Beach Walk on Rainy, Cloudy, Rainy, Briefly Sunny Anchorage Day

Had a morning meeting at Kincaid Kaladi Brothers.  Healing Racism in Anchorage is finally ready to come out of hibernation.  (That means the three of us who have been waiting for a time when we were surfacing from deep commitment dives are all now back on the surface and ready to reach our for more members to make this a working organization again.)

Clouds were threatening and so I didn't ride my bike, like yesterday when I got soaked (enjoyably) coming home from another meeting.  And since I was close, I drove to Kincaid Chalet and walked down the path through the gnarly birch trees and and the yellow devils club.  (Not a typical Anchorage landscape.)





Then off the paved path, along a dirt path and finally to a path down to Anchorage's main salt water beach.

Looking south.

Looking north.

Lots of great garden rocks, but no way to get them back to the garden.  

And a good patch of mostly sand

Here's looking out to the lowering tide and the water.  Fire Island is in the distance on the right.  The resolution on this picture is too low to see the windmills on the island, the only sign of humans (other than the footprints) as you walk along here.

Come mid September and one is reminded to get out into the natural wonders all around here beyond the bike trails in town.  This beach is still in town, and I need to overcome my anti-driving bias and get out of town while the weather is still relatively warm and the roads ice-free.  

Why I Live Here - A Little Nature Break

Had some errands to run, but that also gave me the opportunity to take in some looking nature spots.  So just let yourself slide into the picture for a moment to slow down your heart beat.

University Lake.

The creek that goes by the dorms at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

It makes sense to me why Anchorage homeless would rather be out here than in some institutional storage room for people.  Now if they could police those who trash the place and/or use it as a base for petty theft, everyone would be happy.  Maybe.  I'm taking an OLÉ class starting in October on Homeless Issues, so maybe I'll understand this better.

Iguazu From The Other Side - Never Saw So Much Crashing Water

Yesterday’s visit to the Brazilian side of the Iguazu set of waterfalls, left me wondering how the Argentine side could possibly match it.

Well, today I found out.  As our guide yesterday said, both sides are different.  From the Brazil side you have a better overall panorama of the the 2.7-kilometre-long (1.7 mi) long wall of waterfalls and you see them more or less from below.  But the Argentine side has a lot more trail (we walked about 3 kilometers yesterday, and today on the Argentine side, about 9), and you see a lot of the waterfalls close up, from above and below.  Small waterfalls here, would be big attractions all by themselves elsewhere.  Here they are just one more jaw-drop in an incredible day of far off and close up views of water thundering down vertical walls from great heights. 

The spray at points is strong enough to create a booming business in plastic raincoats and cell phone holders.  

Sorting through all the pictures I took and resizing them for posting is proving too time consuming on my iPad than I can manage.  Maybe I’ll put more up later when I’ve got my Macbook.  I’ll just put up a few picture here today.  

But I’ll also point out that the falling water, well crashing water might be more accurate, is just the most obvious and wondrous sight here.  But then there are the animals - mammals, birds, insects - and the flora.  And the people coming to see all this.  Mostly I heard Spanish and Portuguese.  Relatively little English or other languages.  So here are a few attempts to convey this massive water movement.       

I’d also add that both the Brazilians and Argentines have done a  spectacular job of constructing trails that allow visitors to get up really close from different angles.

Above is looking down from the top of Galante de Diablo - the biggest of the falls, and the one you see closest from below on the Brazilian side.  
 


And here I am on top, right in the middle of things.  This is where people (who had them) wore their raincoats.  As you can see, my camera filter was all wet.  The no ise is constant.

And then getting back a bit so you can see how massive this all is.


And below is part of the miles of metal boardwalk that take you so close to the water.  The cloud is just mist rising up from one of the many falls.

I mentioned above how ‘small’ falls here would be a big deal elsewhere.  I got that notion looking at the two falls on the lower left.  They’re actually pretty big.  But next to the massive fall to their right, they’re nothing.  But they are each stunning.

But let’s pull back a little more and put it into perspective.  (The really big one is San Martin Falto - falls)

And you just kept being hit with views like this all day long.  Enough.  We’re going birding tomorrow morning early.

Iguazu! Amazing Waterfall Experience

We’re in northeast Argentina, where it borders with Paraguay and Brazil.  In fact yesterday we went to the Brazilian national park to see the incredible Iguazu waterfall from there.  (Fortunately for us, the requirement for US citizens to have visas to enter Brazil ended June 17 this year, otherwise we wouldn’t have had time to get one.)

There’s little I can say about this experience.  It was amazing.  The power of the falls is amazing.  Amazing, amazing, amazing.  The pictures don’t do it justice.  Actually, they are pretty bad.  I took so many and it’s hard to find the best using the iPad tools that I’ve figured out so far.  When I get back to my old computer I might replace these.

  

For all the years that I’ve joked about there being an elevator at the end of a hike, well this time there was.

Today we view the falls from the Argentine side.

A little more from Wikipedia:

The area surrounding Iguazu Falls was inhabited 10,000 years ago by the hunter-gatherers of the Eldoradense culture. They were displaced around 1000 C.E. by the Guaraní, who brought new agricultural technologies, and were displaced in turn by the  Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores in the sixteenth century.
The first European to discover the Falls was the Spanish Conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in 1541, after whom one of the falls on the Argentine side is named. Jesuit missions followed in 1609.
A Brazilian army officer, Edmundo de Barros, proposed the creation of a national park near the Falls in 1897. As the Falls form a part of the border between Brazil and Argentina, once those boundaries were clearly defined, two separate national parks were established, one in each nation. Iguazú National Park in Argentina was established in 1934 and Iguaçu National Park of Brazil was established in 1939.
The great power of the Falls was not utilized until the construction of the huge Itaipu Dam, built jointly by Paraguay and Brazil, which was completed in 1991. The dam, touted as a masterpiece of technology, is one of the largest in the world, providing nearly forty percent of the power to Brazil and Argentina. 

The map comes from Lonely Planet  and You can see Iguazu in the upper right hand corner of Argentina.

"Faith is the most peculiar thing." Thoughts On Finishing Niall Williams' History of the Rain,

The first part of this post is really for people who have read the book.  Not because it gives

anything away, but because it's my attempt to distill the themes of the book, without really offering examples that might be a little more interesting  to someone who hasn't lived through the history of Virgil Swain and Mary McCarroll.  (Well, in the end,  I couldn't do it without a couple of examples.)


History of the Rain by Niall Williams is about the rain, the river, and the sea - and the water that moves from one to the other to keep the cycle going.  It's about the salmon that live in the river and the sea and return.  It's about fathers.  Fathers and sons and fathers and daughters and how, to know oneself,  one needs to know who your fathers (and to a lesser extent) mothers and grandparents were.  This, of course, overlaps the theme of rain, river, and sea being all of the same water.   Your identity is like the water in the rain that goes into the rivers, that flow into the sea, and then returns back as rain.  The whole of part one, chapter 12:

"Your blood is a river." (p. 99)

Mothers aren't ignored in this novel, and Williams acknowledges their contribution to one's identity, but in Ruth Swain's (the narrator) family, the women do the practical work of keeping things together - getting money, getting food on the table, nurturing poets.   Whole chapters are devoted to the paternal great grandfather, grandfather, and particularly the father of the narrator.  The maternal antecedents get much less attention.   Chapter 13, on page 100, a third of the way into the book,  begins, for instance,

"The drizzling dawn of my father's fourteenth birthday.  Abraham appeared in the big droughty bedroom and shook his son awake."  (p. 100)

Propitiously, he takes him to the river to go salmon fishing.  But it's not until the beginning of Chapter 14, that we learn

"When my father told it, they caught a salmon that day.
I think it is an imagined one, but I didn't say so.
From the look on y face he could tell.  'O Ruthie, you don't believe anything,' he said and crumpled his face to a small boy's dismay.
I do, Dad.  I do.  I believe everything." (p. 103)

Yet the mother's side doesn't start until part 2 chapter 1.  While it goes further back, there's much less detail on the immediate antecedents than on the father's side.

"By the year 520 Tommy says there were 9,046 Partholonians in Ireland.  Then in one week in May a horde of midges came, brought a plague and wiped them all out.
Except for one.
Tuan MacCarrill survived by becoming a salmon.
Fact.  It's in the History of Ireland." (p. 159)

If you remember Ruth's mother's name from up top - Mary McCarroll - it makes a little more sense.  And this apparently is part of Irish myth/history.  If you didn't remember her name, you're like me.  I had to start the book over again after I finished to catch the early parts where people and places were referenced that I had no context for. But which the book eventually fills in.

The book is about community - specifically the town of Faha,  Clare County, Ireland.  It's about how the people care for each other like family - not always getting along, but being there when needed.  A thought occurred - I will have to pay careful attention to see if it's accurate - that most books are about the people who leave, who go away and strike out on their own in new places.  This book is about the people who stay behind in the waterlogged town along the river Shannon.

The modern world of capitalism is kept at bay in the cities.  We hear about the impacts of the Irish bank failures, but in Faha the father can be a poet with no income and be respected for that.

It's about stories.  Stories are to families what the water is to the river.   The meaning in people's lives come from the stories  of their parents and grandparents  - about truths, what people remember, not necessarily what actually was.  About poetry and novels, about books and their writers and readers.  The same pattern here among the books one has read and their affect on what one writes, as the rain and river and sea, and grandparents and parents and oneself.

It's about knowing  - science, stories, faith, religion, God, literature, nature.   It's about fate and one's ability to shape one's own life.

It draws no clear lines, there are no winners and losers.  Everyone shines at some point and suffers at others.

It slowly tells us about the minute details that cumulatively make up one's life.  It reminds me of Clifford Geertz' methodology of thick description, for anthropologists to use to find the meaning of life in a community they are studying.

And to make the journey easier, the writing is exquisite.  It's like dropping into another country (well, I guess I was) where it takes a while to get used to the rhythms and cadence of the language and the way things are phrased.  The rich down-to-earth details kept me connected.

For example he writes about Mrs. Quinty, the teacher who saw promise in Ruth's writing and comes visiting when Ruth is ill to comfort and encourage her.  Mrs. Quinty's husband was gone.  (Be sure to read to the last sentence of the quote.)

"If Mr. Quinty had Passed On it would have been better.  If he had Gone to His Reward, Mrs. Quinty would cope;  she suited widowhood, and had the wardrobe.  But as it was, despite Tommy Quinty being heavily pregnant with eighteen years of Victoria Sponge, Lemon Drizzle, Apple Upside Down, Rhubarb Custard Tart and Caramel Eclairs, a brazen long-legged hairdresser called Sylvia in Swansea, Wales, managed to overlook the Collected Cakes and see only the black curls of the same Tommy.
He stopped in for a Do, Nan says, and he's not Done yet." (pp. 9-10)

The sound of the stories and the language is from an older time, so when the reality of things like wi-fi flow by, it's a bit startling that this all takes place recently.

While this book is about a small rain soaked river town in Ireland, it's about every human community and it covers many themes of importance to everyone everywhere.  I started this post because of this quote about faith which I think we could all benefit from copying and passing out to people with faith in all varieties of beliefs.

"Faith is the most peculiar thing.  It's Number One in human mysteries.  Because how do you do it?  Where do you learn it?  For the Believers it doesn't matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there's no arguing.  Pythagoras's early life was spent as a cucumber.  And after that he lived as a sardine.  That's in Heraclitus.  That's what he believed*.  Besides the east bank of the River Cong in Mayo was a Monks' Fishing House and the monks laid a trap in the river so that when a salmon entered it a line was pulled and rang a little bell in the monks' kitchen and although there were strict laws forbidding any traps nobody ever stopped the monks because they knew the monks believed the salmon were Heaven-sent and even unbelievers don't want to tax Heaven.  Just in case.  That's in The Salmon in Ireland.  Birdie Clohessy believes her weight is all water.  Sean Conway believes the Germans are to blame for most things.  Packy Nolan that it was the red M&Ms gave him the cancer.  With faith there's no arguing." (pp. 191-192)

*The Pythagoras reference is partly backed up here, but as I read it all, Heraclitus seems to have made up the vegetable and the fish to make light of Pythagoras.  I wanted to give you a Dunning-Kruger reference, but this Irish Times article seemed more appropriate given the book's locale.  And a little more, here's from the American Psychological Association.

I also wanted to write here about the importance of fathers, but I'll save that for another post.  Enough for now.

If They Tell You To Evacuate Before Florence Hits, Do It! Lessons From The Johnstown Flood 1889

My book club's book for this month is David McCollough's The Johnstown Flood.  We've got two The Great Earthquake, which I've already read and posted about.  
disaster books in a row.  Next month is Henry Fountain's

As Florence bears down on the mid-Atlantic, the harrowing scenes I've been reading about seem appropriate.  The Johnstown flood wasn't because of a hurricane, though it did rain for days and those rains brought water higher into the towns along the river than ever before.

But the real horror was the bursting of a damn about 15 miles up the river.  The scenes described by McCullough remind me of the most over-the-top disaster movies.

While some people had concerns about the dam, there had been false alarms about possible dam failure in the past.  (Though it had burst once many years before, but had more recently been rebuilt.)  People were concerned about the rain swollen river, but not too many were concerned about the dam.  But then it burst and a huge wave of water, and increasingly, as it moved along the narrow passage way, trees and houses and train cars.

Here are some accounts from the book, as reminders to those in the path of the hurricane, that it's better to be safe than sorry.

"And these boards were jagged . . . and I looked at my aunt, and they didn't say a word then.  All the praying stopped, and they gasped, and looked down like this, and were gone, immediately gone."
She felt herself falling and reaching out for something to grab on to and trying as best she could to stay afloat.
"I kept paddling and grabbing and spitting and spitting and trying to keep the sticks and dirt and this horrible water out of my mouth."
Somehow she managed to crawl out of a hole in the roof or wall, she never knew which.  All she saw was a glimmer of light, and she scrambled with all her strength to get to it, up what must have been the lath on part of the house underneath one of the gables.  She got through the opening, never knowing what had become of her aunt, Libby, or her baby cousin.  Within seconds the whole house was gone and everyone in it.
The next thing she knew, Gertrude [she was a 6 years old at the time] was whirling about on top of a muddy mattress that was being buoyed up by debris but that kept tilting back and forth as she struggled to get her balance.  She screamed for help.  Then a dead horse slammed against her raft, pitching one end of it up into the air and nearly knocking her off.  She hung on for dear life, until a tree swung by, snagging the horse in its branches before it plunged off with the current in another direction, the dead animal bobbing up and down, up and down, in and out of the water, like a gigantic, gruesome rocking horse.
Weak and shivering with cold, she lay down on the mattress, realizing for the first time that all her clothes had been torn off except for her underwear.  Night was coming on and she was terribly frightened.  She started praying in German, which was the only way she had been taught to pray.
A small white house went sailing by, almost running her down.  She called out to the one man who was riding on top, straddling the peak of the roof and hugging the chimney with both arms.  But he ignored her, or perhaps never heard her, and passed right by.
"You terrible man," she shouted after him.  "I'll never help you."
Then a long roof, which may have been what was left of theArcade Building, came plowing toward her, looking as big as a steamboat and loaded down with perhaps twenty people.  She called out to them, begging someone to save her.  One man started up, but the others seemed determined to stop him.  They held on to him and there was an endless moment of talk back and forth between them as he kept pulling to get free.
Then he pushed loose and jumped into the current.  His head bobbed up, then went under again.  Several times more he came up and went under.  Gertrude kept screaming for him to swim to her.  Then he was heaving himself over the side of her raft, and the two of them headed off downstream, Gertrude nearly strangling him as she clung to his neck.
The big roof in the meantime had gone careening on until it hit what must have been a whirlpool in the current and began spinning round and round.  Then, quite suddenly, it struck something and went down, carrying at least half its passengers with it."

The book doesn't really give good footnotes to document this account.  But we can imagine a six year old (I think of my 5 year old grand daughter) retelling this event, and we know McCullough must have filled in a lot of details here.  Or, if Gertrude retold this many years later, the story must have taken on a life of its own in all the retellings.  Nevertheless, it was a horrible scene as the houses that weren't totally destroyed when the wave hit, floated in the current with people in or on them hurtling toward likely death.

William Tice, who owned a drugstore on Portage street, described what he saw soon after he ha been fished out of the water near the bridge.
"I went on the embankment and looked across the bridge which was filled full of debris, and on it were thousands of men, women, and children, who were screaming and yelling for help as at this time the debris was on fire, and after each crash, there was a moment of silence, and those voices would again be heard crying in vain for the help that came not.  At each crash hundreds were forced under and slain.
"I saw hundreds of them as the flames approached throw up their hands and fall backward into the fire, and those who had escaped drowning were reserved for the more horrible fate of being burned to death.  At last I could endure it no longer, an had to leave, as I could see no more."

The fires in the piles of debris, it was speculated, were caused by fuel in train cars and fires in wood stoves of houses swept away.

The Johnstown Flood was a horrible disaster.  McCullough lists 2, 209 victims of the Johnstown Flood.   Whether it's a dam burst tsunami or merely rising rain waters, if you are caught in it, it is equally terrifying.  I'm sure that survivors like  Mr. Tice, quoted above, had nightmares for the rest of their lives.

The death toll for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is said to be 1427.  There's a reason that floods are one of the  major biblical catastrophes.

So, people of the mid-Atlantic being told to evacuate.  Do it.  If you want some adventure, read the Johnstown Flood.  It's horrific enough in a book.  You don't need to experience it live.

How Did Chagrin Falls Get Its Name?

A blog visitor from Chagrin Falls, Ohio looked at the post  What Do I Know?: Horsetail: One Person's Weed is Another Person's Scouring Pa.  I couldn't help thinking, "How did it get named Chagrin?" So I looked up Chagrin Falls and a Wikipedia article told me about the Chagrin River - and has beautiful pictures.  But it didn't really tell me about the name.  That I found at a blog -Midwest Guest - (whose last post was November 2017), which had a post that addressed my question.  The blogger stopped at the sign because

"The sign immediately sparked my curiosity. I love waterfalls, but more importantly in this case, I remembered Chagrin Falls as the title of a tune by Canadian rockers, The Tragically Hip. I couldn’t help turning off onto the side road where the arrow pointed me to see the infamous Chagrin Falls."

That's something I would do.  And the first thing that came to mind was going to  see Wichata Falls, because of Pat Metheny's "As Wichata Falls, So Falls Wichtata Falls." (A great, great piece of music.)  But I've never seen a sign for Wichita Falls. Later in the post, she* tells us about the name.

"The historical marker at the falls says the Chagrin River drew its name from a French trader named Francois Seguin, who traded with Native Americans in northeast Ohio during the mid-1700s. The Chagrin Falls Historical Society offers a couple of other possible explanations for the name, but says the most accepted story is that the name represents a corrupted and Americanized version of trader Seguin’s name."

Here's the Pat Metheny piece.  I remember exactly where I was when I first heard it (though not exactly what year).  Just leave it on in the background.  It goes on and on.  Good speakers help with this one.





 You can go to the Midwest Guest blog to hear Chagrin Falls.

I tried to leave a comment  at Midwest Guest to thank the blogger, but comments are closed on that blog.  So I have to do it here.  Thanks!  We share the same sort of curiosity it seems.

*I first wrote 'he', not because I default to he, but because I somehow felt it was a he.  But I decided I should check and it turns out - from what I could tell - that the blogger is a she.  I love to have my assumptions proven wrong.  It makes me more careful about making assumptions.

And speaking of assumptions, Wichita Falls is NOT in Kansas.  It's in Texas.

A Break From Politics - Campbell Creek Impressions

These photos are of Campbell Creek yesterday late afternoon, modified a bit with photoshop.

From a bridge (near Lake Otis), modified using the posterize filter.

And the same picture using Curves.  (I still use Curves experimentally - I can't really plan the effects I'm going to get.  I probably should look for some lessons online.)

And for those of you who want to see the original.

What exactly do photographers do when they manipulate pictures in programs like Photoshop?  Is this artistry or enhancement or deception?  What you get from the camera - the third picture here - doesn't exactly portray what the original was like.  Aside from the obvious cropping out - in the sense - the rest of the picture, the camera doesn't capture  the light and colors the same way the human eye does.  And, of course, different eyes and different brains see the same scene differently.

This sort of playing around(experimenting may be too pretentious here, though not if people do this more systematically) can give us ways to see things in the scene we can't see with the naked eye.  It can also hide things we might originally see - and if someone does this to deceive, then, well it should be evaluated the way one would evaluate any deception.  How serious was the deception?  To what extent should the victim have been paying more attention?  How badly was the victim(s) hurt?  Those sorts of questions.

Here's another picture of Campbell Creek further down the bike path.  This one is looking south. (The first ones were looking west).

I used the posterize filter to get this one too.

I think many, if not most photographers do some fiddling with their pictures now just to get a nicer looking picture - playing with the saturation, contrast, exposure buttons are the most obvious ways.  Cropping is basic.  But even the earliest black and white photographers played with their images in the dark room to achieve similar improvements to what they had caught on the negative.

All the images are looking down from bridges, into the sun's reflection on the water.

What Happens When Pipes Get Old?

They've been replacing old water pipes much of the summer.  Here are a few pics from July 27, a couple of weeks into the project.   And here are some recent pictures of the work.

Here's stuff they pulled out:

And what's going in:

And here's where it's going:

And here's the excavator they're doing much of the work with:

Water Cutoff, So We Get Out Of Town

There was a green card hanging from our door the other day that said the water would be shut off between 9am and 3pm on Thursday.  I checked on line and found this:
[UPDATE Aug 21, 2018 - I've corrected the formatting for this project and I've posted an update]

AWWU Construction Projects

• Project Manager
• James Armstrong
• Phone Number    
• 907 564 2776
• Public Description
• Work will consist of the Contractor to furnish and install approximately 2,000 linear feet of 16-inch PVC pipe, three (3) double pumper fire hydrant assembly, and eight (8) 16-inch gate valves and valve boxes, three (3) 8-inch gate valves and valve boxes, and one (1) 6-inch gate valve and valve box.

So we decided it would be a good day to be out in the woods.  The shut off the water by 11am just before we took off.

And the street was blocked off.   We drove straight down to Portage Glacier.  I'd been there a couple of weeks ago with the little kids and I really wanted to go see Byron Glacier and spend some time relaxing in the van at Black Bear campground.  It was raining too much last time to take the kids to  Byron Glacier, and since there was a rare iceberg floating by the visitor's center it didn't seem necessary.  We stopped at the visitor center first.  It was raining some, but with the fierce wind of last time, and the iceberg was gone.

The white in the middle is the glacier.  It used to wrap around and over the hill and sit in the water of Portage Lake.  And there used to be icebergs all the time.  The ranger said the berg had lasted about two weeks, melting and breaking up fairly quickly.

Then off to Byron Glacier not far away.  (I"ve been debating whether this should be in chronological order or if I should just put up pics from the day.  General chronological order won by one vote.)

Here's a ripe salmon berry we passed on the way.

And here's what's left of Byron Glacier.  I remember first seeing it when the whole mountain side was solid glacier.  Now the lower part is pretty pitiful.  When you talk to people in Anchorage about climate change - the long time residents just point to Portage and the nearby glaciers as how they know it's real.  These changes are really dramatic.  And in a short span that humans can notice.

Here's a decent sized chunk of glacier but it's really a tiny fraction of what used to be here.

This is looking up.  The clouds have lowered since I took the first Byron glacier picture above, but you can see the eerie blue ice often found in glaciers, especially on cloudy days.

Walking back we started talking to a couple from North Carolina.  They were originally from Calcutta and they were on a whirlwind tour of Alaska.  In a week they'd been to Denali, Anchorage, Seward, and were spending their last full day at Portage and then went to hike Winner Creek in Girdwood.

And in the car next to ours was a young Israeli who was touring Alaska.

This fern lined path is near Black Bear campground in the Portage Valley.  We'd stopped her last time and it was so beautiful that I wanted to explore the area a bit.  We had lunch, read, and snoozed.  I'm just starting Charles Eisenstein's The Ascent of Humanity. Someone told me about it when I was talking about how the Protestant Work Ethic doesn't work any more now that technology can do much of the work that people had to do.  That we need a knew way to think about the distribution of wealth - other than it being only paid-work connected.  (Here's one post I did on that thought.  Looking for it, I see I've started, but not finished a few others.)

Eisentein's message includes that thought, but in a much broader perspective of how many of our conceptions of the world are failing to accurately portray what's happening around us.

"In the face of an ecological, financial, social, and health crisis that isn't going away, our tools - political, technological, and cognitive - are revealing themselves as impotent.  As that happens, the belief systems that embed those tools lose the gloss we call 'reality.'  Our defining narratives are coming apart at the seems.
"This dissolution reaches to the deepest imaginable level.  Not only our social institutions, not only our ecosystems are collapsing, but along with them our answers to the basic questions of life: "Who am I?" "Why am I here?"  "Where did we come from and where are we going?" "What is the purpose of life?"

But he's also optimistic.  And in a way that might be reasonable.  He talks about how humankind's thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and technology have failed to make people happy.  How along with greater material wealth and better health for many, there is still genocide, hunger, massive destruction of the natural world.

"Something [is] so fundamentally wrong that centuries of our best and brightest efforts to create a better world have failed or even backfired.  As this realization sinks in, we respond with despair, cynicism, numbness, or detachment.  

OK, I know I promised more optimistic and that was the opposite.  Here it comes:

"Yet no matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today.  Though we rationalize it, it is not rational.  We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life.  This moments come to uss lone in nature, to with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty.  At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control.  

Reading that yesterday in the van surrounded by trees and a glacial river nearby and about to go for another walk, I knew I would put these quotes into this post.

"We inuit that something similar is possible collectively.  Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individually more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it.  It is what musicians are referring to when they say, "The music played the band."
"Another way of being is possible, and it is right in front of us, closer than close.  That much is transparently certain.  Yet it slips away so easily that we hardly believe it could be the foundation of life;  so we relate it to an afterlife and call it Heaven, or we relegate it to the future and call it Utopia.  (When nanotechnology solves all our problems . .  when we all learn to be nice to each other. . . when finally I'm not so busy . . .)Either way, we set it apart from this world and this life, and thereby deny its practicality and its reality in the heart and now  Yet the knowledge that life is more than Just This cannot be suppressed, not forever."

He goes on to take about the title - The Ascent of Humanity - as being an ironic take on Jacob Bronowski.'s The Ascent of Man. Ironic because he's arguing in the book that the idea of man's ascent to a better life through technology that takes us beyond nature, that has us conquering nature to improve human life, the idea of progress as we know it is false.  We've been 'improving' since the Stone Age and futurists keep telling us about new technologies that will solve our problems.  It's not going to happen he tells us.  We need to rethink our relationship to the world, to nature, and to each other.  That better life won't come from technology, but from knowing ourselves and our role in the natural world.

It's not a new message in some senses, but he's got 500 pages of back up for the argument.  I've only read the Introduction (where he outlines the arguments chapter by chapter) and the beginning of the first chapter - The Triumph of Technology - where he picks up the theme I've followed about how the promises of more leisure through technology have fallen flat.

OK, back to Portage Valley.  Despite how beautiful it was and the many pictures I took, I'm afraid these are just a pale facsimile.  You can't feel the mist drizzling on your face, or see these shots in their large context.  But I was feeling that 'more magnificent world' as I walked through this with a much lightened heart.

These are shelf fungi growing on the bottom of a cut tree.









I'm looking forward to reading all of Eisenstein's book.  I'm hoping it's as good as it seems to be in the fist 20 pages or so.

I do want to mention the idea of separation which is a key point he's making - and you can see it on the cover page (if you click on it and enlarge it).  I'm guess from the little I've read so far, this will be about many separations from what's real that humans have made.  Separation from nature.  How science has broken down into uncountable specialities so that few actually see the big picture and how everything is connected.  (Again, a big theme in The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf's book about Alexander von Humboldt.)  He's talking about how we have separated humans into different groups - by gender, by race, by ethnicity, by nationality, by religion.  And how humans have been separated from their true selves by the narratives of the societies they live in.

I think Esenstein would take hope from how the Trump administration is forcing so many people to rethink their conception of the United States.  The old world view has to die before the new one can be adopted.  It's not easy, but it's how things work.

And the water was back on when we got home.

Getting Out: Prospect Heights Trail Toward Wolverine Peak

Easy access to Alaska is the reason I live here.  But we've been spending a lot of time getting the house back to 'nice' - freshly painted, new front steps that aren't cracking and threatening come apart, and shedding stuff that's collected over the years.  Mostly we're down to stuff that has sentimental value.  Things that are connected to people we like or remind of us when we were one place or another.

But it was just too nice today and I'm determined to get my money's worth for the State Parks Pass on both cars this year - that means about 20 trips would cover the $5 parking fee at most state park parking lots.  

So even though it's Sunday, we headed for Prospect Heights trailhead to go up the Wolverine Peak trail.  I wanted to get to the rock just above treeline that's been a landmark in family pictures since we started hiking Anchorage - our first full summer 1978.   
The parking lot, which is more than double the size since we got here, was crowded, but with a few spaces when we got there about 12:30pm.  



































This is the south fork of Campbell Creek from the bridge.  This creek then wanders through the Campbell Tract, south of Tudor to Campbell Creek Park, then on past the Arctic Roadrunner to Taku Creek and on west to the Inlet.  And it wanders through various posts in this blog as I post pictures from the trail along the creek.  But it's much wilder here on the mountain headed down to flatter terrain.

J stopped at the fork in the trail where you decide between Near Peak and Wolverine Peak.  I wanted to get up to "the rock."  I'm guessing the rock is roughly 3 miles in, from the fork, starting to get much steeper.

My sense is that this rock used to be up above all the brushy area, pretty much out on its own in the tundra.  But in this picture you can see the brushy stuff going well past the rock on the left.  When we got home I went looking through early photo albums looking for this same picture.  I'm sure there are a number of them somewhere.  What I found was a picture of the rock, May 1979 looking up toward Wolverine Peak.

It's pretty much tundra around the rock, though the right side (left side on the previous picture) is cut off.  I did also take a picture today looking up, but from from the rock or a little above it.

I used a wide angle lens for the picture today, so it look a bit more stretched out, but it's essentially the same picture (but without the rock).  Trees and brush have crept up the mountain as the climate has warmed since the 1979 picture.  I can't say when in May the top picture was, but things hadn't greened yet and there was a lot more snow.  The little guy is in shorts, so I'm guessing it was later in May rather than earlier.  Some now used to last most, if not all the summer, on the mountains.  And we used to hike through snow patches on the way up to Wolverine Peak.  Here it is early June - and we had a relative late (for recent years) spring - and there's not much snow left.

And the Labrador tea flowers were beginning to bloom.

Hiking uses different muscles than biking.  I can feel them.  I need to do this much more often.