A Spring/Summer Travel Saga, Highly Condensed

Lately I've been so distracted by life that I've felt little like chronicling it beyond a scribble or two a week in my reading journal. So the Farm has been evolving into a quarterly effort to get things down for family, friends, and passers-by who might find any of it interesting. It also reminds me to go through the Blogger list of my subscriptions to see what I've missed (since my subs go to the seldom-visited owlfarmer gmail address, rather than my eponymous version). So I'll be spending some of this sweaty afternoon checking back with folks who probably think I've fallen off the planet since my last post.

Our trip west in May was interrupted by an apparent electrical glitch in Porco Rosso, our travel trailer, which gets lassoed into use every year or to to visit the Owens River Valley and points in between here and there. This year's impetus was a family get-together to bury my step-mother's ashes next to my father's in the family plot. She lived a good life, and was nearly 94, so the occasion was celebratory rather than funereal. I got to see a cousin I hadn't seen in about thirty years, and all of my living siblings--and even, in a way, my late brother, who is also buried in the plot, and for whom we had a similar gathering in 2019.

Palo Duro Canyon from the park store overlook.

Resident burro at Homolovi

Deer behind our campsite at Santa Rosa State Park

The trip out began well, with a two-day stay in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, near Amarillo. Because of recent rains, most of the trails were closed, so we've already vowed to return. But the park itself is gorgeous, the campsites pleasant, and has popped up to the top of our Texas state park list. We stayed for a night at Santa Rosa State Park in New Mexico before moving on to Homolovi State Park in Arizona for two nights--which turned into three because we liked it so much--even though Molly decided to go walkabout in the middle of the first night (squeezing out when TBS went out to check on a flapping noise) and scared us half to death. As is her wont, however, she didn't go far and was easily located. 

Some of the amazing variety of ceramic
remnants at Homolovi I and II

Our goal was to avoid RV parks in favor of state parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and dispersed spots on BLM land, but we also wanted to revisit a segment of Route 66 (where we stayed at a campy tourist spot near Seligman, Arizona) and a favorite RV camp in Lone Pine for the two days set aside for family time.

On the day before we were to de-camp and head for our favorite boondocking site in the Valley, however, our freezer and fridge conked out and we had to ditch plans to head north and then eastward into Nevada to visit old family stomping grounds there. We had wanted to visit the Big Smoky Valley, where my great grandfather ran a stagecoach business in the late nineteenth century, and where my grandmother was born and lived before the family moved across the border to California. But this leg of the trip had to be abandoned because we were relying heavily on the stuff stored in the fridge and freezer. Porco has recently been kitted up with electrical appliances, battery backup, and solar capability--which wasn't much help with defunct cold storeage. Winds had also become a problem (again!), so we just gave up and headed southeast and back to Texas via Death Valley. Further adventures included flat tires caused by bad rims on our new Porco tires, and a night in a sleazy Vegas RV dive, further unwanted stays at questionable locations chosen only because they facilitated our quick trip back to Texas. We spent the last night in a Safety Rest Area near Hedley, which we can recommend because 1) it's free and 2) located in a rather lovely area along the road out of the Panhandle. 

By then, of course, the fridge had somehow reset itself and made that part of the problem go away. But without our half-hour stay at the Discount Tire in Vegas, though, we'd undoubtedly have been stranded in the desert somewhere near Belmont, Nevada, population 38. We'll just have to make a more leisurely trip at the next opportunity, knowing what we now know about caravan refrigerator mechanics and tire rims.

The otherwise really cheesy RV park in Las Vegas
provided some interesting views sky-related subjects.

Well, I've spent so much time wrangling photos and trying to compress our short adventure that I'm out of steam, with more to tell. So I'll post this now and hope to get back to the non-travel-related events I intended to include. Perhaps trying to stuff life into too-small containers makes them even more difficult to narrate than simply trying to keep up with things as they happen. Meanwhile I'll take some time to look at what's going on in my particular blogosphere and enjoy what folks have been posting while I haven't been paying attention.

The Seventieth Solstice

There is something quite wonderful about being born on the winter solstice. Some of those born in December rue the fact, due to the proximity of Christmas and other holidays. My sister is especially unlucky in that regard because she was born on Christmas day, although, as a devout Christian, she probably doesn't mind. But for me, having arrived on "The darkest evening of the year" (as Robert Frost so memorably put it in "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening") has always seemed appropriate. I've long been interested in science in general, and in planetary sciences in particular, and the solstice is really what all the celebratory fuss is about anyway this time of year. In fact, according to an article in today's New York Times, were it not for the winter solstice, we probably wouldn't be here at all.

Five years ago, in 2012, I was happy to announce to my students (some of whom were alarmed by the promise of the end of days) that the only thing of any real importance happening on December 21 was my sixty-fifth birthday. The Maya did not, in fact, predict the end of the world on that day. Most cultures do celebrate the moment of "sun return" in some fashion, and others mold their calendars to include the moment, more or less. So the birth of Christ, for which there is no good information about an exact date, has traditionally been celebrated on the Roman date for the solstice, December 25.

The solstice marks the gradual return of longer days and shorter nights, leading up to the vernal equinox in March, the beginning of spring, and the path to the summer solstice. Daylight Savings Time, of course, throws a sabot into the machinery, but it's over before December, making the longer sunny minutes all the more important. I keep hoping that DST will go away eventually, as some states are trying to accomplish already, so we don't have the additional, artificial adjustment to make and can just go by seasonal changes.

My seventieth solstice celebration began last Saturday, when family gathered at my daughter's house. Her significant other shares the birthday with me, his fortieth, so we were joined by some of his family and my son, who flew in from Seattle. On Sunday, we all joined over sixty friends (including some of my favorite former students) at a local draft/movie house to watch The Last Jedi. My incomparable, amazing daughter had been planning this event for the past year, and it was quite a bash. Included in the group were the friend/colleague/teacher who inspired our interest in Continental philosophy, along with his travel writer/filmmaker wife and their astonishing daughter, and my oldest friend in the world (whom I hadn't seen in over fifty years) who happened to be making a road trip from the east and whose arrival coincided with the festivities. A smaller group congregated at our house later for more conversation and conviviality, providing a pleasant end to a memorable weekend.

The year has been a good one for some of my more distant friends, and my California family managed to escape the Lilac fire in Oceanside by living just outside the mandatory evacuation area, so despite our own lack of optimism about the state of the nation, things--as old Jews like me are fond of saying--could always be worse.

I should also mention that this solstice is made even more significant by the retirement from teaching of The Beloved Spouse. What optimism we can now gather is buoyed up by the fact that the current national lack of success in fostering education will not continue to rule our lives. The last twenty years have been more trying than rewarding, and we're now looking forward to doing what we haven't had the time or energy to do until now.

It thus seems fitting that Skywatch Friday occurs at just the right time to share a photo I took on December 21, 2014 on our last trip west, near Midland, Texas. There we spent our first night in our new "old" trailer, bought in anticipation of the retirement that is here at last.

So happy holidays, everyone; have a felicitous Sun Return.

Memorial Day Memories

Families have a variety of ways of acknowledging their dead, many of which involve rituals taught to the young and fondly remembered after the instructors themselves are gone. My grandmother--whose husband was a veteran of World War I, and whose eldest son (my father) served during three different conflicts (World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam)--firmly adhered to a Memorial Day tradition of gathering up all of the flowers blooming in the yard into a bucket and taking them up to the Big Pine Cemetery, where a large number of our forebears and their offspring now rest.

The old galvanized bucket was filled with lilacs, coreopsis, honeysuckle, Rose of Sharon, trumpet vine, and anything else that might be in bud or bloom around her little plot in my home town, where she lived after my grandfather died. While I lived with her and whenever I was visiting at the appropriate time, I'd tag along, and be told the stories associated with the different names and graves.  And although I seldom make it home for Memorial Day any more, I never return to the Owens River Valley without visiting those graves, which now include hers and my father's.

Nowadays, I gather flowers in her memory--although I try to keep the number low, because she preferred that blooms be left where they belong (except when being toted up to the cemetery). This year Mother Nature has given me a very large thistle plant, growing just off the lawn in front. I let it be until it began to blossom, picked one stem, and left the rest. But since they were likely to be lopped down by some overzealous "lawn boy" from next door, yesterday I cut them all for this year's bouquet--and have used a photo of them at the beginning of this post.

Like my grandmother, I try to let things grow where they want to, and am often rewarded for being patient with mystery plants. I encountered my first example of this flower not long after we moved here, and I've had them sporadically ever since. I'm hoping to save some seeds this time, and to plant a more permanent "crop," even though they're painfully prickly. But they're so strange and lovely that they look almost like cartoon flowers, or some sort of alien life. The Beloved Spouse thinks they look like Dr. Seuss flowers.  At any rate, they're rewarding, fragrant and long-lasting, and much prettier than the common thistles that grow along the margins of Texas highways. It doesn't really match any of the descriptions in the Lady Bird Johnson database, but I'll do some more research anon.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying another pleasant day (after several sticky, seasonably hot ones) and am ready to retire to the back quarter-acre with a glass of vinho verde to while away the early evening, remembering good stories and good people.

Looking Backward(ly)

One, almost palpable, aspect of growing older is the increasing amount of nostalgia that permeates one's view of the world at large.

As we grow older, and as change becomes a significant feature of the presentness of the world we inhabit, we begin to remember the past almost as a physical space: houses, landscapes, objects, people. Historians and archaeologists probably suffer more than most, because we "remember" not only our own pasts, but those of others. Whether or not we bathe our visions in some kind of gauzy, golden light, masking difficulties, injustices, or even horrors, we nevertheless tend to paint our ideas of the future with the palette of the past.

Several recent events and observations have brought all of this to mind, the most recent of which is the Academy Awards ceremony (with its focus on early cinema), coupled with Pat Buchanan's departure from MSNBC.

Mind you, I've never thought much of Buchanan's picture of the world which, as Brian Stelter mentions in today's New York Times, is firmly rooted in the idyllic Ozzie and Harriet past that coincides with my own childhood in the fifties. But while my childhood was populated by multi-racial people and multi-cultural life, Buchanan's was white, straight, Catholic, and (in his mind, at least) hewed to those fine Republican values inherited from our Founding Fathers. In my case, although both of my grandmothers and one of my grandfathers were of Canadian extraction, immigration wasn't really part of our background; both my father's and mother's families had been in North America since the Revolutionary War. I'm not sure how long Buchanan's people had been in this country, but like many of his fellow (Tea Party) Americans, he seems to think that early immigrations from Europe were somehow different from those occurring now.

Buchanan's beliefs and politics were informed by Catholicism as practiced in America the Beautiful, while mine were informed by Catholicism practiced in Japan and Taiwan, preached by priests from Italy and China, and were severely tested by Vatican II. By 1963 I had left the Church, primarily because it had rejected many of the traditions it had accrued through time (Latin masses, smells and bells) and that had kept me "faithful" for as long as I was. Having not grown up in suburban America, however, I never did form an attachment to its mythical elements. Not being exposed much to television probably helped.

I try to be a realist, and to ground my hopes for the future in a clear sense of what has actually happened rather than some imaginary Golden Age. In doing so, I am constantly reminded of the criticism directed at William Morris's Medievalist socialism. Whenever I mention his work (at least when the immediate response isn't "Oh, yeah, the wallpaper guy"), the comments that follow usually point out that the Middle Ages he so admired had been radically depopulated by plague, and, besides, who would want to live that way, anyway? And post-apocalyptic films and fiction play on the notion that "Medieval" equals "Stone Age." Get rid of what we have now, the novels all suggest, and we'll be wandering down interminable roads, eating one another, living in squalor, and/or we'll become victims of one or another rampantly repressive ideology. (Update, October 24: a terrific new example is the television series, Revolution.)

All of the above will, according to the Buchananesque prognosis, be caused by lowered birthrates among the middle class (due to the use of abortion as birth control), increasing immigration from third-world countries, rising diversity in the armed forces (gays, women, folk of color), godless humanists, and all manner of plagues and diseases brought on by our increasingly wanton ways. Liberals in general, and Barack Obama in particular, are "destroying America," as I've heard over and over again from participants in the Republican caucuses As Seen On TV. What can only follow is the end of Western Civilization, or at least of American Exceptionalism, as we know it.

Of course, I'm not at all convinced that this is a bad thing. A smaller, multi-racial, more culturally diverse populace might well lead to innovative solutions to economic and social problems. If the self-described Conservatives want smaller government, the only way we can accomplish it is to decrease our population. If we want to increase self-reliance, we need to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, foodstuffs, and technology from foreign sources, and re-learn how to make many of the products we now buy from others, such as textiles.

Pat Buchanan's idyllic mid-century America was only half the size of the current one. Women were only just beginning to acquire the ability to pursue careers other than child-rearing, and Blacks were still being seated at the back of the bus. We were involved in or heading into an interminable series of conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Iraq and Afghanistan), and barely averted World War III more than once in subsequent years. Divorces were rarer (although not in my family), but perhaps only because they were harder to get. Infant mortality has declined significantly since 1950, but minority children die at a much higher rate than whites, and the overall rate in the US is rather embarrassingly higher than for any other developed country. The effects on BabyBoomers' lives may not have been as devastating as the Black Death, but neither are they all that laudable.

If nostalgia is, at best, an ambiguous condition, I'm not sure that future generations will be affected by it much at all. As I struggle to reach new crops of students by instilling an interest in the past and what it can teach us, I find myself swimming in a rip-current of apathy, if not antipathy. Fewer and fewer of my pupils consider the past as particularly valuable; instead, they wonder what it has to do with them, now. "How is this information going to help me in my career?" they ask. The question is genuine rather than churlish. They really do want to know what utility I can offer, but I'm never sure how to answer them. The old saws about how general education will make them better people, or how knowing the past will help them avoid making the same mistakes don't hold much truck with a group hell-bent on fame and fortune in the game or fashion industries. The best I can offer is that the past, especially in the visual arts, represents a gold mine of ideas and images. At least as long as you cite your finds properly.

From an archaeological perspective, the present is the surface, under which lie immeasurable treasures. Education provides only what amounts to a surface collection of odds and ends that indicate what one might find underneath. The more practical contribution schooling makes to our future lives is to provide us--if we're fortunate to have decent teachers--with the tools we need to excavate the past, connect the ideas and objects we locate there with our contemporary needs and desires, and interpret them carefully and fairly. My parents and grandparents told me stories about my ancestors that made me want to know more about "the olden days." But they also insisted on telling me how hard it had been, and ultimately how unfair things were for others who didn't fare as well as we had.

If real knowledge and wisdom don't somehow emerge from the massive piles of information being heaped on this generation, in their future nostalgia might simply become a dismal undertaking, rather than a potentially rewarding exercise in plumbing memory. Rather than longing for imagined, distant glory, we should be showing our kids how to reflect critically on what they remember in order to faithfully craft the stories they tell their own children.

Note: This essay has concurrently been posted on Owl's Farm.

Image credit: In truth, I don't know where I got this; it was just in my archives for use in class. But the image is a bas relief designed by Philip Webb and executed by George Jack on a cottage in Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. I think the relief was commissioned by Jane Morris, in memory of her husband, and certainly captures his pensive demeanor. I have a copy of it at my desk at school.

Eleven

It's been nearly a month since my last post; things have been absurdly busy, confusing, and difficult to juggle, and I just haven't had the steam to even think about writing. But today is Veterans' Day, and I've been thinking of my father and other kin who've fought in wars or supported personnel who did. My daughter e-mailed me earlier today asking if I had any photos of her grandpa Tom in uniform, so I thought a post would present an opportunity to share my favorite. The above image was probably shot during or shortly after WWII, when Daddy was still in the Army Air Corps (at least that's what the wings indicate). What a handsome kid he was!

As I've undoubtedly mentioned many times on the Farm, my family's military roots run deep. Somewhere I have a letter from the Civil War, and there were Revolutionary War veterans on my Mother's side. Both of my grandfathers were involved in WWI, and I received a La Verne Noyes college scholarship on account my being a direct descendent of a veteran of that war. My father's war career spanned WWII, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War. My brother fought in Vietnam as well. One of my mother's cousins was killed on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and my nephew was stationed on the USS Ronald Reagan in the Persian Gulf. The connections spread through three branches of the service and through three centuries of conflicts.

Although war is one human activity I would be glad to see end in my lifetime, I regretfully doubt if anyone ever will. Utopian dreams frequently envision its absence, but that single condition is what makes the word "utopian" synonymous with "dream" (or even "fantasy") in many minds.

But there is one positive aspect: even as it brings out the worst in some, it also stirs others to the most valiant of actions and the most selfless of acts. It enables men and women to embody the notion of honor in ways that no other endeavor allows, whether its causes are just, reasonable, or even sensible--or not.

I wish that whoever reads this post would spent a few moments today honoring the memory of those we have lost to war, those who have endured it on our behalf (including many of my students), and those who continue to serve. Were I able to hold only one hope for the rest of my life, it would be that at some point in a future not too distant, their service would no longer be required.

New Perspectives on Community

One of the “moments” that led me down philosophical paths in my youth was a course at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, called “Philosophical Perspectives.” I was at the time great with child and looking for something to distract me from the upcoming event. The course prospectus said something about reading Plato and Aristotle, so I signed up. As it turned out, however, the particular perspective being explored that semester was community—in its many forms, as manifested in recent history. No Plato or Aristotle, but we would be reading Martin Buber (among others, including some contemporary thinkers whose names I’ve since forgotten), whose I and Thou I had read at UC Riverside as a sophomore in college. His Paths in Utopia was on the reading list, and the study questions the instructor (whose name I do remember, Pat Hill, now at Evergreen State) posed were thoughtful, and guided the reading carefully toward helping us understand the communitarian impulse that led to the idea of the kibbutz in Israel.

Now, what exactly (you might wonder) does this have to do with silly-ass pictures of Star Trek phasers? Funny you should ask. Several events this week got me to thinking about what binds people together in the modern world. One precipitated the photo I’ve used to introduce the post; the other has to do with family and friends.

A new colleague of mine, who teaches oral communication, is a particularly welcome addition to our little “family” of general studies instructors. We all share very tight quarters (proprietary schools, by nature, are far more interested in profits than they are in making their faculties comfortable), and it’s always nice to have amiable people around, especially those who share one’s interests. So I now have a fellow Star Trek fan (although he’s much more of a fan even than I) to work with, and when he noticed my toy “phaser” on my bookcase, he confessed to having a few of his own. So last week, for grins, we decided to mount an exhibition, and he brought in what turned out to be a collection of just about every version of the “phaser” used on every Star Trek iteration up to Enterprise. We had a considerable amount of fun doing this, and were only a little embarrassed by our obvious geekdom.

But we also had a few conversations about fan conventions, the folks who attend them, and the nature of “fandom” itself. Since I participate in a fan forum associated with the short-lived television series Firefly and the feature film Serenity, it occurred to me that these particular affiliations provide a sort of postmodern community, bringing together people who may have little in common but their particular fandom, but who go on to discover other commonalities and to forge bonds that transcend the original point of contact. “My” forum, for example, hosts a number of sub-forums for people interested in everything from booze to Jane Austen. I belong to one composed of like-minded folk interested in the fate of the world and in civil conversation (not always available on the main forum), and we’ve managed to become a fairly tightly knit little group that cares about one another and what’s going on in each of our lives. We’re scattered all over the world (Britain, Australia, Canada, all over the US), but we’ve grown close enough over the last three or so years that some of us now contact one another outside of the forum, and meet up when the occasion arises.

What really prompted this post, however, was my daughter’s emergency appendectomy Thursday night. A series of unfortunate events (exacerbated by my reluctance to own a cellular telephone) found me sitting in the outpatient surgery waiting room with a group of my daughter’s friends during her operation (modern surgical techniques make it possible to remove an appendix in about an hour, using a laparoscope and only three incisions). Nobody was particularly anxious, and conversation centered primarily on whether to vote for Hillary or Barack in the upcoming Texas primary. While we waited, another friend walked in with a card, and several called one or another of the four people in the waiting room, enquiring about my daughter’s progress. When she was wheeled out of Recovery on the way to her room (to be kept overnight), we all trooped after her and waited in the hallway until she was tucked into bed, and then we all crowded into the little room, surrounding her with an almost palpable wall of affection. The Recovery nurse remarked to her that she had more people in the waiting room for her appendectomy than most people do when they have a baby.

The gang of friends was, in fact, mostly from work (a large homebuilding conglomerate), and the friendships had been forged over a number of years. In addition, she raises funds for the Leukemia Lymphoma society by riding her bicycle long distances (for information on how to support her Tahoe Century ride, go to her Team in Training fund-raising website), and many of her work-mates are affiliated with the same group. These people have supported one another through all manner of celebrations and traumas, and it was exhilarating to realize that such communities can still flourish in this plugged-in, fast-paced, world in which people seem so completely isolated at times that the connections are difficult to see.

But the connections are there. New communities are made up of people who—despite the so-called breakdown of the nuclear family—have forged new families, tied together not by blood, but by genuine affection and friendship, and by their concern for big issues like curing cancer, electing a decent president, and small issues like favorite television shows. It’s not exactly utopia, but after this week I’m slightly more sanguine about the future than I had been.

Not a bad start to a new year.