Baby, it's COLD out there

One of the bonuses (bonusi? No, that's a small Japanese tree.) Anyway, as aircrew, I got to go a lot places most people don't. When the scientists need to get somewhere, we were how they got there.

H-52 helicopter on the Ross Ice shelf.

One of the more desirable flights was a trip to lake Vanda in the Wright valley.

Lake Vanda.

Me at Vanda station.
(That is a mummified seal below the sign)

Vanda station was famed for its 'swim club'. A swim in lake Vanda entitled one to purchase an embroidered Vanda Swim Club patch. The requirements for the patch were simple

1. Complete submersion in the lake.
2. No clothing with the exception of some kind of footwear. (The rocks along the shore were razor sharp.)
3. No limits on photography.

Me again. That water is cold!


But some days you're the dog, others you're the hydrant.
This is the wreckage of a Navy helo in the Wright valley.

Summer break

While I'm waiting for the semester to begin I ve been going through some of my old pics. I need to get into the closet where the transparencies are and rescan them all.

Machu picchu.

A shipwreck in the Straits of Magellan.



Adelie peguins at Cape Royds, Antarctica. This was the site of Shackleton's expedtion camp.



Minke whale 'spyhopping'. There were actually two of them and they stayed for quite some time watching the ship.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance & Affection and the FLDS

I've put this reading off for long enough, mostly because I don't have the right answer. And I've concluded that I don't even have a good answer and likely never will. I'm not a pet person and if I were, my choice probably wouldn't be a cat. But my wife and I wound up with this cat. I've taught her 'fetch' and 'shake hands' and occasionally she will 'speak' on command. When she goes outside, she is on a leash. The cat is thoroughly dominated. On the other hand, the cat has never missed a meal and her sole function seems to be converting expensive cat food into cat hair and cat turds. If she were free, she could reach her full potential as a cat. Provided of course that she weren't killed by a car or a coyote or she didn't die of disease, starvation or freezing. That is how I see the FLDS. The government could save these poor benighted women even if they don't realize that they need to be rescued. We could take so much pride in empowering those who managed to survive the predators and starvation. In fact, we don't need the government to solve our problems. Lets break out torches and pitchforks and go destroy the monster ourselves! Picture Dale Barlow limping through the compund saying "Thancthuwawy! Thancthuwawy! If this is being done to "protect the children", I wonder how a 416 kids from here would fare in terms of pregnancy, clothing, adequate food,etc. and whether their responses would be that different if they were asked the questions the FLDS kids are being asked? I think we often have things backwards. If a man fathers a dozen children with half a dozen women and abandons them all he gets a starring spot on MTV. If he takes responibility for all of them, he's a monster. Wilt Chamberlin brags of having bedded tens of thousands of women and he's a hero. Pee Wee Herman practices the ultimate in safe sex and he goes to jail. We select Presidents based how they look and pick Miss America because of how she will solve the world's problems. We used to take LSD to make the world look weird. Now we take Prozac to make it look normal. How did a nation so backwards ever manage to become a superpower?


J. B. Jackson's piece on the Four Corners and trailers makes me think of Slab City. This would be a fascinating place for a thesis. If I were (much) younger and single, I'd buy a van or a ratted out motorhome, a lap-top, a good digital camera, take a year from school, and head off to Slab City for a season. I'd want to know who these people were, why they were there, where they came from, where they went when they left... I'd like to know who made the rules and who enforced the rules. I'd wonder about the social and political hierarchy of a culture like that. If only I were the higher education type.
Anyway, why do we look down on people who live in trailer parks? "Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park..." We don't sneer at people who live in trailers. We don't. There is a "campground" on Rock boulevard that fills with trailers in the summer but doesn't carry the stigma that a trailer park in Lemon Valley carries. The people in the campground or for that matter, Slab City, are "vagabonds" and "gypsies". They aren't permanent. The trailer park is. The trailer park is the rural counterpart to the urban housing project. The denizens are trapped by social and economic conditions but the person towing the trailer isn't trapped anywhere.


I finally got around to reading the Meinig piece. It raises questions as to what role the church played in how the colonization was done. i. e., did the Catholic belief in confession and penitence determine that the Spanish assimilated the natives while the Protestants segregated? Interesting but I take issue with the article for a number of reasons. First, he selects his imperialism. Russian expansion into Siberia is included, but the same practice in Poland is excluded. An unwary reader could get the impression that only the West ever colonized. He calls the return of the Iberian peninsula to christian control as a "reconquest" but says that non-christians were usually never more than a minority anyway. Really? The history I learned says otherwise. Finally, Meinig excludes Japanese imperialism. Japanese imperialism was a major reason the U.S. ended up in Southeast Asia. And for someone of a certain age, my age, why America got involved in Viet Nam is a very important question.

Icebergs have some interesting shapes.

And some interesting uses

The icebreaker breaking ice

Ready for a night flight
What you see at night.

The highest red and white lights are the ship's mast. The row of red lights is the hangar. The semi-circle below that is the flight deck. Aim for that. The white light at the bottom is the stern. Everything else is freezing sea water.

Events in Eldorado, Texas bring to mind Mark Twain's comments on polygamy in Roughing It.
"Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, "No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence."

Cuzco, Peru

Christchurch, New Zealand (They thought I looked weird.)

Orca, Ross sea, Antarctica

Black Browed Albatross, Ross sea, Antarctica

Polar bear, Arctic ocean

I've been pretty lax about blog entries lately. I've been thinking, I just haven't been writing. I'll get my thoughts in order and do some writing then. For now I'll post some of my other images.

Reno hot air balloon races.

Red Bull airplane racing.

Reno air races opening ceremonies.

Moubray bay, Antarctica.

Adelie penguin, Cape Adaire, Antarctica

A bald eagle in Sitka, AK.

I love digital cameras. They don't work for everything. For slow or immobile objects like Moubray bay or the hot air balloon races film can't compete but for anything moving above a moderate speed, they don't work as well because of the time it takes to scan the object. But any film images I take are scanned into a digital format. Unfortunately my digital camera seems to be on the blink.


Someone mentioned going on a trip to Davis Monthan Air Force Base in their blog. I had the great fortune to fly as part of an H-3 helicopter aircrew from Sitka, AK to the "boneyard" many years ago. We fleww down the west coast of Canada and the US to North Bend, OR then turned east and flew over Crater lake and on to Reno. From there we flew south to Las Vegas and down through Death Valley. From Death Valley we turned east again and flew down the Grand Canyon. From there we headed south to Davis Monthan to deliver the aircraft. From the wet, pine covered forests of the Northwest to the saguaro covered hills of the Southwest, it was a trip that stands out among many that I got to make. I also had the great misfortune to fly as part of an H-3 helicopter aircrew from Sitka, Ak to the "boneyard" many years ago. As the turbines spooled down at tthe the boneyard, I realized that this machine had flown in some of the most vicious weather imaginable, had (If I remember right) been part of the Prinsendam rescue, had delivered Santa to remote Alaskan villages, and had carried countless mariners to safety, and with the chocks now tucked under the wheels, it had now become scrap metal.

Readings

I doubt that urban problems can ever be solved. Cities are just too diverse. A solution at one place will create problems for someone else. If we all thought and acted the same then the solutions would be easy. So, if only everyone would be just like me...
Sea and Survival reminds of the many times I spent flying along a beach and wondering if the people who lived in the houses right on the water had some sort of indicator that showed how foolish they were. Like the character in Snowcrash who has the words "Poor impulse control" tattooed across his forehead. You might think that they would at least ask why the place they were building on was called a barrier island, but nooooo... The wreckage of previous houses all around should be a tip off. The City as a Growth Machine was just plain silly. The "elites" are after us. Someone is going to make the decisions. Those decisions will benefit someone. Of course the decision makers are going to run things for their own benefit. I would. And so would most other people. It's not possible to please everyone, so as long as someone is going to be unhappy I want to make sure it isn't me. "It's GOOD to be the king!" I'd be a great king. "Wait for the shake!" Molotch says that there's no need to create jobs since the young people are going to move away anyway. And they will move where and do what, the skeptic asks. He suggests moving people from areas with too many students to places with not enough students, to solve both problems at the same time. Will just the students be moving or will the entire family be uprooted? I really should be the king here.

Above is an ice field in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica above Lake Vanda The small red spot near the edge of the ice field is one of the helicopters below.

And yes, I did join the swim club.

Dazed and confused

Well, this is embarrassing. I seem to have mixed up that kid’s story somehow. I’ve been told that the story was about Pinocchio, not Pistachio. And it was his nose that grew when he told a lie. I even get holidays confused. I used to think that if I saw my shadow on St. Paddy’s day that I was going to spend another six weeks drunk.
I liked The Song of the Dodo. I had a vague idea of what the Wallace line is but Song made it pretty clear what it is and why it is important. Wallace’s problems finding animals in the rain forest mirrors the experiences of the Roosevelt party in The River of Doubt. They had taken rifles on the expedition to supplement their food supply and nearly starved to death. Quammen draws some unusual analogies. “India rumbled off like a runaway beer truck…Madagascar stayed parked.” There’s a geological description even a frat boy could understand and his irreverence made the reading fun. Describing Wallace (seen from his companion’s point of view) as a “nutcake” was funny. I know where he’s coming from. It’s hard not think that someone who wants to fly a hundred miles to collect some penguin dropping might be a little strange.
The other readings, which will be discussed in class tomorrow, bring to mind the term ‘paranoia’. ("In the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Moneybags and his newly re-energized global monopolies and financiers...")

The remnants of a whaling boat at Cape Hallett, Antarctica. Now it serves as a shelter for Adelie penguins.

Week 5

Minke whale, Ross Sea, Antarctica

The frontier has been a fundamental part of America and a frontier without a mythology is unimaginable. I don’t know that the blame for the mythology of the American frontier can entirely be laid at Frederick Jackson Turner’s feet. As Popper notes, there were more than a dozen biographies of Daniel Boone written before the 1880s. All cultures have had myths and heroes. The difference is that our heroes weren’t gods. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill. As an unnamed person said in The Significance of the Frontier in American History “when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow.” Even the fictional characters were just men.
Even some sixty years after the Census had determined that the frontier was gone, men like Chuck Yeager and John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were still exploring a frontier. On June 21^st, 2004, the first private manned spaceflight occurred. This should have been one of those brass band and fireworks events in our history. It merited perhaps five minutes of time on CNN. Now, the frontier is the ‘urban fringe’ and we treat the mythology like that god-awful lamp an elderly aunt has given us. We are embarrassed to own it but we can’t get rid of it. We don’t have an identifiable frontier and we can’t take risks. Sure, there are extreme sports and adrenaline junkies but there is a difference between strapping a snowboard to your feet and jumping from an airplane and strapping snowshoes to your feet and exploring the length of the Rockies or hauling hundreds of pounds of glass photographic negative plates thousands of miles to photograph Yosemite. As a society, we’ve abandoned the back roads for the security and comfort of the freeway. And that’s too bad.

Bless you Sir Edmund Hillary. I hope there’s a special place for trailblazers.

If You Ain't the Lead Dog...

I don’t know what to make of Cultural Geography: A Survey of Perceptions Held by Cultural Geography Specialty Group Members. A ranking like that is going to be subjective. The Cultural Geography Specialty Group has taken measures to make the ranking in a variety of ways, it is still subjective. I did get some interesting titles from the article! How could I resist a title like Fast Food, Stock Cars, and Rock ‘n’ Roll?

So many books, so little time. There is a lot of writing about geography out there, so it isn’t just about maps, but about what and why something is there. Pierce Lewis says, “…literate description and clear thinking … we find it in… guides prepared by and for professional geographers. More often we find it in writings by folklorists, cultural historians, and landscape architects, by scholars and laymen of any calling. Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Literature isn’t all academia. Some of my favorite stories aren’t about geography, but place. Lewis Grizzard, long-time columnist for The Atlanta Journal, had a tremendous ability to describe small town life. Tony Hillerman writes stories set in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, featuring Native American tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Sharon McCrumb’s setting is Appalachia. She takes a folk tale or ballad and fills in the untold parts. At the same time she tells a parallel story set in contemporary times and weaves the two stories together. In The Ballad of Frankie Silver she tells the story of Frankie Silver, a young woman convicted of killing her husband and burning the body and the story of Lafayette ‘Fate’ Harkrider who is awaiting execution for a particularly gruesome killing and why neither character will tell the truth about what occurred, even if it means their life. Writing about regions needn’t be purely academic, it can be for fun.

Lewis’ Small Town in Pennsylvania was of particular interest. Open Google Earth and type “Camas Valley, OR” into the ‘fly to’ bar. That is a small town. The “Entering Camas Valley” and “Leaving Camas Valley” signs aren’t quite nailed to the same post, but a kid with a strong arm could maybe throw a mudball from one to the other. If you move the cursor to 43.00.53.98N 123.40.35.42W (the se end of Burma Road, you’ll see a collection of buildings. There was if, I remember right, a house, a barn, a woodshed, a chicken coop and a detached garage (used mostly for butchering jacklighted deer). The only time it was used for a car was if the jacklighted deer was still in the trunk of the car. That’s one of many places I lived as a kid. There was a beaver pond nearby. It was impossible to sneak up on them but if you sat quiet and still, after a while they’d reappear until you moved or made a sound. Then a slap of tail and they’d vanish. Most summer days weren’t spent at home. There was nothing there we needed. There were apple trees, huckleberries, thimbleberries and hazelnut bushes out in the fields. We’d usually take a sandwich on our excursion but it was more of a courtesy than a necessity. There patches of wild strawberries. They were about the size of my little fingernail and tasted like strawberry flavored sugar. Strawberries from the grocery store are a disappointment. They’re huge, but just don’t have the taste. The visual has replaced the flavor. That isn’t just a memory of the “good old days.” Down the road a piece, (a piece being an actual distance for us), was a cherry tree. That tree was strictly off limits. Which means that we would often be found straddling the branches of that cherry tree gorging on the fruit and spiting the seeds at each other. Cherries still taste just as good today. It was a great time and place to be a kid. Then you grow up and there’s nothing there. Logging has been banned and the mills are closed. The nearest college is about a hundred miles away. The little girls you threw mudballs at still hold a grudge. The small town is obsolete. It once had a function but the automobile and the suburbs ended that. It was hoped by some that the Internet and telecommuting would be the salvation of the small town, but it’s cheaper to outsource to India. I doubt that Camas Valley will become a ghost town. I think that the suburbs will expand and absorb everything, like The Blob did.

The common thread I see in the articles is about communicating your observations. Several of the articles are about geographic writing. Cultural Geography: A Survey of Perceptions Held by Cultural Geography Specialty Group Members is less about ranking and more about being able to communicate.

Week 2 readings

 Adelie penguin, Cape Adare, Antarctica

Having just polished off a Big Mac for breakfast, I suppose Obsessed With Nutrition? is a good place to start commenting on the readings. Bread bolstered with the Omega-3 fatty acids? I think a tuna sandwich would work just as well. Our diet is a two edged sword. The availability, variety, and freshness mean that I’m likely to eat more than I need, simply because it tastes good. That same availability, variety, and freshness also means that I can be sure that I have any needed vitamins, minerals and nutrients. And Obsessed With Nutrition? doesn’t address organic food. Thanks, but I’ll pass. Those preservatives keep the food edible longer. And besides, at my age all the preservatives I’ve eaten are likely the only thing that keeps me from crumbling to dust like Christopher Lee at the end of a vampire movie. Our collective lifespan suggest that our collective diet is fine and orthorexia is silliness.

There are numerous ways to define “region”. But I don’t believe that any single method alone can give an accurate definition. Some have used dialect or accent, others have used the ratio of mules to horse and Zelinsky used as part of his definition, the type of building materials. The influence of radio and television and the way speakers with a Southern accent are viewed have contributed to a decline in that particular accent. Since horses and mules are little used in farming anymore, that ratio would indicate that the South no longer exists. I think that building materials are more a matter of availability rather than a cultural preference. Adobe is used in the Southwest. Trees are more plentiful in the South. The Northeast has clay suitable for bricks. The Great Plains, lacking trees or suitable clay, used sod for buildings until better materials could be imported. I always thought I was in the South when I started seeing headstones in the yards. In the urban (and cooler) North, the dead were transported to the local churchyard for burial. In the rural South, the distances and the heat often precluded transporting bodies to a church for burial so they were just buried in the front yard. Times have changed but it isn’t unusual to see several moss covered tombstones in the yard of a house on a Southern country road.

Some of the readings, I’ll confess, I just don’t understand the point even after multiple readings. I just don’t get the point of Regions on the mind does not equal regions of the mind. Some I am reluctant to address because disagreeing or simply questioning certain orthodoxies can be risky. The comment “Watersheds…are seen as delimiting local natural communities” in the essay ON “BIOREGIONALISM” AND “WATERSHED CONSCIOUSNESS makes me wonder what exactly constitutes an unnatural community?