Watching the clouds drift in, and I watch them drift away again. (With apologies, or at least a nod, to Otis Redding.)
A Downy Woodpecker arrived, stopping to check a fence post for bugs, prompting a pair of House Sparrows to break away from the feeder to assume guard positions at the bird house mounted at the top of the post. Unsatisfied, the Downy moved away, and tried to rustle up some grub from nearby tomato stakes.
The national network news reported a young women shot and killed July 1 on a San Francisco pier. She was reportedly out for a stroll with her dad and a family friend.
The shooter, police said, was a Mexican citizen, deported from this country five times. From news reports, the crimes that resulted in his previous deportations were possession of marijuana and being here without permission. He was free to walk the streets last week because, though he had been charged with possession of $20 worth of marijuana, he had been released to await further court action. San Francisco is a so-called “sanctuary city” with laws prohibiting turning illegal aliens over to federal immigration authorities upon their release from prison resulting from non-violent charges.
The aircraft took off from Nagoya, Japan, Sunday on a planned 120-hour flight to Hawaii. Clearly, it is not out for a speed record; it was cruising at a ground speed of about 10 miles an hour when I watched it online.
In 2010, the craft flew a then-record breaking 26 consecutive hours. When it landed, it reportedly had enough battery left for another six hours in the air. Only five years later, the flight from Japan to Hawaii is scheduled for nearly five times as long. The goal is a 13-segment flight around the world – a seemingly easy feat for nearly any four-motored aircraft – except this one is powered by the sun.
Solar panels on the wings and fuselage charge the batteries during the day, while the airplane climbs as high as 30,000 feet. Then during the night, it runs the battery-powered motors in a long, slow, descent. Along the way, pilot and CEO André Borschberg snatches 20-minute naps.
I‘m a bit mixed about banning speech, but I lean mostly toward don’t do it. Sure, there are things I wish people wouldn’t say, but banning speech really doesn’t accomplish anything, other than to drive the sentiments underground.[pullquote]“Those pictures were not selfies. Someone took those pictures.” – NPR reporter Gwen Ifill [/pullquote]
We all learn to disguise what we think other people do not want to hear us say. I used to visit a certain home and listen to “goldurn” this and “goshdarn” that. Did they really think the god they claimed was all seeing didn’t get that they’d merely disguised the word they really meant.
It was a dark and stormy night.
The day had started the way a nice motorcycling day should start, sunny but not too much heat. My then 13-year-old son and I had spent two nights at Locust Lake State Park, near Mahanoy City, Pa. The stop had given us a tour of a coal breaker plant. LJ came away with a small bag of samples, one piece for every size the plant broke and sorted: stove, nut, pea, barley, and buckwheat, in order of size. I think.[pullquote]“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“That’s it,” I said.[/pullquote]
We ate at a diner on Main Street, populated mostly by old men who enthralled my eldest offspring with stories of the glory days of anthracite coal. It was they who told us of the Blaschak coal breaker at west end of town.
Continue reading Anthracite black blankets and rustling leaves
Gettysburg, in west-central Adams County, Pa. takes pride in being “the most famous small town in the world.” It is slightly more than one and-a-half square miles, and has 16 traffic lights within its boundary.[pullquote]“Then she looked up.
At the green light.”[/pullquote]
There are a few more traffic lights in the county, most to the east of the borough, a couple to the north – but none to the west (not counting the light on U.S.30 northwest of the borough. That is about to change. A traffic light is planned for installation in Hamiltonban Township, barely across the town line at the west edge of the tiny borough of Fairfield.
Continue reading First stop light in (that part of) the county
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. That line has rolled around in my ear for days, though my calendar is nearing summer and Robert Frost wrote “Snowy Evening” about a woods filling with snow.
[pullquote]the floor is carpeted with last year’s leaves and this year’s ferns[/pullquote]Butterflies, small ones, like miniature Emperor Moths only drab-hued, flitter around clover blossoms. Higher in the trees, a flicker of yellow catches my eye, and is gone. I would like to believe it was a Monarch, because they are becoming scarce, but I didn’t see it well enough.
Closer in, and on or near the ground, several Red Spotted purple butterflies, so called because they are purple, mostly, with red spots among white accent marks, search the duff for goodies. They seem afraid of heights; I rarely see them higher than a few feet. Mostly, they seem to favor the edges of dirt roads and, at the lake, open pebbly beach areas with tall-grass surrounds. Continue reading Fantasyland just down the road
One of the many things I’ve learned is a truly good wandering companion cannot be bought. I have tried, and none have worked out. On he other hand, there have been three …
I met Dutch at a friend’s house on Adak, an island about halfway out the Aleutian Islands chain. One day, Dutch – a Yellow Lab and Irish Setter mix – wanted to go home with me. It turned out my friend was leaving the island, and Dutch could not accompany him.
The situation repeated two years later, when it was my turn to depart, but in those 24 months, Dutch and I were nearly inseparable. We wandered the tundra, and when I would go to the store he waited outside – allowing passers-by to stop and pet him, but never leaving his place by the door.
I, and my faithful companion Grady the Golden, wander along our favorite stream, among the vestiges of the Spring Transition.
Water gurgles and splashes over stones and boulders into a pool where a pair of Mallards paddle lazily. In a few weeks, they will be leading a brood of youngsters.[pullquote]… an owl hoo-hoo-hoooos. I flatter myself to think he’s laughing at me …[/pullquote]
Around another curve, a sextet of Canada geese hurry away. They are shy, sort of, like a group of prima donnas that want to be seen, but not looked at – and certainly not photographed.
As regular readers know, I am a strong proponent of wandering. A friend and I moseyed down to the nation’s capital Sunday, for the purpose of wandering around the National Cathedral. I love to people-watch, and am especially mindful of the contrasts among our fellow inhabitants.
[pullquote]“… a 40-month-old is entitled; a 40-year-old, not so much.”[/pullquote]Walking toward the church, we passed a sidewalk café. All the tables were full; one particularly close to the surrounding fence featured a couple adult women and several youngsters. On the ground near one kid’s seat but shoved under the fence separating pedestrians from diners, was a kids toy.
When I was a lad, my bicycle was my best friend. On it, I traveled all over the county, and probably into parts of a couple others. There were, indeed, some hills to climb on the old one-speed Western Flyer bicycle, but coasting down them – especially the mile-long 400-foot drop into town – was absolutely exhilarating.
[pullquote]“(Today’s) children probably won’t live as long as our generation.” – Tom Jolin[/pullquote]A Saturday ride might be a 50-mile loop to Kingfield and Eustis, along the Carrabassett River and other places that, in retrospect, sound almost exotic. In my ’tween-hood, they were simply along the way, sure to include a stop at Mr. Richards’ Shell station for a Mars bar, or Proberts’ store for a tube of Necco candy wafers and a Nehi soda, respectively, the latter pulled from the depths of a red Coke cooler filled with water and melting ice.
Continue reading Bike trails make “getting out” safer, more fun
Granddaughter Kass has a school project involving me supplying pictures from experiences of my younger self. One image she chose was my first wife and a 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon.
[pullquote]His test, his rules. My second try was a success.[/pullquote]That station wagon was pretty terrific. It had a three-on-the-tree shifter, and ran fine if one didn’t count that it burned more oil than gasoline. We and that car went places, many of which were night runs to the Ponte Vedra dunes south of Jacksonville Beach – before people with money bought up the land and erected Don’t Even Think About Walking On Our Sand signs.
The ice is gone from my favorite paddling pond. There’s a saying from somewhere in my past that 75 percent of Earth is covered with water. Clearly, the saying goes, God intended for man to spend thrice the time fishing as working. It’s probably closer to 70 percent, but the point is well made.
About 97 percent of the planet’s water is ocean saltwater. Of the three percent that is freshwater, nearly three-quarters is trapped in polar ice and glaciers, leaving about two percent drinkable.
Continue reading Water, water, everywhere (with limited drinkability)
Fishing season opened this weekend past. I did not go, for several reasons unnecessary to list here, but the day did pull out images of fishing seasons of my youth.
Being a boy with little patience for sitting still for long hours, I spent most of my fishing time alone with a homemade spooning rig or a spinning rod and reel set and store-bought lures. Dad, was more into dragging a two-inch piece of silver metal wrapped partially around a strip of mother-of-pearl.
He would go out for hours, trolling – the 5.5 hp Chris Craft Challenger outboard barely ticking over, keeping the boat moving just fast enough to steer as he navigated the triangular circuit, from our house to a curve in the far southern shore, to the island at the north end of the lake and back nearly home.
Part of Granddaughter Kass’s assignment for her World War Two class was I had to write a short memoir about an experience from my Navy career. (Remind me sometime to explain how MY assignment for HER class …)
It is sometimes difficult to sort the dissonance of which my Navy career memories are woven – separating the fun I had traveling the world from the events that made such travels possible. Without war, I likely would not have seen Hong Kong or Japan or the beaches of Nice and Torremolinos … or Bangkok or U-Tapao, Thailand.
Or “A Mini-road-trip through the forest near home”
Cabin Fever is that ailment that forces one, eventually, to either leave the house or kill everyone too slow to escape. I opted for the former.
“Where are you going?” She Who Must Be Loved queried.
“Up on the mountain,” I replied.
It’s not much of a mountain, compared to some I’ve hiked or driven on, but it’s reasonably close to home, and not unenjoyably populated. Time being a little short, I drove, stopping a few times to get out and look closer at various eye-catchers.
In the opening sentence of a letter ostensibly to the leaders of the Iranian government, nearly half the members of the U.S. Senate declared that those leaders “may not fully understand our constitutional system.”
Why do we keep thinking people who aren’t us are, if not stupid, at least ignorant? I’m guessing the leaders of any nation which can produce poets and playwrights, jet fighter pilots, and maybe even nuclear weapons, likely is aware of the governmental machinations of their competition on the world stage.
If you wear jeans, you wear water. It takes 2,000 gallons of water to make that pair of denim waist-to-ankle coverings, and another 650 gallons for the T-shirt to top the ensemble.
Growing, processing and shipping the coffee from a mountain producer to the cup you held while deciding which T-shirt and jeans to wear used another 37 gallons of water. The medium burger and fries you may have for lunch adds another 673 gallons, most of it expended in watering the growing beef and potatoes, then processing the harvest into food you can grab onto.
Continue reading Water, water, every-wear, not counting what we drink
Driving the Interstate is like flying in a jet liner. There’s a whole world racing past your window, patterns and big green signs with white reflective lettering hinting at places we would like to stop – sometime.[pullquote]… our attention was arrested by a giant cast iron gas pump, about four times taller than I.[/pullquote]
May it please the court, we offer Exhibit A: a road trip I took last Thursday with a fellow photographer.
We drove out to Greensburg, where we had business to perform, on I-76, cruise control set on “Quick,” legal libations close at hand.
“We are going to have to stop there sometime,” one of us said as we blurred by St. John the Baptist church, at the top of a staircase leading from beside the turnpike in New Baltimore.
Continue reading Leaving the jet planes and Interstates behind
The evening news begins nearly every night with some version of, “Forty million people will be affected by the weather tonight.” Unless another Malaysian Air flight disappears, our TV screens will be filled with 8 feet of snow in Boston, and 18-wheelers piled up on Midwestern interstate highways.
Of course, news casters, not to be accused of unqualified hyperbole, usually note the effect will be limited to residents of Illinois through Massachusetts. If they’d include folks in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and maybe Virginia and West Virginia, they could get those numbers up. Even Texas has had snow this year – which is odd since part of the state was wondering as Fall approached whether they would have water at all.