Category → Fruit of Contemplation
The empowered, independent feeling of eating less and doing much more
After ten days hiking through the Adirondacks’ most remote wilderness areas with our 18 year-old daughter, I had plenty of take-aways and contemplative thoughts that came home with me.
One of which was the empowered feeling of eating far less than I usually do, while performing at a far increased level than normally challenged. More on this in a moment.
Another take-away was that I am never too old to make mistakes, and one of the mistakes I made was taking an incredibly heavy pack on a rugged through-hike, where every extra ounce can make or break the trip.
My damned pack weighed 70 pounds and had everything but a Democrat in it. Some of that extra weight was due to Nina’s unusually specialized diet, due to a disease she has had all her life. We had to plan for every food contingency, within the constraints of great dehydrated trail food I make at home. Dehydrated means it weighs a lot less, keeps longer, and is limited to certain meats, fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, the extreme weight really beat on my feet on the rugged downhills, and it slowed us down.
About that food: As I have typically experienced in all of my past days afield, hunger feels a lot different at the end of a tough day. A handful of salty nuts and a handful of sweet dried fruit is usually sufficient to make me feel full and put me soundly to sleep in the tent. Breakfast is usually a large cup of dark sweetened tea and either oatmeal with dried fruit and brown sugar, or the same cold dried fruits and nuts. Then I am off with my kit, about to burn another 10,000 calories.
The meals I eat on these trips are at most a couple hundred calories, so there is a tremendous imbalance between output and input. That results in an extreme burn of body fat, among other positive effects.
So I wonder why I feel the need to eat so much more, so much that is physically unnecessary, when I am at home, or at work, and I am not churning through huge caloric burns?
As I stink at pop psychology, not venturing into the guesswork of why any person, particularly Americans, enjoy over-eating / binging will prove a relief to us all.
But I will say this: What an empowered feeling it is, what a sense of independence I had, from hardly eating a thing, while literally moving a small mountain on my back many miles each day. Each day I was able to successfully plow through the East Coast’s most remote wilderness on just a handful of home-made jerky, some salty nuts (salt is a necessity for our bodies), and some home-made dried fruit.
In the spirit of Independence from want, or mere feelings of want, I am committing to eating a hell of a lot less every day than I used to, not because it makes me look better, but because it makes me feel a hell of a lot better, more empowered, more in control, like I have achieved more with less than expected. That is a very good feeling.
The spy on my trusty old laptop
Microsoft Windows may be the industry standard for personal computers, but with the advent of the much-hated Windows 10 operating system, the company has sought to join the data spying craze afflicting nearly every digital user.
This forced spyware is driving users batty.
Who wants to click the “YES – SPY ON ME” Windows 10 install button? Not many people. At least not people who value their privacy.
One of the reasons cell phone users are going back to flip phones is because they are tired of being spied on by the various software companies that run the “smart phones” like iPhone.
Likewise, I am joining the growing number of non-Internet-connected PC users.
A personal computer is a valuable tool, an effective tool, and between the spreadsheet and writing software on it, it does a lot for my life and business. However, once connected to the Internet, that same PC becomes a spy turned back on the connected user. Some of the hacking involves using the PC’s camera to surreptitiously watch the user. For that reason a small piece of sticky note pad paper covers the never-used camera on my PC.
Now I have a cheap PC for Internet use, a PC with nothing on it but basic software. And then another PC with my data and files.
I found a way to stop Windows 10 from installing, and it’s actually easy to do. I highly recommend it. Reports over the past year about Windows 10 are not flattering. It is designed simply to turn your PC into a spy, to pick apart and report on not only your online habits, but your personal software uses and writing content.
And Microsoft is allowed to spy on you because you hit the YES – SPY ON ME install button.
Our dear friend, Don Heckman
Don Heckman needs little introduction in the sporting circles of Pennsylvania and the East Coast.
A founding member and long time leader of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation, Don’s cheerful, generous and kind personality and locomotive work ethic helped re-establish wild turkeys to Pennsylvania in the 1970s, when the conventional wisdom said it was impossible.
Don was also a powerful advocate for the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsman’s Clubs, the National Rifle Association, and many other similar groups to which he was a devoted life member.
He was a persuasive advocate for the continued success of the Pennsylvania Game Commission on the whole, and its land acquisition and science-based habitat management programs in particular.
Don was both an incredibly good hunter, and at times also exasperating to hunt with. This is because of his own unique standards: He refused to shoot a gobbler (male turkey), unless it was both strutting and gobbling at the same time. Sneaking toms, peeping toms, cautious toms, running or flying toms he would not shoot, no matter how close or in range of his gun. None of those were sporting birds, in his estimation. Only a completely unaware longbeard was worthy.
Don and I turkey hunted together a number of times over the years, mostly in the central Pennsylvania farmland we both love. While it would be easy to regale Don’s skill as a caller and hunter, two instances come to mind that sum up the attraction of having Don as your hunting partner.
First was his wry humor. He meant it with love, of course.
“Mmmmmm, uh huh. That sounds like a turkey,” was a frequent back handed compliment from Don as I was scratching away on a friction call, mostly slates.
He wouldn’t care that my calling had actually lured in a nice longbeard to within range. That was no inoculation against the compliment. For Don, it was important to remind me that my calling could always improve, whenever he had the chance. And he was right, of course, as much as I do not like to admit it. That’s what good teachers are about. He was, after all, a many time champion caller whose skill I could only marvel at and never hope to replicate.
And just to prove his point by spiking the ball, Don might decide to stand up and switch locations even as the gobbler was determinedly marching across a cut corn field directly to us.
Watching the alarmed bird take wing and sail to the other side of the valley, the now standing Don said to my sitting figure, “Yeah, he must’ve seen you move.”
Movement is the biggest no-no of all in turkey hunting, and rookies move a lot. Even veterans get caught moving their eyeballs by wary gobblers fifty yards out. To attribute the alarmed and rushed exit of a wild turkey to a hunter’s movement is a gentle way of saying “Your hunting skill needs some work.” Even if it didn’t at that very moment.
And then there was that truly exasperating standard of his, the one where he would only shoot a gobbler in full strut AND gobbling. That performance is like looking up in the sky and seeing the sun and moon align, because a longbeard gobbler that is both strutting and gobbling is completely in the moment. He feels no fear or wariness that usually accompanies most alluring hen calls by hunters.
As I am not ever going to approach Don’s skill as a turkey hunter (he has racked up more annual grand slam turkey hunts species-wise and across multiple states than anyone else I know), I feel fortunate to shoot any gobbler, strutting or not.
And it is a fact that my poor skill as a turkey caller usually results in birds sneaking in, peering in, or darting in for a quick look before running like hell to get out of Dodge, or “putting” (turkeys make a putt-putt alarm call when they are suspicious enough to flee) from 40 yards out, so that most of the gobblers I have killed were shot mid-stride to the next county.
Not in full strut AND gobbling, like Don would have.
One morning in Dauphin County about four or five years ago, Don and I were lying in a field while I called to turkeys below us. They came well within range, but the lead gobbler, a huge bruiser boss bird, stopped gobbling and was “only” fanned out and puffed up, strutting. Such an impressive performance was insufficient to move Don’s trigger finger backwards, despite my harsh whispers of expletive-laced encouragement.
Nope. Instead, Don stood up in plain view of the flock, maybe thirty yards away, with his shotgun trained on the head of the strutting gobbler, and he began simultaneously calling with his mouth diaphragm call.
Wild turkey hunters know that at the sight of a man standing up within two hundred yards, let alone thirty, wild turkeys scatter like dust in a hurricane. They are gone in the blink of an eye.
Not these birds. Don’s calling was so good, so realistic, so enticing that the entire flock turned to look at us with concern for the grossly misshapen hen addressing them, and then they calmly walked away.
Don never shot, though he would have easily bagged any of the gobblers there. He just said “Oh, well, let’s go try another spot.”
Don is now in another spot, a turkey chaser’s dream spot, I am sure. He was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor in late January this year, and he rode it out with the help of his devoted wife, Sandy, for the next few months, until he died on the night of May 17th, in the central Pennsylvania region he loved so much.
Like all of his friends and acquaintances, I will miss Don Heckman enormously. Sitting in a turkey blind I cried yesterday, thinking about his loss. Don died way too young, barely into his retirement, and not in time for me to prove to him that really, I can get a gobbler to strut AND gobble in range. But that is what I will continue to do, to aspire to, in Don’s memory, as representative as it was of one of the last great generational wildlife conservation leaders in Pennsylvania and in America.
Bye, old friend, boy do I miss you.
The spy in my pocket
So after a year of prompts and warnings and threats, I updated the operating system on my iPhone. According to Apple, my iPhone was no longer a member of the 21st century, but had begun to operate in the Stone Age.
More concerning to me, being a happy Stone Ager myself, was the increasing likelihood that Apple would simply detonate the phone from afar, as it had become a liability for THE SYSTEM. Whatever that is.
So I updated. Using our home wifi, I babysat my blinking, chirping brilliant iPhone for about eighteen hours, until it demonstrated it was no longer brachiating, but in fact was walking upright, like all modern bipeds. Good, so far so good, I thought.
When I turned it ON, what eventually emerged from the long sleep was a totally different animal than the one that had been so cheerfully helpful just a day before. What we had now was a failure to communicate, as I realized too late my mistake in allowing my pet to morph into a nattering little nabob of negativity, full of admonitions that deleting worthless photos could easily lead to the loss of all my photos, good and bad, desirable and deletable.
Also turned out that the phone was set to “spy” mode from the get-go.
That is, everything in it that could be used to share my information, track my location, disseminate my photos, and otherwise divulge everything about how I use the phone was set to GO. It took me dang near a week to figure out which switches and buttons to throw in order to eliminate the most egregious spying, but I know there are still parts of the iPhone dedicated to watching me and reporting back to Apple on all my choices. Especially the regrettable ones.
So here I have what was once a friendly and useful pet, and now an annoying little North Korean minder in my pocket. It watches everything I do, type, and say, and although I have done all I could to not share certain things with people who have no business seeing what is on my phone, it nonetheless threatens to destroy everything if I change one photon of how it is now set up.
I don’t know about you, but I lead a pretty simple life, and I really don’t have a lot to hide. But what I do have to hide I really want hidden. No, I do not want to link the iPhone directly to my bank accounts. No, I do not want to automatically share with the world via snapchat, facebook, twitter and etc every photo I take. And so on.
At some point I will tire of being spied upon by Apple, and I will throw this thing into a fire with lots of gasoline to help it along into the dark hell from which it came. And then I will go back to the Stone Age, that happy time when your flip phone simply called people from a list who you wanted to talk with, and it could text them, too, in really important moments, if need be.
Oh, how I long for the days of the antique Flip Phone. It was not a spy in my pocket, but a useful tool, like my pocket knife, also from the Stone Age.
Neil Young’s 1970 Protest Song REWRITTEN for 2016!
Following the 1970 fatal violence at Kent State University, Neil Young of Crosby Stills Nash and Young fame performed a song dedicated to his perspective of that sad event. It was written by Patricia Griffin and Robert Plant and published by Universal Music.
Neil Young named his song “Ohio,” a “protest song and counterculture anthem” representative of the Left at that time, and probably today, too. If you remove the lyrics, or replace them as I have here, it’s actually a good song.
Ain’t it funny how what comes around goes around, Mr. Young. Yesterday was the 46th anniversary of Kent State.
“Four Dead in Benghazi”
(Sung to the tune of Ohio)
A Parody by Josh First
Tin soldiers and Clinton coming,
we’re finally at the “T.”
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi.
Gotta get down to it,
Government letting us down,
she should’ve been gone long ago.
What if you knew Chris,
and saw him in the compound,
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Clinton coming,
we’re finally at the “T.”
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi.
ISIS soldiers and Clinton coming,
We’re finally able to see,
this summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi
Four dead in Benghazi,
Four dead in Benghazi
Four dead in Benghazi….
Information on the Bowlby family sought
Information on Edward Salvin Bowlby is being sought for a research project, especially photos from the late 1890s. Please contact Josh if you have knowledge of this interesting man.
The old Samurai sword still speaks, quietly
An old Japanese Samurai sword presently sitting up on the mantle may be just an old hunk of metal in a damaged wooden scabbard, and to the vast majority of people, a sword is a sword is a sword, so it means nothing other than it is a one-dimensional artifact of another time and place.
What’s the big deal about one or another artifact or old sword, right?
What sets old Japanese swords apart from every other sword ever made by humankind is literally everything about them, every aspect and detail of a sword, from tip to pommel.
Without going into detail here, suffice it to say that if, for example, a huge Viking sword was successfully made to mindlessly, crazily smash, bash, break, cut, gouge, gore, and rip a human body in a fit of power madness, a relatively slender Japanese sword will certainly do all that, if it must, but it can also serve as a surgical scalpel slicing fatally deep with minimal sense of anything awry, at first.
Artistic forms of death inspire artists and fascinate onlookers still, so is it any wonder that old Japanese swords symbolically speak still to men around the world, including me. A hushed, quiet, almost slithering whisper is its language. You cannot really hear it, but to look upon such a weapon, with full understanding, is to recognize its potential danger, even if it appears inert, steady, a mere object in need of a strong arm and shoulder to wield it.
Such is the role of any powerful symbol, and the more subtle they are, the more powerful they are.
As a new window begins to open in some political theater, Kabuki?, this sword sits front and center before me, speaking its quiet, ancient language, inspiring on to battle those who revere quality above apparent size. The theater may be absurd at time, it may have incredibly comical villains and real heartbreak, but nevertheless, the sword remains. Whatever it must do, it will do, so long as the will remains to direct it.
And buddy, there is a deep well of will.
Please brake for turtles
Beginning around the I-81 overpass over Front Street in Harrisburg, and ending about half a mile south, turtles are now trying to reach loamy dirt to lay their eggs.
Oddly, sadly, many dead and dying turtles litter the roadside, hit by cars, either by accident or on purpose.
It’s difficult to plumb the depths of someone’s thinking when they deliberately drive off the roadway and onto the roadside, to crush a tiny helpless little animal like this.
Please brake for turtles. They can’t, won’t, and haven’t done anything to us humans. They deserve to live, too.
People we’ve lost, then and now, still shape us
Days ago, my next door neighbor was riding bikes with his son, and he had an accident. The trauma to his head was so significant that he died yesterday, never waking up from his injury.
Doctor Jerry Luck was a hell of a nice man, and I’m very sorry he is gone. Planet Earth is a much poorer place without Jerry among us. Our condolences to his wife Kathi and their two children.
Tonight I attended a regular meeting at the Duncannon Sportsmen’s Association, where club president Carl Fox pours his endless love, energy, and devotion to recruiting new hunters, fishermen, and outdoor enthusiasts. Sitting next to me was an elderly Mr. Foultz, a name I dimly recalled.
Turns out, Mr. Foultz is from Pine Grove Mills, a small village near where I grew up. Many summer days I walked barefoot from the deep farm country across the semi-developed farm country closer to State College, to play with friends in Pine Grove Mills.
Sitting on his porch there, forty years ago, was a grumpy, quiet old man we knew as Indian Joe. He was reputed to be an actual Indian, he certainly looked dark skinned and “ethnic,” and in a location as rural and frontier-like as that area was back then, he was as good and as real and as exciting as a person could be. Indian Joe was a touchstone for the old frontier days that we could still feel and see and touch, like when someone’s dad would find an old 1790s or 1820s flintlock rifle stashed away in a barn, and people would come to see it and hold it.
Indian Joe was a central feature of many Penn State homecoming parades on College Avenue, often dressed in a nice suit and a Plains Indian feather bonnet, riding in a convertible Cadillac behind Coach Joe Paterno. Indian Joe would grumble at me when I was a kid pestering him on his porch for stories of the old frontier days.
When I asked Mr. Foultz tonight if he knew Indian Joe, and what his real last name was, I received a long and flattering description of Indian Joe.
No, he was not Shawnee, nor Delaware, nor Conestoga, nor Onandaga, nor any other local tribe. Joe was Menominee, from Wisconsin.
Turns out, Old Joe had served in the American Armed Forces, met a young woman in Baltimore, married, and moved back to her home town of Pine Grove Mills. His real last name was something like Gonfer, as it sounded to me.
Pine Grove Mills was also the location of the first girl I had a crush on, Billy Jo. We hunted together as kids, and even then she was beautiful to look at, and kind. She was a hell of a shot, too, and killed deer sooner and faster than I did.
So elderly Mr. Foultz and I went on a memory spree tonight, naming places and people from decades ago. The Artz’s Arco, where I bought my hunting licenses from age twelve through twenty, was where he worked Saturdays as a teenager. And so on. Mind you, dear reader, Pine Grove Mills had a total population of about 250 people back then, and probably a bit more today. Still surrounded by farms and State Forest, it is the epitome of Small Town Pennsylvania, something I regularly celebrate.
So, kind thoughts to old Indian Joe, long gone from his porch and from Joe Paterno PSU homecoming parades down the middle of our quaint town, and sad but good thoughts to Doctor Jerry, whose kind and gentle demeanor will be hugely missed today and for decades to come.
Takeaway? People shape us constantly, from our earliest days to our hoary old age of fifty. It’s good and proper that we should be shaped, and honed, sharper and better, by the people around us, as time marches on.