This article illustrates an extreme example of technology ruling our lives, but many of us experience the conflict between technology and “real” (human) interaction. (more…)
June 7, 2010
September 22, 2009
Another of Fran’s childhood adventures
Fran recently told me the following childhood tale from when she was eight and lived in Albuquerque, NM. She (then known as Dixie, for Dixwell) had gone on a trip with some childhood friends to a Campfire Girls’ event in the mountains. Getting bored in the afternoon, she enlisted a small group of the girls to go with her on a hike. Seven or eight started out, following her up the mountain, with Dixie promising a good view of the campground from the heights above. However the trail grew progressively smaller and smaller until it was little more than a ledge. A couple of the girls turned back, and then a couple more, but Dixie pushed on with two friends following. They finally got to a height where they could indeed look down on the camp and could also hear people calling for them. Dixie had reached her intended lookout, and so she led the little contingent back down the mountain. Turns out that the girls who first returned had reported incorrectly that the group was lost, and a rescue effort was being mounted. Dixie, of course, was quite ho-hum about all the commotion when she returned. Some things never change.
Fran believes that you are never lost unless you think you are lost. She is never lost. Ask her about this. My view is that we’ve been lost so often that I’ve lost count, and so it doesn’t really matter anyhow. Is there a difference here?
Fran thinks that this is just an excuse for MY story of the time it was 10 below and I got lost on the mountain and returned just as the ski patrol was sending out a search party. Our parents do tend to worry for nothing.
August 15, 2009
Homesteading musings
I was looking at my dog-eared copies of Living the Good Life (Helen and Scott Nearing) and The Complete Homesteading Book. And thinking “what ifs.” I was doing this as a musing only, because we get one life to live and not multiples and we can’t go back anyhow. But nonetheless, “what if” Fran and I had met earlier, say in the early 70’s when we were each dissatisfied with current relationships? It’s an interesting mind game for us – who needs Sim City?
At some point we likely would have ended up homesteading like Helen and Scott Nearing, and probably in Vermont or Maine as they did. We might have even discussed our plans with them, as they welcomed visitors. Fran and I would have had much in common with how the Nearings had started out in homesteading decades before, and we would have learned much. They were of the pacifist PYM Quaker sort, war tax resisters (when they owed taxes), and he was forced out of his academic position at U. Penn in WWI because of his pacifist and socialist activities. During the depression they left their urban surroundings for a new lifestyle of subsistence farming. They were highly intelligent, well educated, and maintained some connections with their old friends via their reading and writing. They had no children (I’m assuming Fran and I would have had five children – our current ones) and worked very hard at the Vermont farm. Through dint of hard work and innovative farming techniques, they subsisted comparable to their more established neighbors. In their later years their books coincided with the spirit of the times, and they were feted by many and hated by many. White House invitations depended on who was in the White House. They willingly advised hippies attempting to homestead, but it is interesting that most of these attempts failed (cf. What the Trees Said- Life on a New Age Farm). The only folks I knew in this category bought a small farm near Exton at about the same period (early 70’s), and the couple had chickens (for eggs) and goats (particularly for milk for children sensitive to cows’ milk). After a while they hated the life, hated one another, and divorced and sold the farm to a developer for a large profit that enabled a new life for each of them (strange, how life turns out).
It is noteworthy that the Nearings maintained their intellectual and activist activities with the “outside” world, something that would be important to Fran and me. This distinguished them from (and sometimes antagonized) their traditional New England Republican neighbors of that period. However, they did not have independent money when they arrived (money is something that makes outsiders different and unacceptable – it is a “game” for the outsiders and survival for the natives). A constant worry for subsistence farmers is how they will survive in their old age. There is a great deal of serious poverty in rural Maine, particularly among the elderly. By the time they reached old age, Helen and Scott’s books had achieved such popularity that the royalties could support a conventional middle-class retirement. The right-wing criticized them for having electricity, flush toilets and oil heat in their retirement house, but do we really want folks in their 80’s and 90’s to be living without these things? The Nearings lived to be 91 and 100; it is no virtue that other Mainers sometimes meet their end in their 80’s by essentially freezing to death in their rustic farmhouses. The poverty there is rampant, the Nearings worked to change that, and I am grateful they did not need to die a pauper’s death.
So if the Nearings might have been a model for us, one question would be would we have homesteaded our entire lifetime? For Fran and me, I doubt it. We would have tried something else, not from a sense of failure or giving up on principles, but for the experience of life. Note that the Nearings started their Thoreau experience when Scott was in middle age and Helen a few years younger, and they already had a wealth of experience behind them. Fran and I would have started at a considerably younger age and anticipated a wealth of change and experience ahead of us. What would that “post-homesteading” life have been like for Fran and me? That is another “musing” story.
February 28, 2009
History of the early Nazi period — personal and general.
My father had a keen sense of history, and when my parents were in Germany in the early 1930s (he had a graduate travel fellowship at the University of Berlin), he was aware of (and peripherally involved in…another story) history in the making. He also was something of a perfectionist, and carried not only his 16-mm Kodak but also a tripod and light meter all over Europe and the Middle East. I am the repository for his 1930s films, all on highly flammable nitro-based celluloid. When my parents returned to the states, he used these films and other historical material (some interesting items) for public lectures. By the time I came along, I would occasionally set up the projector so that I could show my friends our home movies of Stalin in Red Square on May Day and Hitler in his open Mercedes. I burned up much of the Hitler sequence by stopping the projector to see things better, and then Hitler would curl up before our eyes in wisps of acrid smoke. My father intended to get the “Big Three” on film, but Mussolini was out of the country when my parents were in Italy, and so we have a very nice sequence of the Italian square and balcony from which Mussolini used to deliver his harangues to the people (apparently the best possible shot available under the circumstances).
It is interesting to note that my friend John Cary was in Berlin at the same time as my parents and recounts that as a young student his school youth group was required to stand on the sidewalk for Hitler’s Mercedes procession. Additionally, his Quaker family had some connections with the University of Berlin and some of the places that my father attended. He has kindly translated some of the historical material that I received from my father.
Additionally, I have learned much about this period through Fran’s connection (at Saul Ewing, LLP) with Arthur Solmssen, and particularly through his excellent historical novel A Princess in Berlin (1980). In this well-received book set in Germany in the early 1920s, Solmssen (writing from extensive experience) sets the scene for what led to Germany’s later Nazification.
I recently read The Revolution of Nihilism (1939) by Hermann Rauschning. We must remember that the Prussian aristocracy (Junkers) such as Rauschning, as well as the capitalists, had made a pact of convenience with Hitler, while always considering him to be a temporary tool useful for their own conservative causes and sure of their own superiority. Rauschning served as an anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet speaker for years, but no one mentions that his goal was a return to a monarchy in the service of the traditional ruling (upper) class.
Click the Comments link for related family stories.
July 19, 2007
Risk Taking, Not Thrill Seeking (re Backpacking Donut Hole Trail)
The phrase above is how Fran described herself in her response to my ad on match.com five years ago (see Comment below). Sounds good, although I may not have fully understood what I was letting myself in for. I could hardly have preferred it the other way –Thrill Seeing But Not Risk Taking. That might be eating cotton candy on the boardwalk and riding the roller coaster. Blaaaa.
Monday evening we returned from a three-day backpacking trip on the Donut Hole Trail in Sproul State Forest. I got my dose of “Risk Taking, Not Thrill Seeking.” The area where we hiked, and the Donut Hole Trail in particular, are described as follows: “North-central Pennsylvania features the most isolated and expansive forest lands between New York City and Chicago. The experienced backpacker looking for an isolated trail will appreciate the lonely Donut Hole Trail…maintenance may be a problem…with inconsistent blazing…stinging nettles…expansive isolation, deepwoods experience, and the opportunity to witness wildlife” (quoting from Backpacking Pennsylvania, by Mitchell — the backpackers’ bible). We can confirm that Mitchell speaks the truth. We were lost twice and each time eventually found our way back to where we went astray (easy to do with ”unestablished trails” (Mitchell) and the inconsistent blazing. Encountered bears and snakes, including a timber rattlesnake. I think I’m phobic to poisonous snakes. The local backpacking stores do not sell snakeproof gaiters (they seem to carry all other types), so I adapted some heavy canvas gaiters (WWII surplus that I already owned) and these were comfortable and efficient to use (although, thankfully, never tested).
I found an answer to the snake problem in my Britannica (Rattlesnakes…11th ed), but the implementation poses some difficulty. “The surest way of clearing a ground of them is to drive in pigs, which are sure to find and to eat them, without harm to themselves.”
I am the one who suggested this trail and helped prepare myself with a solo hike on the Tuscarora Trail in May. But we hope to tone down the Risk Taking somewhat for future backpacking, which sounds like the wise thing.
Here’s the complete story of our hike. Pictures are available at www.photos.sheldontimes.com/
July 2, 2007
Eating off the land
Yesterday we went for a walk along Darby Creek near our house, looking for dinner. We found it in the form of such plants as nettles, plantain, daylilies, spicebush, etc. Although these items are usually described as weeds and wild flowers rather than food sources, they are in fact edible if correctly selected and prepared. See the dinner that resulted.
I admit to some trepidation about all this. These plants are described as nutritious and particularly endowed with life-enhancing vitamins and minerals. But after dinner last night, I expected that I should next be either getting my stomach pumped or leading the pack in the NYC Marathon. Neither event happened, and I slept comfortably.
Eating off the land can be considered the original “eating out” for we were gatherers before we were farmers. We are now pursuing this concept as an adjunct to our backpacking. This was Fran’s idea — part of how she never ceases to intrigue and surprise me. We are just getting started and educating ourselves using some of the fine resources available in print and online. It can add fresh food on the trail and lighten our packs at the same time.