Welcome Back Rant

As my last post indicated, I tried moving my blog to Wordpress. I got it in my head that I was going to build a more robust site with "how-to" pages and other resources, but it turned out it was just too much work. I have little interest in taking on more commitments, especially ones that are technology-dependent. I also got sidetracked by Facebook for awhile, but I got sick of people posting about the mundane things in their ordinary lives. No offense to them, I'm just not interested. I suppose my life is plenty mundane, or at least odd and incomprehensible, to most of them.

Blogger gives me a release, without the complication of building a resource, and without the distraction and even greater complication of Facebook.

So I guess I'm back, and though I do try to avoid all-out rants, today I think is going to be a rough one.

Why today? I'm at work and wholly depressed, which isn't a big surprise if you've read anything I've written over the years. I have a high-paying job with wonderful benefits that contributes to a cleaner, greener world, my peers respect me, my work environment is low-stress and my employer is generous.

And I hate my job. I hate it in the way that a lover of fine dining might hate giving up juicy steaks, fine wines, crisp fruits, tender vegetables, crusty breads and silken desserts for the futuristic meal-in-a-pill. It isn't that it tastes bad, or that it lacks nutrition (assuming humans could actually achieve this), but rather that it tastes like nothing and leaves the soul malnourished. I feel like a suburban drone, passing the days not by the rhythms of nature but by the wholly artificial ticking of the clock. I feel unstimulated. Unmoved. Unmotivated. Pointless. Wasteful. Sad.

I have to get out.

My coworkers praise my work, my work ethic, and my good-natured personality. But I'm just going through the motions. My body is here earning money to pay everyone else to provide my "living," but my heart roams the forested mountains in search of something real.

I watched a movie called The New World last night. It was a little slow as it was more a love story than anything, but it put me in a mood. It reminded me (as if I needed reminding) just how f*ed up white people and Western society are and always have been. If I came ashore in America in 1607 I would join the Indians and never look back. They had it made. The mere fact that they managed to live on this continent for 14,000 years and not destroy it, and we managed to take it to the brink in just a few centuries speaks volumes.

I despise money and the clock and the calendar. I despise the Western social hierarchy, the greed and the gluttony and the backstabbing. I hate fashion and gadgets and everything that Pottery Barn represents. I hate that we're not only willing, but eager to trade timeless, unspoiled wilderness for a metaphorical minute of suburbia. I hate annual performance reviews and standardized tests. I hate car culture and television and processed industrial calories that pass as food. I hate human stupidity and I hate being part of the whole f*ed up system. I hate religion, especially the "big three."

All I want is to live deliberately. All I want is to hunt and gather and grow my own food, to build my own home, to laugh with friends, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to walk among ancient forests and to wonder and ponder over the midnight stars. I don't need "stuff" beyond what I can make from what the forest provides. I don't need "culture" or "entertainment." I don't even need to own land. I just need to live with the land, and after I die let someone else walk in my footsteps. That's all. You know, the way most humans have lived for three million years. Is that so much ask? Really? I don't want fame and fortune, I have no interest in keeping up with the Jones', and you can keep your plastic suburban fantasy. I want to extricate myself from it entirely. If I don't do something soon I will go mad.

I've thought about going back to school and becoming a biologist, but even scientists often irk me. As Ian Malcom said in Jurassic Park, "what you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world." I'm not at all comfortable with poking and prodding nature merely to see "what makes it tick." Some things, I think, are best left to the realm of the mysterious. I don't need to know what's happening on a cellular level inside of Clostridium botulinum, or even that it exists. Is it not enough to know that cooking certain foods keeps one from getting sick? Is it not enough to gain wisdom from observing and interacting with the natural world, rather than gain information by dissecting it under a microscope?

Why must I "get a job?" I'm not lazy, not at all. I love work. A few weeks ago I spent an entire day felling, limbing, bucking and splitting firewood in the forest using nothing but a double ax, an antique bucking saw and a maul. I used no fossil fuels except to drive my truck up in the mountains because I don't have and anyway wouldn't be allowed to use a horse drawn cart on modern roads. And anyway if it weren't for the "advancements" of society I wouldn't even need the cart or to cut down trees. Natives had small fires burning twigs and dung that kept them quite warm with no need even for harvesting firewood as we know it. Talk about efficiency!

That said, I'm not opposed to learning a trade. I need to work with my hands more. I need to walk and interact with things that are real, like wood and wildlife, not plastic and suburban cube-zombies.

When the weekend comes and I'm in the Rockies, I feel alive and happy and deeply interested. When the weekdays come I feel dead and numb, like my spirit is broken. Work is an endless procession of pointless days doing pointless work to live a life I don't want in the first place. How do I get out?

How do I get out?

Tell of Woe

Well it seems I'm in full-on blogger mode again, which means I've reverted to my Great Obsession.

It makes me want to laugh. Or cry.

It's finally snowing in Boulder. The wind is howling and we could get as much as a foot by tomorrow morning, along with sub-zero temperatures. Counting today I have four more days before I have to go back into the office. I plan to spend the majority of that time fireside knocking out a few books, doing a little blogging, and working on my novel.

So what brought my obsessive feelings back? Partly I wanted them to come back. I missed them, if that makes sense. I guess it's how I've come to define myself. It makes me wonder how I'd feel if I ever were to achieve my fantasy. I mean imagine you spent your whole life fantasizing of, say, going to Greece. Then you finally get to go. Upon returning home, what then? What comes next? Would you be satisfied thereafter? Or would you find that it was the obsession with Greece, rather than Greece itself, that you actually needed?

Partly my obsession was brought back by just not being at work. I haven't been in the office since last Wednesday. It's now Thursday of the following week. In the past week I've been to the Leanin' Tree Museum of Western Art twice, and that always catapults me back into hardcore Western fantasizing. It's one of the best little museums I've ever been to and the only art museum I've ever loved. It's in Boulder, it's free and open to the public, and it's usually very quiet so it's a good place to meditate on the things near and dear to my heart. And the art collection is amazing. Even my parents loved it. Often I'll go alone during some off-time when I'm sure to be the only one there and I'll spend an hour or two gazing into an intangible world that captivates me. Every sculpture, every painting is a moment frozen in time - yet they all tell a story, however brief, and give one a glimpse of what was and what would be, even if the stories are only based loosely on historical events.

The deep lines painted on an old Cherokee woman's face as she stares off into the desert at something only she can see; the cowboy about to be crushed by his sun fishing horse; the war party in the pale moonlight; the haunting spirit horse mourning the death of his warrior; the epic struggle between hunter and mountain lion; the tenderness of two cowboys at Thanksgiving in a rugged and unforgiving world; the packers after a successful hunt; breathtaking western landscapes with all their minute detail and a thousand things more. These images move me and haunt me; they fill my soul with something I can't get from the daily grind of "normal" life.

And finally, my obsessive feelings were brought back by getting out into the mountains. Rocky Mountain National Park is what keeps me sane, and it's not even the most perfect slice of the American West. That title belongs to Yellowstone, the only in-tact ecosystem in the lower 48 that still looks and functions more or less like it did before the arrival of the white man and all of his destructive ways. I think that when the day comes that I visit Yellowstone I won't want to leave. Wolves, grizzlies, wolverines, bison, untrammeled forests and meadows, snow-capped peaks and untamed rivers - Yellowstone is the last refuge of Wild America outside of Alaska.

For lunch today I sat down with a warm bowl of leftover homemade chicken soup: potatoes, carrots and dried oregano from the garden and chicken from a local farm. I served it with a leftover buttermilk biscuit I made from scratch for breakfast yesterday. In the glow of the Christmas tree I watched the snow falling outside, warmed by my soup and my thoughts. This is heaven for me, this moment.

I'm a philosopher. That's what I really am, no bones about it. I probably wouldn't make for an exceptional cowboy; I'm not reckless enough. I probably wouldn't make for an exceptional mountain man; I may not be tough enough. I don't make an exceptional analyst or businessman; I don't care enough. What drives me is a desire to become enlightened and to be inspired. What thrills me is to enlighten and inspire others. What comforts me is nature. What satisfies me is purpose.

I don't want to be a scientist; they care only for what makes a thing tick. I don't want to be a businessman; they care only for making money. I don't want to be an adventurer; they care only for the thrill of the moment. I don't want to be a politician; they care only for winning the game.

I think my calling in life is to be a teacher, a writer, a naturalist, a philosopher, and a non-academic historian. These things I am now, as much as I can be. I do want to know about science, I do want to have business sense, and I do want to understand the game. We need professionals in all areas I suppose. Thing is, I don't want to specialize in the activities. I want a bird's eye view of all of them, to understand how they form our world. I want to know who we are, where we came from, where we are going, why we do what we do, or don't. I want to inspire people to think beyond what makes a thing tick, to care for more than just money, and to realize that the game has no value but that which we assign to it. I despise the concept of money and accumulating wealth in monetary form. I despise the corporate ladder and the Western concept of "progress." Alas, this is the world in which I live, so I struggle to find a way to "earn a living" from the things I love, rather than from the unsatisfying activities that I know will work but leave me feeling empty. My body is clothed and nourished by my career success, but my soul is left destitute.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

War of the Worlds

I had the most awesome day fly fishing in Rocky. Between me and my buddy Keith we probably caught two dozen or so cutthroat trout, many of which were a good 14 inches or more. It's about a three mile hike up to the Loch where we fished. It's a place of stunning waterfalls and dramatic cliff faces, thick pine forests and clear icy waters. And of course a lot of trout.

The Glacier Gorge area is arguably one of the most beautiful parts of Rocky, and it's the area I spend most of my time in. The hike up to the Loch isn't what I would consider terribly strenuous, but most tourists (thankfully) disagree. It's three miles in with about 1,500 feet elevation gain. And of course it's at about 10,000 feet so the air is a might thin. While fishing, we had the occasional hiker come by and wave, but mostly it was just us fishermen with only the chipmunks and the gray jays to keep us company. For lunch we stretched out in a wildflower-carpeted meadow next to a stream, surrounded by fortress-like walls of sculpted granite, and watched the trout gulp down midges and the honey bees drink up the last of summer's nectar. It was spectacular.

I hadn't been fishing in a long time, but I can see now that this is a hobby that's way overdue. I can't describe the thrill I get from the game. Fly fishing is especially so, because trout are so finicky. One minute hundreds of fish will be feeding en masse, gulping anything on the surface that moves. The next minute, every one of them will stop, drift to the bottom and disappear. Often they'll only be interested in midges, and ignore anything else, then suddenly switch to grasshoppers or flying ants. With trout it's a constant game of trying to guess what the fish want, and then tricking them into taking a fuzzy bit with a hook that more or less looks like whatever is pleasing their palate at the time. Then of course there's the grand finale, the icing on the cake: the moment when a big one takes the fly, and you the fisherman are fast enough to set the hook in the split second before the trout figures you out. The fight is thrilling, and I can't quite explain why. I imagine it harkens back to those hunter instincts our ancestors depended on for millennia before the industrial revolution. I released all of my fish unharmed today, but the thrill of the chase was extraordinarily satisfying.

I also love the smell of a live, squirmy fish, and the way it feels in my hand. Cutthroats are among the prettiest and most vivid of fresh water fish, and I'm always dazzled by their colors. There's something thrilling and primal about going out into nature and having a close encounter with a wild creature. I think that's especially true today with so many of us living such disconnected, ignorant urban lives. I've blogged before about the simple thrill I often get at touching the bark of a tree or of hearing the sound of a stream after being subjected to cube life for an extended period of time. To go out into nature and see something, some beautiful form of life, that lives all on its own and needs nothing from man to survive but to be left alone still amazes me and fills me with delight. Going into the mountains reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me of the real world - the world beyond the artificial urban world - the world that created us, the world in which we have lived for millions of years, and only very recently have forgotten because of the illusions we've created with our cities and our nifty techno trickery. The cities and all they contain could not exist without the green, living world they, like a tick, have imbedded themselves in. How quickly most of us have forgotten our roots.

On the hike down from the lake this evening, I noticed - I always notice - that the trail gets busier and busier the closer one gets to the trailhead and parking lot. The people get fatter. The kids get more numerous. The attitude (mine) gets worse. Just hundreds of yards from the trailhead one will see fat suburban women wearing flip-flops, smoking, and screaming at unruly children who are literally climbing over the "stay on the trail" signs. One will see teenagers with their headphones on and people of all ages pecking away at their iPhones. One will smell a thousand different perfumes, deodorants, fabric softeners, shampoos, cigarettes and other toxic aromas from "real life" in the city. One will find cigarette butts and trash on the ground, and a hundred other signs that the ignorant, uncaring masses have descended upon the "easy" parts of the park to get their snapshot on the family vacation. I push through, and I keep my mouth shut. What, after all, can be done? Why can't these people switch off the city for a day? Why can't these people come into nature with the reverence these wild places deserve? Nature is not some playground for dumping your kids in. In my mind these are sacred spaces, not just that overgrown area outside of your suburban shithole.

It's always like this. All of the prettiest places I've been are being loved to death, most especially by the people who can't come into the country without bringing the city with them. It's always a nasty shock for me after I spend time in a relatively pristine wilderness and then step back into the urban machine. Most people are like predictable, selfish little drones. If you build it, they will come. Give them their iPhones and their fast food and their artificial lives and they will flock to you by the millions. They are mesmerized by shiny things, things that whirr and beep and give offer instant gratification. They like the illusion of material wealth, and the superficial trappings of a civilization that can never have enough.

As for me, if you build it I will leave. A more perfect system cannot exist than that which nature designed. The Earth in all her complexity is a perfect system that constantly creates, destroys, and recycles so that new things may be born: mountains, oceans, rivers, life. Here in the mountains can be found all of the things I could ever need to be healthy and happy: deer, elk, rabbit, bison, pronghorn, fish and turkey for food, shelter and ornamentations. Meat is for eating. Bone is for making tools and weapons. Hide is for shelters and clothing. There are edible and medicinal plants such as service berries, wild raspberries and strawberries, currants, cottonwood, mariposa lilies, yucca, mushrooms, and hundreds more. There are plants for making string, rope and dyes. If one has good food, clean water, a warm safe place to call home and loved ones to share it all with, what more could one possibly want or need? How could an iPhone or a shopping mall really enhance these most basic of human needs and comforts? Instead of sitting alone typing my thoughts on some lifeless, glowing box, I could be sitting around a cozy fire talking with real people; perhaps telling stories or talking about what a great day I had catching fish, and perhaps sharing a good haul of roasted fish with my loved ones. But that is not our world. In our world, some of us step into reality when the weekend comes and we are granted a reprieve from the Matrix. We are allowed, for a short time, to tiptoe through the unadulterated system that truly sustains us. Then on Monday we must go back into The Machine, back into the artificial world where we are told what to eat and how to live and what's fashionable, where we live by the clock and calendar under artificial light, eat toxic "food" and sit mesmerized by television and all it's mind-numbing power.

And now I must go to bed. The Machine is expecting me at 8AM.

School Rant

I have ONE class to finish in order to get my master's certificate in GIS, and it's pissing me the hell off. It's a geographic statistics class, online, in which we're getting virtually no instruction, guidance or feedback from our non-responsive, uninterested instructor.

Our first problem set is a TWENTY PAGE DOCUMENT full of typos and vague instructions. Problem number 11: Write an essay on Exponential Distribution and make some graphs. Use a software called JMP that makes no sense unless you're already fairly versed in stats.

Okay.

Since there's no lecture or anything to guide us, I start with Wikipedia:

In probability theory and statistics, the exponential distributions (a.k.a. negative exponential distributions) are a class of continuous probability distributions. They describe the times between events in a Poisson process...

Okay, what's a Poisson process?

A Poisson process, named after the French mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781–1840), is a stochastic process...

Okay, what's a stochastic process?

In probability theory, a stochastic process, or sometimes random process, is the counterpart to a deterministic process or deterministic system...

Okay, what's a deterministic system?

In mathematics, a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

By this point I've forgotten what I was even looking for in the first place, and all the crap I read in between.

:0(

It's really not a good idea for me to sit around on a Sunday evening browsing the web for dream ranches and farms for sale. It only depresses me.

Beauty in Diversity

Late this afternoon I was cruising in my truck down a country road out on the eastern plains. The weather had been cloudy for days, and this morning rain finally started to fall. It was a cold, wet spring day and I was taking the long way home from the dairy.

All at once the rain stopped. As if the breath of God were blowing down on a frothy cup of chai, the clouds ahead of me broke apart and the sunlight poured through. In an instant I was under a blue sky. The rolling green countryside, dotted with big red barns and sprinkled with horses, stretched in all directions. The Rocky Mountains stood hazy and dark in the distance, and the world felt so alive. So perfect. Some lonely old country song came on the radio. I smiled. I cruised.

My day started early with the farmer's market, as every Saturday during the growing season does. Today we had the first of the asparagus! Unless you've eaten thick, tender stalks from an old plant cut early in the season, and just hours after harvesting, you've never had asparagus. That crap in the grocery store, even the stuff from Whole Foods, is only asparagus in appearance. I also picked up fresh mushrooms, a few pounds of crisp baby spinach, two dozen eggs from chickens that eat grass and bugs, ten pounds of anasazi and black beans, cider from last fall's apples (spent the winter in the deep freeze), purple potatoes, white and purple onions, green garlic, fresh goat cheese and a few other things. This afternoon, on the way out to the dairy for raw milk, I stopped by Rocky Plains to buy local, grass-fed bison, pork and chicken - steaks, pork chops, sausages, ground round, roast, marrow bones, Rocky Mountain oysters, bacon, etc.

I can honestly say the highlight of my week, and one of the highlights of my life, is the farmer's market. I can't tell you how happy - how downright giddy - I get over local, farm-fresh produce and the people who produce it. It isn't just the superior flavor and freshness or the nutritional value. It's more than the community aspect too. It's more even than the "green" aspect and the self-sufficiency factor. A big part of it is just the simplicity of the system. It appeals to me on such a deep level. There are no factories, no complex and convoluted chains of corporate fat cats, no elaborate distribution networks, no chemicals, toxics or synthetic additives, no vile marketers trying to invent new "products" with flashy branded labels, no wasteful packaging, no nutrition labels, no fads, no gimmicks. It's just sunshine, some nice farmers, some beautiful produce, and some very happy customers and neighbors. I dig that in a big way.

This year I'm planning to supplement my diet with some wild game. My ultimate fantasy is providing all of my own food, and having no use for the industrial food system. I shopped for hunting rifles after lunch. It's been a few years since I shot a gun and I haven't owned a gun since I left Texas. I haven't been hunting since my early college days. I took a few shots on the rifle range. There are a lot of options, but I think I've settled on a sweet Remington 700, vintage 1979. It's got a gorgeous woodgrain stock and all metal sights - today they're mostly plastic. This one has been well cared for and lightly used. It's a very good find. It's a perfect all-around hunting rifle, from coyote to elk. I'm prone to impulse buying, so I decided to think on it a few days. If it's still at the shop next week, then it was meant to be mine.

I have to say it has been a long time since I set foot in a gun shop. It was worth it for the culture shock alone. This shop is in Weld County, which is about as close in culture to rural Texas as Colorado gets. In fact, while I was there Texas came up in conversation. Some of the patrons were swooning over Texas' legendarily pro-gun politics. The employees' uniforms had the following quote printed on the back: "I'll keep my money, my guns and my freedom. You can keep the 'change'" with a badly drawn illustration of an American flag and a gun. A poster on the wall showed pictures of Obama and McCain on dollar bills, with the text, "Don't blame me, I voted for the American."

I had to laugh. My only other option was to blow a gasket. Not to get off topic, but I've recently reconnected with a whole lot of my old high school friends and acquaintances through the magic of Facebook. Probably ninety percent of them would think those shirts and posters were right-on. Even a half-way educated person would see the utter ridiculousness of them, but we're not talking about educated people here. Not even close to half-way. But does that make them bad people? I went to school with those kids, some of them for twelve years. I know they're not bad people. I knew them before we were old enough for politics and religion to come between us. The guys at the gun shop were just as nice as they could be. They were so willing to help and talk about this and that, share hunting stories, give tips on scoping out used guns, etc. They weren't pushy salesmen. I distinctly felt like they wanted to help. But the tiny world they live in doesn't allow them to see very far beyond their own noses. You know, I can remember a time when I supported George Bush. Yes, I mean DUBYA. I can even remember a time in high school when I thought segregation was a good thing, that blacks and Mexicans were all dirty freeloaders that couldn't be trusted. I went to church and Sunday school - I even voluntarily got Baptized because I thought it was the only way for me to go to Heaven. It makes me chuckle now. I remember the first time I saw a man with long hair. I was a child. I cried. My Aunt Kiku (Karen Sue - but as a baby I said, "Kiku!" and it stuck), among the most tolerant of the family (and that's not saying a lot), tried to explain that he wasn't a bad person just because he had long hair. It kills me to admit this, but I can remember a time long ago - long before I'd even heard of Hitler or the Holocaust - that I though genocide wouldn't be such a bad idea. Of course I didn't know the term. Hell I didn't know much of anything. I wasn't stupid, just incredibly naive, sheltered, brainwashed. I had no real concept of many of the ideas I was taught. Black people were just the scary homeless figures that lived in downtown Houston, a place our family very rarely ventured. They weren't real to me. They were like boogiemen - a scary thing I'd heard about but never really seen. It was easy to imagine wiping them out. Just like vampires and werewolves. All I knew was my tiny little world in Huffman and what the adults told me. Small Texas towns don't allow a lot of room for thinking, questioning, learning anything at all about the world beyond. I knew all non-white races only by their horribly racist names. But it was normal. We weren't angry or spewing bile when we said those words. It's just what they were, in our tiny little world views.

Moving off to college was rough for me. It was shocking. It was eye-opening. But I, unlike many of my old high school friends and acquaintances, DID go to college. I asked questions. I traveled. I experienced just a little more of the world. But I think the greatest driving force in my life was my sexuality. That, more than anything else, forced me out of the tiny world of Huffman. It was the hardest thing I've ever gone through. And I suppose that even today, as "extreme" as I would be considered by my hometown, I'm still tied to those roots. I still love the simplicity of country life. I love trucks and rifles and cowboy hats. I have no desire to be some kind of backwoods dumbass and get into bar fights (like plenty of people I've known in my life). I guess I just like the simplicity and the honest ruggedness that these things symbolize. Yet I've noticed that when I go home to Texas, especially when I visit my family or very old friends, I feel compelled to put away the cowboy hat. I want to wear fashionable city clothes and put on airs and talk about my job and politics and religion. I want to conduct myself in a way that separates me from them and puts me above them. I guess I want to say, "I am NOT like you!" But when I come back home - the home I've made for myself - I relax back into a way of life that, in many ways, fits well with my Texas roots. Isn't that curious?

My life is a dichotomy. I've said this before. There are two people living in my head: a Texas good 'ol boy and an educated liberal activist. Now if that ain't a fine how-do-you-do! I don't claim to know everything. In fact, the older I get the more I realize I know nothing. I don't want to fight with the conservatives because I believe in Obama. I don't want to fight with the liberals because I drive a Super Duty. At best I just want to be friendly with everyone. If not that, then at least just let me live and do my thing.

I do find a degree of entertainment value in being a Super Duty-driving, gun-owning, cowboy hat-wearing Obama supporter who gives money to Greenpeace. I guess it takes all kinds.

Home Again

I just got home from San Diego. It was a business/pleasure trip. It was so nice to feel 80 degrees again and to see the ocean and tropical plants. I had a great time.

But Californians can keep their bums, their gridlocked traffic, their smog and their overdeveloped urban world of orchestrated chaos. God I'm glad to be back in Colorado. Boulder is very good, but always when I come back from a trip to Urbania I feel the need to disappear deep into the wilderness and find my quiet cabin.

In other news, Boulder is going to have its first day in the 70's this week! And the farmer's market opens exactly one week from today! Woohoo!

Broomfield

Every now and then I start to feel trapped, or maybe it's just that I'm needing a change, but I start thinking about moving out of Boulder or, at the very least, to a different part of Boulder. Maybe some place a bit cheaper where I won't be wasting so much money on rent while trying to save for a house in the country. For example, if I moved 15 miles away to Broomfield, I could get an apartment that's twice as nice for half the price.

This weekend I did some apartment shopping. One of my stops was in Broomfield. I spent a lot of time trying to get a feel for the place, to see if I could live there for a year or so. It's total suburbia, the kind of place I've long shunned. But it's 15 minutes closer to work, and the apartment I looked at is very nice. It's brand new, has a big, modern floor plan, massive closets, enormous kitchen, brand new appliances, garage, big windows, year-round heated pool, allows dogs, etc. It's half the price of my current apartment, which has a single closet-sized bathroom, a couple of pantry-sized closets, no pantry at all, and a galley kitchen with appliances manufactured around the time I was born. But I do have the mountains and Boulder Creek, which is something Broomfield can never hope to offer.

The complex is completely surrounded by Big Box stores. You name it, it's there. Broomfield is suburbia at its finest. I was also scoping a gym, so I checked out 24 Hour Fitness which is right across the street. The young sales dude gave me the tour and asked if I was ready to join. I explained that I was actually living in Boulder but was considering moving to Broomfield in the summer, and was just scouting potential neighborhoods at this time.

"Oh man I love Boulder!" he said. "It's so quiet out there, plus you have the mountains! The people are so friendly. Wow, I'd love to live out there! But I can't afford the high rent, so I live here in this hell hole."

I decided I should give Boulder a harder look.

The Mailbox

It's always a tense situation, checking the mailbox. Sometimes I'm excited, expecting a package. But always I have this little fear that something's going to show up and just piss me off. It happens every now and then. Years ago I got a letter from an insane ex's lawyer, threatening to sue me for breaking up and, apparently, stealing his socks. You'd think that after being in a relationship with me for five years he'd know I don't wear Wal-Mart socks.

Right before Christmas, of all times, I got not one, but TWO letters from the IRS within a month of each other. One said I hadn't reported some income from the previous year. The other said I hadn't reported some income from THREE years ago. They were right, and both were honest mistakes on my part, but it still sucked.

Today I had another double whammy. Apparently I was caught by one of Boulder's mobile cop-in-a-box cameras driving 30 something in a 25 through a neighborhood. Forty bucks. I also had a letter from the City of Milford Texas, telling me there was a warrant out for my arrest because I owed them $139.50 for a speeding ticket I got in February, exactly TEN YEARS AGO almost to the day. I clearly remember that incident. I was driving to Dallas on a rainy night. I was 25 years old and speeding and probably deserved the ticket, but that was the most Godawful little hell hole of a one-horse town to get a speeding ticket in. I had to drive all the way back out there to see the judge. I waited for about 3 hours in a dirt parking lot with about thirty other people, wondering if he was even going to show. None of wanted to leave because no one could have possibly lived within 100 miles. The judge finally showed up in his jeans and hat, driving a beat up old pickup. The "court" was a little shanty, the shell of a house probably 100 years old. After an absurdly long, rude ordeal that ended up consuming an entire day of my life, the judge wouldn't let me off. He didn't let anyone off that day, and something told me he never did. Speeders were undoubtedly their only source of revenue. Whatever happened after that, I apparently never finished paying off the ticket, or if I did the memory and records of it are lost to time. I guess they decided that after ten years they might aught to try and collect their money. I paid it. I got a confirmation number this time.

Other than this, I got a few of my regular bills and the usual junk mail. See, I really have no choice but to shop online at Williams Sonoma so that going to the mailbox won't always be such a drag.

The Facebook Fallacy

So I joined Facebook. What a joke.

Yeah a few people from high school found me. So did a lot of other people, many of whom I haven't seen in a long time. Some for good reasons.

I don't get "the wall." Is it a chat forum? Is it an inconvenient spin-off of the email concept? Who reads it? Why am I supposed to care that someone I haven't seen in 15 years is grocery shopping at this very moment?

How is this thing supposed to be helpful?

I'm fighting the urge to cancel it, but I'm going to try and last at least a week. I do want to give it a fair shake, if for no other reason than to have even more firepower when someone tries to argue how awesome it is.

And since I'm on a techno roll, I decided to check out Twitter and Kindle, two other techno fads that I commonly rail against. So far Twitter looks to be even more absurd than Facebook, and Kindle, while intriguing and possibly more environmentally friendly than books, is something I remain suspicious of.

Isn't technology supposed to make life simpler? My life isn't simpler when I have several computers, an iPhone, two social networking services, chat, email, fifty different passwords for all my various devices and online accounts, and I'm trying to do my work and keep up with the mundane details of dozens of people I may or may not know and may or may not care about. What's the point? I'd rather have one good friend to have a beer with once a week and have a real conversation with than a hundred "friends" on Facebook who want to send virtual pokes and newsflashes about what their cat left in the litter box.

[sigh]

I wanna be a cowboy.

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.

Cowboy Up

Today I went to the Boulder Horse & Rider to buy a pair of jeans. It's Boulder's version of a feed store. In Texas, feed stores are generally huge and carry all sorts of farm and ranch supplies, clothing, animal feed, hay and some sell tractors and other machinery. Boulder's version isn't quite that. It's a very small shop with bagged "specialty" horse feed, a small selection of grooming supplies and clothes, some books, saddles and a few other odds and ends for the discriminating Boulder horseperson. It's locally owned, and they're one of only two clothing retailers I know of in the entire city that don't sell $200 designer jeans - and they're the only retailer that sells Wrangler (which are made in the USA.)

The owner is usually there when I drop in. She's nice, at least from what I gather in our short chats during my irregular, infrequent visits. She's the outdoorsy type, though I get the impression she's a bit pretentious and probably a gossip. She was there today. I walked in and she immediately started chatting me up. "So are you enjoying this gorgeous fall weather!?" she said with a big grin. I smiled and nodded. She kept talking but I wasn't really listening. I'm normally more chatty but I wasn't in the mood today. Eventually the chatter faded and I found my jeans.

I browsed some art she sells by a local farrier named Andrew. He's a young guy with a gift for painting. When he's not shoeing horses, he paints himself, his wife, horses and his cowboy friends in watercolor. I've been collecting his art, but there was nothing new today.

I browsed some saddles. I know of one saddle maker on the entire Front Range who still makes saddles the old fashioned way by hand. I haven't met him yet, but I'm keen to interview him and get a tour of his shop. These were not those kinds of saddles. They were all shiny, mostly made of synthetic materials, amply stuffed with synthetic padding so that they ride more like a pillow than a proper saddle. They were machine stitched and I could picture them rolling off an assembly line in China. They looked like something you might find in a furniture mega-store; lots of black pleather and chrome-esque bobbles. They were godawful ugly and modern looking and had no personality. They don't even look like they belong on a horse.

I was about to checkout when a book caught my eye. It was a book about packing, and there were several photos on the front of cowboys packing up horses and mules in some dreamy mountain wilderness. I perused the pages for a long while, looking through black and white photos of cowboys, probably in the 1970's, demonstrating the various stages of packing, leading, trail clearing, tracking, camping, cooking. I didn't see anything terribly modern in the photos. From the canvas bags on the mules to the hats on the cowboys, these guys and their equipment looked "all natural." To my great pleasure, I noticed they specifically mentioned what we today refer to as the "leave no trace" philosophy. They may have been just a bunch of horse-packin cowboys, but they had respect for nature and keeping the land clean and minimally impacted. I had to buy it.

At the register the owner asked, "Are you a packer?"

I didn't look up. "Just dreaming," I mumbled.

"Oh you need to go! I just came back from a packing trip up in Montana! It's so gorgeous! You need to take your horses up there! This is the prettiest time of year!"

Her words grated on me, probably because I don't have any horses to take anywhere. She was a publisher in her previous life. She made a lot of money then decided she wasn't happy, so she sold everything and moved to Boulder and bought herself a million dollar ranch, a herd of horses, and opened this little store for something to do when she wasn't riding. It's people like her that keep people like me out of the running for land around here. She doesn't have to work. I do. But instead of buying her dream ranch out in the wide open spaces of West Texas or Montana or Wyoming or less populated parts of Colorado, she's right here playing in my back yard keeping property prices higher than working people can afford. Consciously I can't blame her, but subconsciously I'm ripping her a new one. I'm just being a crybaby.

Just then a BMW pulled up and a short thin 40-ish woman dressed in expensive synthetic riding clothes came in.

"Babs!*" the owner cried.

"Sweetie! It's been too long!" Babs replied, opening her arms wide. Kissy-kisssy, huggy-huggy.

"Oh Babs, how's the new darling treating you?"

"Oh," Babs exclaimed with a comically dramatic exasperation, "I've been riding Sasha now for what, two weeks? Well, you'll just never believe blah blah blah..."

I walked out the door. These people have every bit as much right to own land and horses as I do, and it isn't their fault or their problem that they ended up with the riches to do so and I haven't (yet, anyway.) I still can't help that it pisses me off, and I can't help feel that I'd make better use of the land and appreciate it more than these spoiled Californians who just come out here to play. That doesn't justify anything and nobody ever said life was fair. I realize it's irrational and wasteful to let it piss me off. These people don't deserve my scorn, so I just brood quietly to myself or let it leak out in this blog. This weekend when Babs is out being frustrated with the nuances of her new $100,000 polo pony, I'll be reading my little book and dreaming that I'm one of those cowboys in those old black and white photos, packing up a $300 mule and a $1,000 horse for a long trek into the serenity of some distant mountain wilderness.

*Babs wasn't her actual name, though it was something equally cutesy and pretentious. I just can't recall it.

Elk

Yesterday in Colorado two bull elk (mature males) were found entangled with each other due to barbed wire which was wrapped around their antlers. This is rutting season, and males are battling one another for dominance and females. In this case it seems some stray barbed wire became entangled in their antlers and essentially tied the two animals together at the head.

This all happened just off the road I take to work every day.

Fortunately, several ranchers found the animals and were able to cut the barbed wire off. (No, that's not me in the black cowboy hat below, but I wish it had been!) The two elk, upon being freed, ran off into the mountains apparently unharmed.

Oh and by the way, that beautiful golden meadow where this happened is slated for development. It's home to elk, mule deer (yesterday I saw a mule deer with a huge rack lying in the grass there), coyote, prairie dog, fox, hawk, rabbit and innumerable other creatures, but some developer is chomping at the bit to turn it all into a quick buck (for himself.) Yep, it's been sold to the highest bidder, which means a developer. It will be paved and covered with cookie cutter houses and strip malls. There's a huge sign erected by the developer in front if it right now proudly displaying the fact, and doubtless there are Americans who just can't wait for this "useless" meadow to be turned into more cheap shopping opportunities (because God knows Americans just don't have enough cheap places to buy crap!) After all, that toxic MADE IN CHINA stuff isn't going to buy itself! Who cares about good 'ol American wilderness and the spectacle of nature's ancient rituals? We need more plastic garbage and cardboard houses!

This whole thing just makes me glow incandescent with rage. Not only can elk not breed without being tied up in our junk wire, but soon the very meadows where they've been breeding for longer than humans have even existed will be strip malls and tract houses. Is nothing sacred anymore?

Ridin' Steel Horses

Did you know that 100 years ago the automobile was touted as being the pollution-free transportation of the future? In big, crowded cities like New York, horse pollution was a problem that made smog seem like a joke. Horse manure was a terrific problem and nearly everywhere it lay where it fell. Even when it was picked up, it was just dumped in someone else's back yard. Even dead horses tended to lay where they fell, liquefying in the streets. Aside from the stench and unsightly appearance of it all, flies and disease were rampant. In addition, city horses could only work about 5 years before they had to retire. They required a lot of feed and water, couldn't move a whole lot of people per animal and had a hard time trudging up hills - especially when pulling carts. In 1872, an outbreak of horse flu ripped through New York wiping out much of the transportation and causing a serious carcass problem.

There were about 3.5 million people in New York City in 1900, and about 75 million in the entire United States. Today the population of New York City is well over 8 million, and in the US there are about 300 million of us.

Can you just imagine if we were all still riding horses? I think we'd already be extinct.

But we aren't. We're here, riding the horse of the future. Rather, the "horseless carriage" as it was called back in the day. The car was the solution to pollution. It was clean by anyone's standard in 1900. It didn't drop dead and rot, spread diseases (or catch diseases) or leave steaming piles of fly magnets every half hour. It could last well over 5 years with proper maintenance. Of course, paved roads weren't common at the time and the Interstate system hadn't even been conceived of. Outside the city the horse was the only alternative to walking, but inside the city the car had everything going for it, except that it was too expensive for most people. But Henry Ford changed all that with his brilliant idea of the assembly line, and in 1908 the Model-T started rolling off the lines and into the hands of the masses. In a generation the horse went from being transportation to being recreation - from daily necessity to play thing.

I thought of this last week as I was grooming a horse named Sunny. Horses fart a lot. They poop a lot. They pee a lot. They sneeze big slimy dirt-filled boogers a lot. It's astounding how many offenses a single horse can produce in a short period of time. And they aren't nearly as cooperative when I've got a brush in my hand as my pickup is when I've got a garden hose and a towel.

Recent studies have suggested that all of the world's livestock - horses, cows, etc. - produce nearly 20% of all the greenhouse gases being released into the environment. That's more than all of the world's planes, trains and automobiles combined. The combined global farts alone produce a whopping 1/3 of all the methane being released into the environment, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Right now there are over 600 million automobiles on the planet. No one knows how much livestock there is, but there is at least 1.5 BILLION cattle.

At my conference last summer in Austin, one of the presenters mentioned a study wherein psychologists determined that people, on a subconscious level, identify their car as a horse. Apparently Chrysler used this information to give "eyes" to the Jeep by making the headlights round, and sales shot through the roof. Indeed years later when they shifted back to square headlights, customers revolted and the design was swiftly changed back to round where it has remained since. I don't know how much truth is in that, but I've always thought of my vehicle as my horse in some sense. It has always given me freedom - freedom to run and to roam. I even bond with my vehicles, silly as it seems, and in years past was known to spend hours detailing my pickup. I've heard it explained that the American frontier and our vast dependence on the horse for so many generations, along with the lingering fantasy of the American West is what gave rise to the American love affair with the car - particularly among American men. Psychologists tell us this ultimately goes back to thousands of years of horsemanship and roaming.

There's this Boulder hippie who works down at Whole Foods - young guy - long ponytail, scruffy beard, skinny, vegetarian. He's about as green as a Boulderite can get. And he drives a jacked-up, beat-up old white Jeep Wrangler with black flames down the side, and the thing's nearly as old as I am. It totally doesn't fit his image. "It's the only thing I do that's not 'green,'" he'll tell you. "But it's my horse. I love it. I gotta have it." His comment strikes a chord.

I suppose all of this is on the forefront of my mind because of all the time I've been spending around horses lately. Just about everyone I know who rides or has ridden frequently has numerous stories of being bucked off and sustaining injury. I decided to do a little investigation. Turns out that horseback riding is many, many times more dangerous even than motorcycle riding, which itself is far more dangerous than driving a car or truck. We're talking orders of magnitude here. This of course led to looking at injury and death statistics for lots of activities, learning about fears generally held in modern society, and facing up to some of my own fears as well. For example, I'm not in the least afraid of spiders or snakes, though I do have a healthy respect for them. However I've always been irrationally terrified of a shark attack. I've never lived within 100 miles of the ocean (and maybe that, in part, explains my fear.) I don't think twice about jumping in my pickup and going anywhere at all, but put me out on a mountain above tree line and I can't stop obsessing over a lighting strike.

Yet the chances of me having a life-altering accident in an automobile are far, far, higher than being eaten by a shark or struck by lightning. In nearly every scrap of literature on riding horses, we're urged to wear not just helmets but protective vests due to the high rate of injury. In our society you're considered odd, to say the least, if you refuse to drive for fear of an accident, but it's nothing at all to be afraid of bugs or sharks or lightning. Why is this? I think it's familiarity. I suspect that over 100 years ago, few people feared riding a horse because riding is just what one did. It's how one got around, got work done, moved things. Likewise, despite the risk of car accident, few people today think twice about riding in one despite the risk.

And then of course there are those who believe that when you're time's up, it's up. Nothing else matters so why worry about anything.

So these have been my thoughts the last few days: horses and pickups, technology and tradition, cowboys and urbanites, life and death. Sometimes it seems like everything is so jumbled up. I'm not saying they were necessarily better, but the "old days" have a certain appeal to me if for no other reason than that life was pretty clearly defined. You're born, you get married and have kids, you work, then you die. Depending on your perspective, that may or may not sound appealing. The appealing part is you didn't have to worry about the millions of choices we have today. You don't worry about getting hurt on a horse, you just ride. You don't worry about finding the perfect career or the perfect life-partner or living in the perfect place; you do what you can, you love who you're with, and you live where you are. More than likely that meant you did what your father did for work, you married the girl next door for better or worse, and you lived your whole life within a few miles of where you were born. Again it's not the formula that's necessarily appealing, but the simplicity behind it that's appealing. I honestly wonder if kids today aren't so screwed up because they're plagued by choices. They have so many options they don't know what to do, and end up not doing much of anything constructive. In my own experience, graduating from high school was like stepping in the center of a giant labyrinth with a thousand doors all going to places unknown. At first it seems like a wonderful thing: endless possibility. But you soon realize it's got a dark side. You can't go through all the doors and you can't see how any of them end. Does having more options really bring more happiness? Numerous studies have shown that pre-arranged marriages produce couples that are far happier than our system produces. That's evident from the divorce rate and the proliferation of online dating and social networking. As for me, I became obsessive about which road to take after high school. What might I miss or suffer by choosing one instead of another? How far do I go down one road before I turn back and try another if this one isn't doing it for me? Had I been born over 100 years ago there might have been only two or three doors, tops. At least I'd have (or I think I'd have) the satisfaction - the peace of mind - of knowing this was my life's path, that I didn't make any mistakes because there were no other options.

Or maybe I'm just perpetually wondering "what if" and romanticizing things I don't really understand. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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.

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?