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.

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

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.