Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Am I off the radar screen? Pardon me while I follow the migrations
Across the Atlantic seaboard and throughout the eastern US interior, fish and animals are migrating, or following mating instincts as they prepare to mate or compete for mating rights.
Those of us who are hunter-gatherer-naturalists are following these natural pulses of animal life, as this is the best time of year to intersect with our prey. These movements and motions of our prey naturally lead us out into the ocean, onto river banks, hunkered down on field edges, along the beaches, or into the woods with a bow and arrow.
Striped bass, blue fish, deer, doves, and geese are all moving. Their calls may often be distant, or mostly silent, but they pull me nonetheless. If given the choice between writing about politics and culture, or hunting and fishing (and running a business and family), the blog always comes in last.
So please forgive me if I am off the Internet radar screen right now, as I follow these magical migrations happening all around us. Our ancestors did the same thing for tens of thousands of years, too. I will return…
Fifty years of designated wilderness
Two weeks ago marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act.
It applies to federal designation of remote areas, not to states. States can create their own wild areas, and some do. States closest to human populations and land development seem to also be most assertive about setting aside large areas for people and animals to enjoy.
I enjoy wilderness a lot. Hunting, camping, hiking, fishing, and exploring are all activities I do in designated wilderness.
Every year I hunt Upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, in a large designated wilderness area. Pitching a tent miles in from the trail head, the only person I see is a hunting partner. Serenity like that is tough to find unless you already live in northern Vermont, Maine, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming or Alaska. It’s a valuable thing, that tranquility.
This summer my young son sat in my lap late at night, watching shooting stars against an already unbelievably starry sky. Loons cried out all around us. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the birch trees above us and caused the lake to lap against our rocky shore.
Only by driving a long way north, and then canoeing on a designated wilderness lake, and camping on a designated wilderness island in that lake, were we able to find such peace and quiet. No one else was anywhere around us. We were totally alone, with our camp fires, firewood chores, fishing rods, and deep sleeps in the cold tent.
These are memories likely to make my son smile even as he ages and grapples with responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. We couldn’t do it without wilderness.
Wilderness is a touchstone for a frontier nation like America. Wilderness equals freedom of movement, freedom of action. The same sort of freedoms that instigated insurrection against the British monarchy. American frontiersmen became accustomed to individual liberty unlike anything seen in Western Civilization. They enshrined those liberties in our Constitution.
Sure, there are some frustrations associated with managing wilderness.
Out West, wilderness designation has become a politicized fight over access to valuable minerals under the ground. Access usually involves roads, and roads are the antithesis of a wild experience.
Given the large amount of publicly owned land in the West, I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t some bartering that could go on to resolve these fights. Take multiple use public land and designate it as wilderness, so other areas can responsibly yield their valuable minerals. Plenty of present day public land was once heavily logged, farmed, ranched, and mined, but those scars are long gone.
You can hike all day in a Gold Mine Creek basin and find one tiny miner’s shack from 1902. All other signs have washed away, been covered up by new layers of soil, etc. So there is precedent for taking once-used land and letting it heal to the point where we visitors would swear it is pristine.
Out East, where we have large hardwood forests, occasionally, huge valuable timber falls over in wilderness areas, and the financially hard-pressed locals could surely use the income from retrieving, milling, and selling lumber from those trees. But wilderness rules usually require such behemoths to stay where they lay, symbols of an old forest rarely seen anywhere today. They can be seen as profligate waste, I understand that. I also understand that some now-rare salamanders might only make their homes under these rotting giant logs, and nowhere else.
Seeing the yellow-on-black body of the salamander makes me think of the starry night sky filled with shooting stars. A rare thing of beauty in a world full of bustle, noise, voices, and concrete. For me, I’ll take the salamander.
Chautauqua’s shame
Chautauqua Institution was once an intellectual’s dream destination: Opera company, symphony orchestra, book stores, authors and noted speakers every day for the summer. Gated and safe. Nice people. Beautiful homes next to quaint Victorian gingerbread boxes, all adhering to a commonly held design ideal. Chautauqua Lake, at 32,000 acres a real big body of water to fish, swim, boat, and otherwise enjoy.
Chautauqua was also a unique symbol of community building, and education. The institution spawned The Chautauqua Movement, which was big from the 1890s through the 1930s, with places like Mount Gretna in Central Pennsylvania dedicated to comfy living, higher entertainment, tolerance, and learning.
Now, Chautauqua Institution is the antithesis of its founding ideals and original mission. Overthrown, captured, and jealously guarded by political extremists, its summer programming is now carefully groomed to exclude dissent and include well known jihadists. It’s pretty much extreme political indoctrination 24/7 there.
And yes, you read that above correctly. Chautauqua Instituion is now so tolerant of intolerance, the place regularly hosts pro-Jihad, pro-Sharia Law advocates (think of the people behind Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff having their heads sawn off while on their knees), who lie lie lie to adoring audiences, who in turn shout down questioners asking the right questions for the liars during the appointed Q&A periods.
I myself have been nastily hissed at and yelled at there, for clapping in support of a speaker or statement I like, while the endless sea of extremists in the audience uproariously cheered on their favored speaker.
The place is now ruthlessly run by intolerant, close-minded control freaks, serving up anti-Americanism by the bucketful, pro-Jihad by the boatload, and dissent-crushing manipulation by the truckload.
How sad. How utterly shameful.
Farewell, fair maiden of Chautauqua Lake’s shores. We once knew ye.
Natural abundance right now
Natural abundance surrounds us now. Apples, chestnuts, corn, osage orange “brainfruit,” and much much more. We scramble every day to snag wild apples along road sides, pick up chestnuts up the street before the squirrels eat them, and toss a few funky looking “brains” from a Lancaster farm road into the truck bed.
All with the intention of planting them on rural properties we manage.
By introducing new seeds to a given piece of land, we increase the species diversity and DNA stock on that piece of land. Like Johnny Appleseed of old, we kick open holes in the dirt and pat a seed or apple core into place.
True, turkeys, bears, deer, chipmunks, and squirrels will eat much of what we plant. But if we do enough, some will survive.
And from there they will grow into trees and shrubs, feeding wildlife and people in the future, thereby perpetuating nature’s abundance.
Quiet little discoveries await
Marking a boundary up in the woods today, I encountered an ancient little field that had once provided hay and pasture for cattle. It is on a steep hillside, so it must have been hell to farm, but in this supremely quiet, gentle nook of a place, there is another surprise to go with this small, welcome surprise.
Along several hundred feet of the field margin are fruit and nut trees, lovingly planted long, long ago. Walnut, butternut, American chestnut, various apples, all in various stages of death and decay, but still clinging to life amid brambles and a towering, sunlight-hungry forest canopy all around.
Finding these old signs that someone loved and tended to this land in such a personal way feels reassuring, because baby, if you are watching the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, France, London, there ain’t a whole lotta lovin’ goin’ on out there. Hate and calculated grabs for power seem to dominate. Finding this little sidebar of a postage stamp of Earth gave me some breathing room. It felt good.
Thank you, old farmer from 100 years ago. I enjoyed the peace and tranquility you intended for someone to have at some point here, if only for ten minutes. I will return again, eat an apple on an old stump, and look out at your creation. You never anticipated mile-a-minute weed, did you? Crushing that invasive weed there will be my contribution to your special spot, old farmer.
Remembering neat people, Part 1
A lot of neat, interesting people have died in the past year or two, or ten, if I think about it, but time flies faster than we can catch it or even snatch special moments from it. People I either knew or admired from afar who changed me in some way.
There are two men who influenced me in small but substantial ways who I have been thinking about in recent days. One of them died exactly ten years ago, and the other died just last year. Funny how I keep thinking about them.
It is time to honor them as best I can, in words.
First one was Charlie Haffner, a grizzled mountain man from central Tennessee. Charlie and I first crossed paths in 1989, when I joined the Owl Hollow Shooting Club about 45 minutes south of Nashville, where I was a graduate student at the time.
Charlie owned that shooting club.
Back before GPS, internet, or cell phones, the world was a different place than today. Dinosaurs were probably wandering around among us then, mmm hmmmmm. Heck, maybe I am a dinosaur. Anyhow, in order to find my way to the Owl Hollow club, first and foremost I had to get the club’s phone number, which I obtained from a fly fishing shop on West End Avenue. Then I had to call Charlie for directions, using a l-a-n-d l-i-n-e, and actually speaking to a person at the other end. You’d think it was Morse Code by today’s standards.
After getting Charlie on the phone, and assiduously writing down his directions from our phone conversation, I had to use the best map I could get and then drive way out in the Tennessee countryside on gravel and dirt roads. Trusting my directional instincts, which are good, and trusting the maps, which were pretty bad, and using Charlie’s directions, which were exactingly precise, I made my way through an alien landscape of small tobacco farms and Confederate flags waving from flagpoles. Yes, southcentral Tennessee back then, and maybe even today, was still living in 1865. Not an American flag to be seen out there by itself. If one appeared, it was either directly above, or, more commonly, directly below the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag shared equal or nearly equal footing with the American flag throughout that region.
Needless to say, when I had finally arrived at the big, quiet, lonesome gun range in the middle of the Tennessee back country, the fact that I played the banjo and was as redneck as redneck gets back home didn’t mean a thing right then. Buddy, I was feelin’…. Yankee, like…well, like black people once probably felt entering into a room full of Caucasians. I felt all alone out there and downright uncomfortable. And to boot, I was looking for a mountain man with a deeeeep Southern drawl, so it was bound to get better. Right?
Sure enough, I saw Charlie’s historic square-cut log cabin up the hill, and I walked up to it. Problem was, it had a door on every outside wall, so that when I knocked on one, and heard voices inside, and then heard “Over here!” coming from outside, I’d walk around to the next door, which was closed, and I would knock again, and go through the process again, and again. Yes, I knocked on three or four of those mystery doors before Charlie Haffner finally stepped out of yet one more doorway, into the sunshine, and greeted me in the most friendly and welcoming manner.
Bib overalls were meant to be worn by men like Charlie, and Charlie was meant to wear bib overalls, and I think that’s all he had on. His long, white Father Time beard flowed down and across his chest, and his long, flowing white hair was thick and distinguished like a Southern gentleman’s hair would have to be. And sure as shootin’, a flintlock pistol was tucked into the top of those bib overalls. I am not normally a shy person, and I normally enjoy trying to get the first words in on any conversation, with some humor if I can think of it fast enough. But the truth is, I was dumbfounded and just stood there in awe of the sight before me.
Being a Damned Yankee, I half expected to be shot dead on sight. But what followed is a legendary story re-told many times in my own family, as Charlie (and his kindly wife, who also had a twinkle in her eye) welcomed me into his home in the most gracious, witty, and insightful way possible.
Over the following two years, I shot as much as a full-time graduate student could shoot out there at Owl Hollow Gun Club, which is to say not as much as I wanted and probably more than I should have. Although my first interest in guns as a kid had been black powder muzzleloaders, and I had received a percussion cap .45 caliber Philadelphia derringer as a gift when I was ten, I had not really spent much time around flintlocks. Charlie rekindled that flame in me there, and it has burned ever since, as it has for tens of thousands of other people who were similarly shaped by Charlie’s re-introduction of flintlock shooting matches back in the early 1970s, there at Owl Hollow Gun Club.
Charlie died ten years ago, on July 10th, I think, and I have thought about him often ever since: His incredible warmth and humor, his amazing insights for a mountain man with little evident exposure to the outside world (now don’t go getting prejudiced about mountain folk; he and many others are plenty worldly, even if they don’t APPEAR to be so), his tolerance of differences and willingness to break with orthodoxy to make someone feel most welcome. Hollywood has done a bad number on the Southern Man image, and maybe some of that negative stereotype is deserved, but Charlie Haffner was a true Southern gentleman in every way, and I was proud to know him, to be shaped by him.
The other man who has been on my mind is Russell Means, a Pine Ridge Sioux, award-winning actor, and Indian rights activist who caught my attention in the early 1970s, and most especially as a spokesman for tribal members holed up out there after shooting it out with FBI gunslingers.
American Indians always have a respected place in the heart of true Americans, and anyone who grew up playing cowboys and Indians knows that sometimes there were bad cowboys who got their due from some righteous red men. Among little kids fifty years ago, the Indians were always tough, and sometimes they were tougher and better than the white guys. From my generation, a lot of guys carry around a little bit of wahoo Indian inside our hearts; we’d still like to think we are part Indian; it would make us better, more real Americans…
Russell Means was a good looking man, very manly and tough, and he was outspoken about the unfair depredations his people had experienced. While Means was called a radical forty years ago, I think any proud Irishman or Scottish Highlander could easily relate to his complaints, if they or their descendants stop to think about how Britain had (and still does) dispossessed and displaced them.
Russell Means played a key role in an important movie, The Last of the Mohicans. His stoic, rugged demeanor wasn’t faked, and he was so authentic in appearance and action that he easily lent palpable credibility to that artistic portrayal of 1750s frontier America by simply showing up and being there on the set. Means could have easily been the guy on the original buffalo nickel; that is how authentic he was.
Russell Means was representative of an older, better way of life that is disappearing on the Indian reservations, if that makes any sense to those who think of the Indian lifestyle that passed away as involving horses and headdresses. He was truly one of the last of the Mohicans, for all the native tribes. Although I never met you, I still miss you, and your voice, Mr. Means.
[Written 7/23/14]
Are Turtles Crossing the Road Really a Threat?
Why drivers seem to target slow-moving, non-threatening little turtles is beyond understanding.
Don’t we all have a soft spot in our hearts for innocent, vulnerable, gentle creatures that do us no harm?
The same goes for snakes, which eat the rodent mice, rats, and chipmunks that do so much damage to our homes, crops, gardens, and vehicles.
Every spring and summer, turtles cross roads as they leave water bodies like rivers, ponds, lakes, and marshes, and seek out soft soil where they can lay their eggs, so that the next generation of their kind can continue their unimposing life cycle. Yet every year, roadways are littered with dead and wounded turtles, many dying slowly in the baking hot sun.
Their crime is nothing more than appearing in front of humans behind the wheel of a machine. Are so many of us really so homicidal or sadistic that we go out of our way to hurt, injure, and kill a little helpless animal?
The unfortunate, sad answer is Yes, a lot of drivers go out of their way to hit turtles with their cars. You can simply look at where the turtles lie, crushed or wounded on the side of the road, where the car driver had to actually veer off the roadway to hit the helpless little thing. What is really sad is that turtles take at least ten years to breed, so killing one or two (or stealing one or two) in a given area can doom or kill off the entire population there.
If you have compassion for turtles, you can watch these instructive videos below, where curious turtle-liking guys put a rubber turtle alongside some roads near their homes and generated some unhappy results, and where drivers get out to try and help injured turtles.
Bottom line is Yep, drivers went out of their way to run over the little rubber turtle.
Google, Facebook, COSTCO – each trying to suppress your free speech
If you think that social media sources like Google and Facebook treat everyone equally, you are wrong.
If you think that COSTCO treats everyone equally, you are wrong.
All three have been documented in recent days to be in an aggressive war against your free speech opportunities, and against your ability to access information that the owners (of Google, Facebook, and COSTCO) do not like.
The owners of all three institutions are liberals.
Liberalism went from a demand for fairness to an overarching totalitarianism in a few short decades. While many people say now and said back then that the socialist and communist roots of liberalism indicated that liberals were never interested in fairness, being open-minded, or tolerant, I grew up surrounded by liberals, and it was not until the last decade that I witnessed what looked to me like a transformation. They went from representing opposing views to crushing opposing views, terminating dissent, as soon as they had the opportunity.
For example, the gentle “peace”-loving pacifists <ahem> were on the war path at Chautauqua Institution, a place long known for providing a platform for different ideas and views. Suddenly authors like Andrew Bostom were shut out of week-long discussions where Islamic terrorists had the stage, as though they could not possibly be balanced by another opposing view. And it then dawned on me and many others that liberalism is just one more tyrannical, evil, cruel, divisive, phony movement designed to create winners and losers by any artificial means necessary.
Like all totalitarian movements, liberalism must be opposed in the name of freedom. Let people make up their own minds.
If you want to see how liberals have been shutting down your free speech opportunities this past week, visit these links:
http://www.dineshdsouza.com/news/wnd-costco-removing-dsouzas-america-shelves/
And simply use BING to search for examples of how Facebook has artificially shut down and hindered conservative Facebook pages, including our own Josh First for PA Senate.
UPDATE: How could we forget to mention that Google removed the Gates of Vienna blog without any notice to the owners, thereby violating the very terms of service that Google themselves had required. The Gates of Vienna blog is a well-known source for history and updates from around the world. But the Left, ah, the Left, they cannot tolerate dissent. So, Google, run by liberals, tried to destroy the blog. But it survived. Use BING to look up the story.