What is Home?

I just finished reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. What a fantastic book.

I had been told many times I should read it because I have some things in common with the person about whom the book was written. I finally picked up a copy on Friday and read it over the weekend. It's the true story about a kid who went to college, graduated, then essentially ran away and severed all ties with his family. He had crazy notions of abandoning civilization, which he despised, and living his life as a lone drifter. He especially wanted to live in the "wild," which culminated with him marching into the Alaska wilderness with virtually nothing, where he starved to death at the age of 24. His name was Chris McCandless.

It's a fascinating book because it touched on some topics that I found to be particularly close to home. While this kid was far more extreme than I could ever be, there were some extraordinary similarities between us I found disturbing. I also learned that my own fantasies of pulling away from civilization and dreaming of a simpler life closer to nature are far from unique. They are also by no means a recent phenomenon, which I found particularly surprising. The history books are filled with examples of others who share these thoughts to varying degrees. The most extreme examples, such as Chris, make for particularly interesting and frightening tales.

In the 1930's a sixteen year old kid set out from California to live a solitary life as a nomad in the deserts of southern Utah. Eventually he disappeared without a trace and the mystery of what happened to him has never been resolved. Only his horse and some graffiti were ever found. This kid's name was Everett Ruess, and here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote before he disappeared:

I have been thinking more and more than I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best... I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler... I have some good friends here, but no one who really understands why I am here or what I do. I don't know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone.

I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly.

Now who does that sound like? Gives me a chill. Ruess goes on to talk about the beauty of the country and the ruined dwellings of the ancient Anasazi. Some of his writings sound a lot like my blog entries.

And check this out, written by Estwick Evans in 1818:

I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; ... and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger.

And that was in 1818!

The book is full of such examples. Chris was just one in a long line of people wanting to renounce civilization for the complete opposite alternative. The book focused a lot on comparing these people and what drives them, while telling Chris' fascinating story and ultimate tragedy. Many, many times I found my own words being repeated.

One thing that sets me apart from many of these people is that I know I can't just walk into the wilderness and survive. And even if I could, mere survival is not the kind of life I want. Chris was extremely lucky on many occasions but his luck finally ran out in Alaska. His biggest problem, ultimately, was that he was overconfident and notoriously ill-prepared for the vast majority of his adventures. For example, on a whim he acquired a canoe and floated down into Mexico hoping to reach the ocean. He didn't bother to read up on where he was going and didn't know that the Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean because of all the water that's diverted for irrigation. It ends in a vast swamp, where he got lost. He likely would have died there had he not happened to be found by some Mexican duck hunters who also happened to speak English and who also happened to be kind enough to tow his stupid ass out of there. This kind of thing happened to him a lot. When he set off into the Alaskan wilderness he had minimal clothing and gear, knew virtually nothing of the land itself aside from what was contained in his field guide to edible plants, and refused to take even a map with him. Just a few very basic precautions would have saved his life. His story is extremely complex and I can't hope to reproduce it here, but I found the book very helpful in framing my own desires and organizing my own thoughts on the matter.

First of all, I realize that I don't have the ancient wisdom of the natives who once roamed these lands, which they accumulated over the course of 10,000 years of living here. I also realize that these natives had a support network through their families and tribes, and that virtually all tribes, in turn, traded with other tribes in a network that effectively stretched from the Aleutian Islands to Patagonia. They had well established cultures and were on intimate terms with the land and all its peculiarities.

Second, I don't think civilization is bad, per se, and even if I did I am not and will never be able to become a modern day hunter gatherer living solely off the land, no matter how cool the fantasy might be. Honestly this isn't even something I want. I would certainly like to experience it in the short term, provided I knew what I was doing and/or had sufficient guidance from someone who did. But I fully realize and am completely okay with knowing that even when I get my cabin in the woods I'll have ties to civilization. I don't want to be a hermit. I don't want to shun the world. I just want to trim the fat (and there's a hell of a lot of fat.) But I do want to have a soft bed, a warm fire, solid walls. I want to have a gun for hunting and I rather enjoy running water, electricity and farm fresh produce. I like eating at a table and baking pies. I like stretching out on overstuffed leather furniture. I like having a phone if I need to call for help or if I just want to say hi to someone. I love books. I love traveling. And I really do love people. I don't think people are inherently bad or that living in cities is a sin or automatically has to be a destructive thing. And perhaps most importantly, I think education is an extremely good thing. Perhaps more than anything else, I think the greatest benefit of modern society is our unprecedented access to information. Along those same lines, I think our ability to so easily travel far and wide is probably just as important, because knowledge acquired either through books and the internet or from seeing foreign places and cultures first hand are the best ways to overcome hatred, intolerance and small-mindedness. Just moving out of Huffman, Texas changed my world. A hundred years ago most people never traveled more than 50 miles from home in their lifetime.

And while I'm on the subject I wanted to make one more thing clear. I've read quite a few books (Into the Wild included) where at least one gripping tale is told of a lone adventurer braving bottomless crevasses in frozen wastelands, enduring frost bite, starvation, 3,000 foot precipices, calamitous storms that only God could whip up and much more just to summit some craggy peak that the human species was never meant to set foot on. They are places where nature seems to be telling us in no uncertain terms that we are not welcome. While I find these stories interesting in moderation, I have absolutely no understanding of what drives someone to want to do this. It's the same feeling that ensures I'll never be a rock climber or a cross country cyclist or go backpacking through rural Asia. I don't see the point. Well, that's not entirely true. I can see the point because it has been explained to me. I guess I'm just not missing from my life the thing(s) that motivate others to seek them in those places. That, or I'm just looking for them in different places.

One more thing I got from Into the Wild was annoyed. I was annoyed by these peoples' tendency to ramble on and on with flowery talk about nature and their excessive philosophizing. (Is that a word? It probably annoys me because I know how bad I am at rambling on and philosophizing about stuff that has no answer.) Anyway, Thoreau really was a bit of a putz. Often these people have no real concept of nature. It's like they describe the natural world as if it were a painting, and when they try to step into that painting they end up dead. One thing I've learned in recent years is that nature really doesn't give a crap about us. We may admire it, write songs and poetry about it, frame images of it on our walls, plan vacations around seeing it from the comfort of paved overlooks, send Greenpeace out to save it, but in the end it really doesn't give a shit. Nature is her own woman. Step out into the "wild" and she'll have no qualms about snuffing you out if you can't get out of the way.

This last realization has had a major impact on my life. When I first went to college I had a biology teacher who liked to deer hunt. I remember we had a lively discussion about it after class one day. Basically I was all over her case for it. What an idiot I was. I no longer see nature or wilderness as something other than or outside of myself, something that must be set aside like a delicate glass object, put into a case and never touched for fear of shattering it. I fully realize that many ecosystems are fragile and we can't just tromp across the globe doing whatever the hell we want or else we're going to end up with a pretty ugly and miserable world. But I now realize that we are an indelible part of the whole thing. We can't pull away and live like some ethereal higher beings, so if we can't integrate and use the resources of this world either then where does that leave us? The trick is finding the balance. The Native Americans had no such inclination as to have flowery, putzy notions about the fragility of nature. To them, "nature" was not something separate. It was the world. And they were part of the world. They understood that if they killed all the beaver then there would be none for making clothing, or that if they hunted all the deer there would be no more meat or buckskins. They also realized that not killing them would also leave them without food and clothing. They just realized there was a give and take relationship, that they were part of the cycle, and they knew how to sustain that. I think that's what I'm trying to find. I don't want to be a lonely wild man living off bugs and roots in the frozen Alaskan wilderness anymore than I want to be a suit in some smog-choked high rise with a Blackberry attached to my head. There has to be some reasonable middle ground.

Am I philosophizing too much?

Kitty in the Hay

There's a kitty at the ranch where I ride who loves people. She's probably the sweetest, most affectionate cat I've ever seen. She was distracted by a horse just long enough for me to get this shot, then she immediately went back to pawing all over me.

I really like being out there on the ranch. It's so quiet, yet there's life everywhere. There are probably two dozen horses, a few cats, a couple of dogs and more barn swallows, barn owls and other birds than you can shake a stick at. The prairie dogs are innumerable and, unless you get within arms length, are completely comfortable sharing their little bit of the prairie with you. Coyotes are a common sight, even in broad daylight. Last week two of them streaked past me just two dozen yards away. There are also a few ranch hands and various other people coming and going all the time, but the place just feels like the clock is ticking a little slower than in the city. It's the kind of place where I can pull up in my truck and instead of a 17 year old lesbian with pink hair, a peace t-shirt and a nose ring hissing with a condescending eco-smirk, "Gawd that's a big truck. What do you need that for?" as happened in the Whole Foods parking lot awhile back, I'm greeted by a 20-something cowboy with a size 30 waist and tight Wranglers who says with an envious grin, "Wow, that's a nice truck. I wish I had a truck like that." (Okay, I'm biased, but fitting in is fitting in!)

It's the kind of place where you can wear a cowboy hat and no one stares at you, and no one asks if they can wear your hat. It's the kind of place where you can just sit in the hay for an hour watching the ranch critters do their thing, and it doesn't matter. There's no place to be. There are no phones ringing. There's no sound of traffic, no electronic calendars, no meetings and nothing plastic or glowing or buzzing or florescent anywhere in sight. Just a cool breeze through the barn rafters, the occasional distant neighing of a horse, and the sound of a tawny kitty purring in the hay next to you.

I've been taking advanced riding lessons out at the ranch, working with different horses, beefing up my riding and handling skills. It may sound cliche, but I think working with animals teaches us a lot about ourselves and the world. One thing about me that quickly comes to the surface is my buried desire for instant results. That surprises me because I thought I had moved beyond that. Probably I have for the most part, but there's definitely some of it still lurking inside my brain. Personally I think that city life does that to a person. Just about everything these days is instantaneous. You want something, you hop in your car and go buy it or go online and have it delivered to you doorstep the next day. You want music or you want to watch a show, you want to talk to someone or meet new people, you want a meal or anything at all, you've got your computer, your iPhone, your restaurants, your car, your internet and a thousand other ways to make your wish come true with virtually no effort and no waiting.

One of the things I like about cooking, eating locally and seasonally, and about not having a microwave in the house is that if I want to eat something I have to prepare it. There is a cost associated with my food beyond the price tag, and that actually makes eating a much more satisfying experience. There are no bags of junk food in my kitchen and no zapping anything so I can't eat within 1 minute 30 seconds of deciding I want to eat something. This also reduces temptation and works as a built-in system for ensuring the quality of my food. It has completely broken me of the habit of snacking.

Working with horses is the same kind of thing in the sense that you don't just go pick out a horse, hop on and expect an experience as predictable and controllable as your car or your microwaved frozen dinner will deliver. Horses are living things. They have brains and therefore have moods, personalities, likes and dislikes. They experience fear and pleasure, and their chemistry doesn't mix the same with everyone. Hop on an exceptionally good horse and you might get what you expect, if he's in the right mood and nothing unexpected comes up. Hop on a horse that doesn't have all these things going for it in that particular moment and you could be in for some frustration, to say the least. From my own experience and from discussions with the instructor, frustration due to unrealistic expectations is a common problem with people who spend more time on a computer or in a coffee shop than on a horse.

I've also taken up guitar recently and have found the same challenge there. Learning to play music can be incredibly frustrating and takes practice, practice, practice, day in and day out, for years. I grew up playing the piano and I remember how difficult it was in the beginning. Actually I suppose it never really got all that much easier, because as my skills improved my instructor bumped up the challenge. But with time and patience I progressed. Everybody wants to play the guitar or learn a foreign language or possess some other skill, but a lot fewer people are willing to put in the work to get it. I'm not ragging on anyone. I face the same challenges and I haven't always been as persistent as I should have been. If something's hard, it's hard not to quit.

It's been said that anything worth having is worth working for and I do believe that's true. People who are given things are rarely as appreciative of those things as they are of things they fought long and hard to get. I think part of my motivation to take up guitar or become a better horseman comes from my desire to have more meaningful things in my life. I mean, don't you ever get bored and think:

"Is this all there is? I've got a good job, I make enough money. I could just eat out all the time and sit at the coffee shop for an hour each morning and never really have to fuss over anything, learn anything new or do anything that doesn't directly contribute to my immediate comfort. So why do I want to spend so much time and money on things that require so much work and that in the end won't even increase my salary?"

Maybe it has something to do with that old saying about idle hands or maybe there's just something restless in me. I don't know. I can enjoy a coffee shop or a nice dinner out as much as anyone, but I'm just not satisfied making my life super cushy. It's like I want to introduce a little pain, a little hard work, a little something so I can feel like I'm alive and not just curled up on the sofa watching life go by. And it needs to feel real, genuine, not manufactured. For example, I'll never get into cycling. It's a great hobby and I think Lance Armstrong is cool. But for me, I'm thinking: "Where the hell am I going?" There's got to be a destination, a greater purpose. Cycling or mountain climbing, while in moderate amounts can be fun, feels like busy work to me. What's the point? But things like growing my own food, harvesting it and then preparing it actually has a very important purpose in and of itself. Playing the guitar and riding horses are similarly justifiable in my mind, as they fit into my grand scheme of self reliance.

Picture this: my cabin in the woods (as I've described many times). I saddle up and take a string of horses into the wilderness for a week-long hunting trip. When I return I've got hides to tan, a new bearskin rug and a supply of elk/deer/moose meat that will last until next season. I've got a garden to tend, a cow or goat to milk. I've got canning to do, meat and trout to smoke, butter to churn, a root cellar to stock, beer to brew, wood to chop. I've got horses and dogs that need tending, a hog that needs butchering, a cabin that needs repairs before winter. And when I'm resting I can fill the air with the lovely sounds of the harmonica or sing lonely tunes to the mountains as I strum my guitar on the back porch on a cool summer's evening. That's what I want. Those are "hobbies" that mean something to me. I get tingly all over when I think about it.

So in the mean time I spend my free time trying to wring the vestiges of the city from my life and my body, ever trying to push my life down that dirt road that leads home, my cabin in the woods.

Hippies: I Am Not One

This may come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has ever seen me, but there was a time that I thought I was one. Well, never in outward appearance, but at least I thought that mentally I was a hippie. Those were my Austin days, back before I knew what a real hippie was.

I thought I learned what a hippie was when I moved to Austin, but it turns out that what I thought was a hippie was really just a slightly rebellious young person who cared about the environment and liked yoga and organic food. In other words, your average liberal. (I'm from a small east Texas town. I grew up thinking that liberal = hippie, but not really knowing what either term really meant.)

Moving to Boulder has shown me the true meaning of the word "hippie," and I can say I most certainly am not one. We may share a few broad views, but trust me, I'm about as distant from everything a hippie is as I am from everything that Jerry Falwell was. I'm about to unload the only real complaint I have about living in Boulder.

The Austin "hippies" I recall generally dressed in drab clothing that was sometimes hand made, and they were generally well groomed, friendly, young, idealistic, and had jobs. And they liked incense. I always hated incense, but their other qualities were wonderful. Maybe they didn't use deodorant but they bathed regularly. They were functioning members of society. They were intelligent, pleasant, sane and maybe even had some formal education.

The Boulder "hippies" are largely not these things. A Boulder hippie may range from scarcely pubescent to retirement age, though they strongly tend toward the young end of the spectrum. They are always filthy, generally won't look you in the eye unless they're begging for change, food or beer, and they camp in the bushes and under rocks in the middle of our downtown parks. They're basically transient bums with dreadlocks and a serious pot problem. Oh, and they invariably drag behind them a mangy dog. I really don't care if people choose to live this way. I think we all have a responsibility to contribute something to society, but I'm not one to say they're wrong for doing what they do. The problem I have is when they plop themselves down in the middle of MY world. That is not okay with me. They congregate, sometimes 30 at a time, in the middle of our sidewalks and greenways. They're loud, obnoxious, and often publicly intoxicated. They trample public gardens, yell obscenities, and leave trash EVERYWHERE. These things I have major problems with. They are sleeping in and trashing the public spaces that my tax dollars are paying for. The City of Boulder has a truly fantastic homeless shelter, provides food and will even give them money and bus fare to help them get jobs. But they just don't want a job, though they'll gladly take the handout. Maybe this is where some of my conservative roots start to show, but I really have a problem with enabling people. I know a lot of homeless people have mental problems and that homelessness is not a problem with an easy solution, but I'll be damned if it doesn't piss me off when these people are dumping in my park.

Now I don't want to make Boulder sound like it's overrun with bums. It's not. You never see these people except summer, and even then it isn't a daily or even a weekly thing. And they're only found downtown, where handouts are easy. Cops are pretty good about keeping an eye on them and keeping them moving, especially if more than a few get together at a time. Every city unfortunately has a problem with homelessness, and I'm not talking about your run of the mill homeless population. What I'm talking about is the so-called "Rainbow Family" and their kind. Back in the 1960's when hippies first materialized and started to flow toward California, Boulder became a major stop. Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, Boulder had some pretty serious issues with hordes of hippies, involving violence, vandalism and other crimes. As the hippie movement died down the problems decreased significantly, but Boulder still remains a rest stop for bands of these nomadic dirtbags. Just two weeks ago, about a dozen Rainbow Family members were found sleeping on top of the public library downtown. With their dogs. Apparently they had scaled the building and had been camping up there for days. And remember, these people don't adhere to the "leave no trace" philosophy.

The Rainbow Family was, like the hippie movement, conceived out of the desire to bring something good and peaceful into the world. But like most things, it didn't take long for corruption to set in. I know not all hippies fit this description, just like not all Christians are self-righteous small-minded hate-mongers. I did some reading up on the Rainbow Family awhile back and apparently knife fights, alcoholism and drug use rates are quite high, and the average age of a member is early to mid twenties. Doesn't sound like they abide by the principles upon which the group was supposedly founded. These days the Rainbow Family is little more than a loose association of homeless delinquents wandering from town to town across much of the west. Apparently there are thousands of them. Fortunately they only get together en masse once or twice a year and, to my knowledge, it has never been in Boulder.

Since I'm on the topic, I wanted to get one last thing off my chest, and this is something I feel bad about. I think I bumped into one truly genuine, real-life, honest-to-goodness hippie who might possibly have represented the essence of the hippie movement and the ideals that conceived the movement. It was last summer. I had spent a lot of time downtown during the height of summer and so had become quite hardened to people who even remotely appeared to belong in the dirtbag category. I was walking home when I saw a slightly older man who looked a whole lot like John Denver standing on the sidewalk ahead. I knew immediately he was going to ask for money. And he did. But before he got half his sentence out I snapped back in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome to even talk to me. I was kinda mean, actually, and it has bothered me ever since. But the reason why it bothers me so much is because I immediately realized there was something quite different about him. He was clean, and he literally looked like he could have been John Denver plucked from the height of his career. I heard him say something about traveling to California and something else that made me think he might really have been a hippie of old. He was very polite, and very reserved. I really don't have any hard evidence, just a gut feeling that he was different and that I had allowed myself to take out on him the anger I had toward others. John Denver, wherever you are, I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that.

Crabapple Pie

Place

Last week we had a record low for that date: 47 degrees, I don't remember the specific date. Today we had a record high for this day, 98 degrees. It's 72 degrees right now and I'm having trouble sleeping because it's too warm. Guess I've adapted.

We had a good weekend. I managed to can a half dozen jars each of peach salsa and crabapple jelly, and a dozen jars of tomato salsa. That's twenty pounds of tomatoes. Can you believe it takes that many pounds of tomatoes to make 12 jars of salsa? Each tomato had to be skinned, cored and seeded. And that's not all, of course. Being salsa, there was a mountain of jalapenos, half a dozen onions, a bunch of cilantro and a few other things in there too. We also made two crabapple pies which, I must say, came out absolutely perfect. We gave one to some friends.

That was Saturday.

This morning, after a sunrise hike, we cleaned the kitchen. Despite our best efforts, there was jelly on the walls, juices, seeds and bits of vegetable matter on the floor and on nearly every surface of the kitchen. There were dishes to be washed, counter tops to be wiped, dish towels to be washed. After that we pretty much took the rest of the day off.

We made an afternoon trip into Denver, just because we rarely go and I think it's good to have a reminder every now and then why we don't live there ("there" meaning "the big city," not Denver specifically which, by big city standards, is actually quite nice.)

We rounded out the evening reading at home. Right now I'm reading A Place of my Own by Michael Pollan. He's the author of some of my favorite food-centric books: The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, The Botany of Desire. A Place of My Own was his first, and deals with a very different topic. It was his quest to build a small, private room in the wooded area behind his house where he could read, write and work. The picture on the cover is what first grabbed my attention. It's a cold blue photo of a tiny warm house in the snow right around sunset, his completed masterpiece. You can see a wall of books through the warm glow of the window. The photo drew me in immediately because it reminded me of my fantasy cabin in the woods: a dark, snowy landscape, cold, beautiful, forbidding, with a cozy, inviting home nestled in the middle of it radiating light and life. See the book here.

The guy is a writer/editor, not a carpenter. In fact he's really not handy at all, as he admits many times. Yet it was his quest not just to have a place of his own, but to build it himself. It's comforting for me to know that I'm not the first or the only person to have the thoughts and desires I do. I'm not the only person who wants - needs - to have a safe, comfortable place of my own removed if only temporarily from the things of everyday life, or who worries about the environmental impact of my actions or who finds joy in discovering new things about myself and the world in my journey to satiate my sometimes inexplicable desires.

Pollan quotes Thoreau a lot. I know Thoreau is not universally loved, and Pollan even made a few remarks about Thoreau's sometimes self-serving or Earth-mother type views of nature. But, as is nearly always the case, one's point of view changes dramatically when one actually walks just a little in someone else's shoes. Pollan was reminded of this on more than one occasion. It was really interesting to see how Pollan moved from dismissing some of Thoreau's words as self-serving to understanding what the man actually meant. Trying something new has a wonderful way of giving one new perspective. I find I've done some of this in recent years myself. Isn't it amazing what age and experience can teach you? The older I get the more I realize how little I know. People are so quick to dismiss or judge the actions or thoughts of others, but who are you to do that? Who am I to do that? How many times in my life have I been so sure I was right only to find out (or worse, to come to the conclusion sometime later) that I was completely wrong - or at the very least, that I was basing my opinion on a woefully incomplete picture? It's a good idea to step inside other people's homes and see the world through their windows now and then.

I also read through another book this weekend. It's a book by the US Forest Service about camp cooking. It's first a foremost a recipe book for cooking in a dutch oven over a campfire, created from 100 years of journals, articles, papers and interviews with Forest Service employees. Secondarily it's a brief glimpse into the life of a Forest Service employee, particularly between 1900 and about 1970. There are samples of letters, statements and interviews as well as a few stories, photographs and some cowboy poetry interspersed among the recipes. Was life really simpler in 1950 or 1900? Probably not. Maybe. I don't know, I wasn't around. I guess it depends on your criteria for what constitutes a simple life. And at any rate, a "simple" life and a "hard" life are not the same things, and needn't have anything to do with one another. But for whatever reason, reading the stories of those old timers just takes me away to fantasy land. Maybe their lives were simpler, in my mind, because they lived and worked in the great outdoors. Sure, they only earned $7/day, but they lived at a time when they didn't have to consider life without medical insurance, cell phones, computers or a car payment. By and large these things either didn't exist in the first place or weren't options for the vast majority of the population anyway. A lot of the Forest Service men had a saddle horse, a pack horse, a dutch oven, a gun, a tent or a teepee and not much else. But they liked it. Actually, they loved it from the accounts I read. They ate the non-perishables the Forest Service provided and supplemented that with wild game and plants. There was no social networking, no daily commute, no techno-gadgets, no reality TV, no TPS reports, no management meetings under the searing hum of florescent lights in a sea of cubes. There were no arbitrary work deadlines, no false sense of urgency, no hordes of strangers living all around you, no college students wearing their pants around their ankles and sunglasses so big they cover half the face, no people standing around ignoring each other because they've all got their faces buried in their iPhones. Sounds pretty simple to me. The work was hard, often dangerous. But the thing is these guys loved it. And they weren't all the grizzly mountain man type either. They just had a passion for a simple life, living close to nature, being under the stars and in the wide open spaces, and for doing work they honestly believed in that had physical, visible, tangible results.

Maybe I romanticize that life too much. But how will I know unless I walk a mile in their shoes?

Summer Market 2009

Just wanted to share an image from this morning.

Food

I love food. I really do. I can't tell you how much joy came into my life when I discovered Whole Foods, and how that joy has intensified exponentially with my subsequent journey into eating locally and seasonally. Food is such an important part of nearly every culture but ours and it makes me sad. Millions of American kids grow up eating McDonald's and other trash "food" and think that's some kind of treat. A treat for doctors and drug companies, maybe, medicating their diabetes and epidemic weight problems.

But unhappy topics aside, food is awesome. The Peppercorn, Boulder's locally owned gourmet kitchen shop, is my favorite place to spend money besides the farmer's market (and the Boulder Bookstore, but that's another topic.) I don't buy a lot of kitchen gadgets because 1. I'm not into mass consumerism and 2. I prefer tried and true methods and a fair amount of manual food preparation instead of throwing everything in a food processor or using the latest supposedly labor-saving wonder device. What gets me excited is a new razor sharp Wusthof paring knife from Germany that will last a lifetime, or a hand crafted copper French pepper mill or a hand made crock from one of America's oldest and most renowned makers of fine crockery. All intensely useful, all individually crafted, all of the highest quality.

The food I eat has been painstakingly planted by human hands, nurtured by people who actually care about the food and the environment, and harvested in small batches just hours before and a few miles away from the market stand. I think this food deserves the loving attention of being hand washed, hand chopped, hand kneaded or hand churned. I suppose, like people do in cultures who care about food, this is my way of offering a little prayer of thanks and honoring the sanctity of fresh, delicious, wholesome, bountiful food. So many who have come before me and so many who live today have no such luxury as even having enough to eat, let alone the quantity and selection available to most Westerners. Food is a gift, a very precious thing indeed. To waste it, to take it for granted or bastardize it in the form of a "McNugget" or similar abomination is just so...depressing.

I'm planning to spend most of the weekend in the kitchen. Last weekend I warmed up with two dozen jars of crabapple jelly, but this weekend it's time to get serious. How so you ask? Well, the peppers are hot and the tomatoes are red: It's salsa time.

Fall?

I don't want to jump the gun, but lately daytime temps have barely cracked 80 and we've had some nights in the upper 40's. The forecast shows more of the same. I'm not exactly ready for winter, but fall is really my favorite time of the year. Always has been, and fall in Colorado makes it even more true. It's even starting to smell like autumn.

On the menu tonight:

• Seared grass-fed lamb loin chops
• Fresh corn off-the-cob sauteed with summer squash, onion, garlic, oregano & butter
• Sauteed fresh broccoli with butter
• Fresh baked whole wheat bread with home churned raw butter
• For dessert, hot crabapple pie with a tall glass of raw milk

Boulder Social

One of the cool things about living in Boulder is that when your friends get a group to go out to dinner you're sure to meet some really cool people.

Not that people in other cities aren't cool, but how often does it happen that your friend introduces you to three other friends, one of whom is a scientist who specializes in global climate change with particular emphasis on temperature shifts in the Antarctic, another is an astrophysicist, and another is a wildlife biologist studying mountain lion movements in the Rockies? In Boulder it happens quite a lot. Nearly everyone I know in this town is around my age, has a Ph.D., and does something really interesting. And they ride a bike everywhere instead of drive, are into local food and love to drink microbrews. It's pretty awesome.

What I DON'T recommend is that when you get invited to a pool party in Colorado, to not bring a change of clothes in case you end up going out to grab some food and a beer or three afterward. Even in mid-August it's going to be 58 degrees when you come out of the bar and shorts and sandals aren't going to be quite as good an idea as they were when you were swimming earlier in the day.

Crabapples!

This morning Gerard and I picked crabapples. You know what that means? Canning season has officially begun!

We made the largest haul yet, which surprised me considering the late spring freeze killed off the vast majority of blooms earlier this year. I didn't know if we'd get any at all. But we happened to find two spectacular crabapple trees that clearly made it through the frost unscathed. These trees also have the largest, tastiest crabapples we've yet found. We also got smarter about picking this year. Instead of filling our bags by hand picking, we laid out a tarp and shook the trees. We got twice as many apples in half the time. This method also tends to give apples that are perfectly ripe while leaving on the tree the ones that need a bit more time.

I've started making a canning list. Last year we had too little crabapple jelly and salsa, and perhaps a bit too much apple butter and pumpkin butter. Guests always tended to leave with a few jars of this or that which depleted the stock more than I expected. This year we'll be ready. Peaches are just about to hit their stride, but they aren't quite ready for canning. About the time I've rebuilt my stock of crabapple jelly it should be time to dive into the peaches.

Office Space

If you have to have an office job, it really doesn't get any better than working from home. As part of our commitment to "walking the talk" as our company newsletter says, employees are now being allowed to work some portion of the week from home on a regular basis. I'm working from home about half time now and have been for about a month. It's great work if you can get it.

Searching

Last week/weekend was our annual backpacking trip to Capitol Peak. We (there were eight people in our party) were gone 5 days, and returned last night around midnight.

Base camp was just below 12,000 feet, in the wooded area in the photo above. It's literally on the edge of the alpine tundra, just meters from the limit of where trees can grow. It takes the better part of a day to hike in.

The weather is always unpredictable in the mountains, and the higher you go the more extreme it can get in a hurry. We experienced baking sun, a hail storm, violent winds and freezing temperatures. And that was just the first day. The second day started with sunshine and blue skies, so after breakfast we hiked up above the tree line to the saddle to make trail repairs. At noon, black clouds sprang up from the far side of Capitol Peak and within ten minutes we were running back down a 40 degree incline through a vicious lightning storm, complete with hail and pouring rain, to the relative safety of base camp. We counted 35 lightning strikes around us in the time it took to run down. In an hour it was sunny again, but then the wind started. We had sustained winds of over 40 mph, punctuated by regular gusts much more powerful, which lasted day and night for two days. The last couple of days were gorgeous and sunny, with daytime temps in the 60's and nights below freezing.

Despite this, we had a good time. The company was great, and camp was, all things considered, comfortable. We had great food, a nice warm camp fire, and clear mountain streams running on all sides of us. Deer, marmots, chipmunks and gray jays were our constant companions. And the scenery, well, it's really indescribable, like something from a dream. You can't imagine the world can really be so beautiful.

I'm leaving out so many details, but there are a few interesting or quirky things worth mentioning. For instance, we found a dead cow on the way up. Ranchers lease the land (it's owned by the forest service) and they unleash their cows to get fat by trampling and destroying pristine alpine meadows. We don't know how that particular cow died, but the next day hikers told us they had seen a bear munching on the carcass. When we saw it it didn't have a mark on it. It's highly unlikely the bear had anything to do with the cow's death, but they are opportunistic feeders and are roaming the area looking for an easy meal. We were extra careful to hang all of our food and trash high in the trees at night and while away from camp during the day.

Had I seen the bear it would certainly have been the highlight of the trip. But the best part for me is always the cowboys. Every year we hire an outfitter to pack tools in for us. We backpack our own clothes, tents, food, etc., but the sledgehammers, picks and other tools and a few common base camp necessities are packed in on a string of mules lead by a cowboy on a horse.

This year our cowboy was Aaron. He was a taut twenty-something with a slow western accent, piercing glance, cowboy hat, boots, chaps, the whole nine yards. He was born on a Pennsylvania farm but moved out west when he came of age to learn how to be a packer. I'm sure there are a lot of dirty details I don't know about the job, but the fantasy of living on a mountain ranch and having city folk pay you good money to pack them into the woods is kinda nice. I mean, he only has to see us twice per visit: once to get our money and put all our stuff on the mules, and once again as he passes us on his way down. Five days later it's just the reverse. In between he's riding alone through a gorgeous wilderness and never even has to break a sweat. A horse with two stubborn mules loaded with gear can get up and back in the time it takes us just to get up. I'm not suggesting his job is easy, not in the least. Last year, for example, one of the horses slipped on an unusually snowy slope and rolled down to the switchback below with all our tools and gear on its back. Fortunately neither man nor beast was injured. I'm aware that the job comes with certain hazards and isn't all romance. No job is. But sometimes I wonder which is really the less desirable prospect: being crushed by your horse on a mountain slope or crushed in a car accident on the interstate. Somehow the car accident just seems like the more wasteful tragedy.

I've been reading the blog of this old packer in the Idaho Rockies. His accounts are beautiful, terrifying, alluring. They're full of his adventures, decades of them. They're heavily peppered with tips too: what can happen and what to do or what not to do, what others have done and the consequences of their actions or inactions. It's easy to imagine him writing in a leather bound journal next to a camp fire in the forested mountains of frontier America.

Anyhow, today I was back at work - back at my desk clicking away on the glowing box that puts virtual green in my checking account so that I can spend a couple weeks a year getting out into the world.

I really don't mean to rag on civilization or technology. I freely admit it was very nice taking a hot shower last night and sleeping in my big, soft bed with fresh cotton sheets instead of lying on cold hard ground. Instead of a freezing, howling wind there was just a cool breeze through open windows. Instead of bears sniffing me through ten microns of nylon sheeting in the wee hours of the morning, there was just the predictable stillness of home. Good things, to be sure. Yet all I could think about all day was being back out there, somewhere in the wilderness with my horses, a warm campfire, and a hot meal bubbling in a cast iron dutch oven. Somewhere in the mountains is my cabin; simple, warm and comfortable. It bridges the gap between the soft civilized world and raw nature. It allows me to live deliberately, carefully walking the line between two extremes.

I wonder what Aaron did today.