E is for Eastbourne

It's more than a week into the A to Z challenge and I'm already seriously behind. I started behind and I'm behind more. I'm in the slow lane and dawdling, a bit like those folks on the seafront in Eastbourne.

The first time I visited this resort on the south Coast of England, I was visiting Uncle B and Aunt B. Well Aunt B is dead now and the two kids are grown up with their own kids. The girl I met on the long bus ride is now a far off memory. Still, it's a big deal when you are an insecure 17-year-old.

Looking back, I wonder why I was so trapped in myself and bound up in anxiety. I was young and had most of my life in front of me.

Eastbourne is populated by old folks. it's flat and the sea rolls out under the pier like caramel coated glass.

The most exciting thing about Eastbourne is the country around it and the soaring cliffs, most notably Beachy Head. This headland is a staggering 530 feet high. The lighthouse at its foot looks like a model in a front yard.

Beachy Head is beautiful and terrifying. It's frightening because so many people jump off here. In the cult movie Quadrophenia the rocks under Beachy Head are the final resting place for the Mod scooter - a place where dreams of teen rebellion die.

I prefer to see it as the beautiful white edifice where the sun comes up.

D is for Douthat

Douthat is one of America's great parks. It's probably less dramatic than the Grand Canyon but your chances of dying here are significantly lower.

Douthat State Park is in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. West Virginia is within sight. We rented a cabin here out of season and did a lot of the cliche things like hanging out by a fire we started ourselves, in a hearth as opposed to the heart of the forest, and the whole icy, sticky s'mores thing. S'mores is a quintessentially American thing. I don't really get the whole marshmallow, chocolate and cookie burned fusion thing. I have never met anyone who ate more than two in one sitting.

I'd recommend Douthat out of season, though when the lake is empty, the mountains are serene and lined with snow. In the summer, the place is full of campers and RVs.

My longtime promise to take the kids to the beach remains unfulfilled. Perhaps they'll take me there one day when I can happily drool out the side of my mouth and quietly chide the wild antics of 50-year-old whippersnappers.

The use of this term just led to a major digression. What the heck is a whippersnapper anyhow? The website Phrase Finder points out they were layabouts in the 17th century who would hang about on street corners snapping whips. Presumably, they didn't qualify for the next iPhone upgrade.

If you visit Douthat, make sure to hike the Blue Suck Falls and Tuscarora Overlook. Don't expect Niagra Falls or even Cascade Falls. The Blue Suck Falls is aptly named.

C is for Charlottesville

I used to like Charlottesville. Then it lost its innocence. 

I heard people say a similar thing after the Virginia city became a byword for racist tensions during the Unite the Right furor in 2017. The reality is more complex.

When I first arrived in places like Charlottesville, Charleston, and Savannah I was wooed over by their charms. You do the tourist thing, You go on the plantation circuit; you sit on sunny porches and drink iced tea. Even the word antebellum seemed quaint, conjuring up the shade under magnolia trees in long southern afternoons.

If there is one lesson from Charlottesville, it's that the past casts a long shadow. The horrors of the events of August 11 and August 12, 2017, somewhat obscure the fact the protests sparked by a proposal to remove a giant statue of Robert E. Lee in the city.

 Virginia has an uneasy relationship with its past. Even the founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson who crafted the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Monticello are tainted. As you dig beneath the surface, you soon realize places like Charlottesville never had much innocence.

The tour of Monticello dwells on Jefferson's books and ideas. It treads carefully over his ownership of other human beings and the nature of his relationship with Sally Hemings.

Monticello is a pleasant enough place to while away an hour or two. However, I was somewhat bemused to pay so much to be bused military style on a tour of a house that must be the size of the latrine at Chatsworth back home. Just saying.

B is for Baltimore

I struggled to think of a city I had visited beginning with B. This was curious because I lived in Birmingham for the first seven years of my life and studied in Bristol. If I'm to be honest - and I try not to as a rule - I have probably blocked out the Birmingham connections. England's second city in the 1970s was a lot grimmer than it is now. I carry choice memories, though, such the concrete acres of the Bullring with the squat and blackened church of Saint Martin rising from the slabs. I have vivid memories too of a bomb scare in a department store and having to get out fast. There was nothing romantic in my childhood, just too much concrete, memories of long bus rides and the ever-present menace of the IRA.

Only later in my life after hearing terrible tales have I come to cherish my childhood. I cherish it for its uneventfulness. I have come to realize there are so many kids out there who would kill for uneventful, although killing has a habit of rendering a childhood suddenly eventful and not in a good way. Still, Birmingham has never felt like home. It's hard to pinpoint anywhere that has.

I realize my thoughts are far now from Baltimore. I've only been to the city once back in 2014. I was camping with my kid and she was keen to get out of the tent after the previous night's chili tasting. I always wanted to visit Baltimore because I wanted that ' big city' feel and that edginess. I also figured we could be original and post pics of the Inner Harbor on Instagram.

This was a perfect time with my kid before the big bad world, too much homework, iPhones, and teen friends kicked in.

We found pleasant streets in Baltimore and the excellent Walters Art Museum. We had successfully missed the Hope Diamond the previous day but found the famous Walters hermaphrodite first time. "Back of the that," I commented. I think my daughter was just a little confused.

Then driving west home we became lost in some not-so-pleasant streets. I can't recall seeing so many boarded-up, rotting blocks of homes and we were forced to visit Glasgow as a kid. I recall feeling that small nervous tic tic in my neck spreading north and south with every wrong turn east and west. These were the days before everyone used GPS.

We eventually got back to DC. Within 18 months many of the streets were drove down were on fire during the riots. Baltimore is not for the faint-hearted.

A is for Arches

Entering the A to Z Challenge late at night was obviously a foolhardy thing to do. But it was fun back in the day, right? When I had time and inspiration and all that good stuff. So I entered anyhow in the absence of time, and inspiration and any modicum of good stuff.

But I'm just posting pictures. Arches is easy too as I wrote about it last year. So you can read my words of wisdom elsewhere on this blog. As national parks go, Arches is up there with the best. Will I ever return? Probably not. Too much to see, too little time, onto the next and all that....

Now where can I find that pesky badge?

About that Climatic Apocalypse Thing

I hadn't looked at my global warming novella for a while but recent events led me to revisit it. Since writing it for the A-Z challenge a couple of years ago much that I predicted has come to pass. Trump is indeed the President of the United States. While less frightening and more ridiculous than my President Jackson, Trump has come to represent the ostrich mentality that pervades public life.

The official line of climate change denial, even as a government report warns of grave consequences, is both staggering and predictable.

But is it worse to deny what's going on than to draw up elaborate plans that are never implemented? Rio, Kyoto, and Paris came and went and climate change marched on unabated.

In the meantime, drought caused a massive migration that is linked to the origins of the Syrian war, thousands perished when a hurricane hit Puerto Rico and nobody cared and California was hit by the most devastating wildfire in its history.

All great empires fall, but the technological age is due to come crashing down sooner than most. Even the Roman Empire lasted 507 years. Going back 507 years takes us to 1511, a year when the Portuguese took over Malacca and Steve Jobs had yet to invent the iPhone.

It remains to be seen if humans will survive but this most ingenious of ape is also the most stubborn and impervious to change. If as Shakespeare said there are seven ages of Man, we are rapidly falling into the last, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything and certainly sans any common sense.

Yet in his haplessness man is more like another Shakespearian character, Hamlet who in his muddled quest for justice makes everything worse.

Man is entering his twilight and his descent is not going to be pretty. If the overall life-span of the planet is seen as a 24-hour clock the Age of Man will probably not even occupy a full second when all is said and done.

This is a sobering thought that may displease those who believe we are God's chosen people and as such are given the power to do what we see fit with the other species. Far be it for me to climb into the pulpit here but I would say unto thee - 65 million years.

The significance of this figure is it's the time the dinosaurs inhabited the earth pretty much from the top of the food chain given their oversized teeth. Give that time to sink it. The dinosaurs had brains the size of peas. They were bloody stupid but they hung around for 65 million years. Like our Great Leader, they also had small hands.

I digress. I'm not going to pretend my novella is a great work of art. It might make a couple of people think. It might not. Here's the latest extract.

The Levelling of Suburbia

The night Patrick took a call from Gabrielle was exactly 25 years to the hour since they last parted company. He didn’t realize it then. There wasn’t much space or time left in his city to be sentimental anymore and the day-to-day game of survival had played havoc with his human side.

Gabrielle with her sensible white skirts that smelled obscurely floral represented a half-forgotten world that hummed to the sound of crickets, lawnmowers, and greetings of old folks over the garden fence.

Her wholesomeness had made her passion and his sadness at their parting all the more surprising. Although fragments of Gabrielle clutched at his dreams, she often transformed into other girls. Patrick had not heard a cricket for years.

Patrick’s conviction that Gabrielle moved in a different and more gentle world made the call more surprising. He struggled and stumbled over his words as his brain played catch up. Her tone made the experience more surreal.

“Patrick. They were in your town. They’ve gone. I’ve heard nothing for three days.”

“I’m sure they are fine Gabrielle. It’s a big place. A city more than a town…”

Her shriek of a voice cut him short. It was the howl of a wounded beast, something he would never have expected from his high school sweetheart.

“Please Patrick.”

“Gabrielle. Where were they?”

“In Eastern Falls.”

“Oh.”

Patrick’s mind had played tricks on him. He remembered San Francisco and their home in Eastern Falls but he forgot they lived so near to him decades ago. Patrick wondered why she had called him but he didn’t try to placate Gabrielle anymore. He had always liked her parents. They were simple country folk who had worked hard on the land before they made money. They approved of him and tried to see the positives in his negatives. Patrick had never met Gabrielle’s son but he had seen her kids on social media in the days when he still casually stalked her.

He felt something rising up in his chest. Like a need for valor to make up for the times he failed to measure up in the past.

“It won’t be easy to get into Eastern Falls but I know someone who has Fire Zone clearance. I’ll do everything I can. Where are you?”

“I live in Iceland now. I’m trying to get a flight back. I’ve been talking to them for two days but it’s hard for Outlanders.”

Patrick requested her contact details and hung up. Eastern Falls was only 20 miles across the city but nobody was going there. In the day after the inferno swept down from the hills, long lines of cars and refugees with little more than their shirts on their backs had headed out of the Fire Zone.

It was a routine sight in this part of California. The Eastern Falls fire was the 20^th to burn in the state since July but this one had fueled rumors of mass casualties although the only story about the fire in the Free Press concerned President Jackson’s morale-boosting photo shoot with the firefighters.

Patrick podded at his phone as he drove west until Joel’s voice came out of the device.

“Jeez Pat, why do you want to go there?”

“I’m looking for someone. Can you give me clearance?”

There was a silence on the other side. Pat expected him to quote him a figure.

“You know it’s rough there. I’ll be liable if you get hurt.”

“It’s OK. I’m a big boy.”

Joel emitted a long sigh. “You saved my life during the Mexican War. I owe you one. I can’t say this is the type of favor I wanted to do for you, but if you insist. What’s the address?”

Patrick relayed it to another trademark long sigh. He looked out for the verification code on his phone that would allow him to get to Eastern Falls.

Two hours later, Patrick was on the road. The highway was empty traveling west but long lines of vehicles came out him. There were cars blackened by smoke. Some had bumpers and sidings warped and melted from heat damage but they kept going. He saw three kids drawing lines in the ash of the windows of a driverless van and casually wondered what had happened to their parents.

The people on foot were the most pitiful evacuees. He saw a family with their household belongs in an old Radio Flyer, dragging a wounded dog behind them. The children were screaming incessantly through their hunger.

And still, the ambulances came from the west, although Patrick couldn’t fathom who or what they would be carrying anymore.

Over the mountains ahead the sky was a whirling mass of blacks and gray spirals, a cocktail mixed for drinks in a diabolical bar at the end of the world. The fire had receded from Eastern Falls but it still marched up and down the mountains above the town, threatening to return with a change in the wind.

When he reached the city limits, Patrick encountered the walls of wire put up by the authorities. A thickset man wearing the slash logo of the Fire Enforcement Force marched over to him, placing a red hand like a stop sign in front of his car.

“Why are you here?”

Patrick had learned the hard way how to keep calm during such encounters.

“I'm seeking information about family members?”

The FEF official’s face became even redder.

“Only authorized people. Move on.”

Patrick held up his phone to display the verification code. The FEF officer still looked annoyed but he removed his hand from the car.

“OK proceed. Nobody is allowed beyond the Eighth Parallel.”

Two FEF officers opened the gate and Patrick drove forward. His breathing became labored as he took in the ashen air. Even here, the flames had licked at buildings. Stores were ripped open by fire and looters and charred pieces of paper blew across the road. The deeper he went into Eastern Falls, the more alien and forbidding the landscape became. Now buildings were harm-formed, warped or wiped out completely. Bodies lay on the sidewalk under tarps. Patrick screwed up his eyes and tried to reconcile it all with the fires of his childhood, the cliché of s’mores in the circle by the tent and his delight as a kid in making the perfect s’more – singed but retaining its form. He recalled the day he huddled around the campfire with Gabrielle and how he screamed when he touched a smoldering log. He felt both hot and cold at the same time at the thought. He imagined the pain replicated 200 fold as the flames consumed his body. It was a level of torture more in keeping with medieval than modern times and yet the people of Eastern Falls had burned as badly as most pained martyrs of the Middle Ages.

Patrick was disturbed from his reverie by the bleeping of his sat nav. He had arrived on Poplar Close. He saw scorched squares that were once lawns. Poplar Close had been no different from suburbia the world over. Houses that were too large built of materials intended to fail. His own parents had lived in a similar place, fooled by disingenuous words of developers who spoke of granite countertops and conservatories. Patrick wondered that such sterility could ever be passed off as a slice of paradise lost. Today the subdivisions were little more than fodder for the hungry fires. Still, the Westons had continued to live there. Perhaps their erstwhile poverty had lulled them into thinking suburbia was something better, a place to aspire to even as the local authorities cut off the water and the trash pickups.

Patrick drove down Poplar Close wondering if poplars had ever grown near the subdivision and when Eastern Falls had a waterfall. Shadows stretched across the road where the plumes of smoke still blocked out the sun. He wore his mask on but was still coughing quietly beneath it. Every so often, he swerved to avoid an obstacle in the road, a charred car, TV set or a bundle he did not want to examine closely. He was surprised to find the mailbox of 1238 Popular Close was still intact, sticking defiantly out of the ground at a crazy angle. The house behind was a mass of blackened beams. Patrick got out of his car and walked up the drive. A beam creaked within the house and fell to the ground. Patrick shut his eyes momentarily to vanquish the scene. Nobody could have got out of the house alive.

An image returned to him of the honeysuckle bush that was once 100 yards from here and the day he drank beer with Mr. Weston and joked about how watery it was as they tried to light the barbecue. The days when people burned for fun had turned antique in his memory.

He walked back to the car, his shoes crunching on cinders. Suddenly he heard an engine and a car inched into the close. He picked up his pace fearing looters had arrived who might kill him on the spot for his car. However, a middle-aged woman and a man got out of the car. They stood in the road impassively and stared at a forlorn pile of rubble where a house had been.

Patrick looked closer. Below the lines and neck fat, he made out a certain familiarity. 

When he realized who they were he almost forgot the grim surroundings and skipped toward them.

“Pete, Andrea, you remember me. I used to date Gabrielle. I’m Patrick. Remember how we hung out at the school.”

Pete and Andrea were brother and sister. Patrick assumed they must be in their late 40s now.

They were silent. They looked beyond him and through him. The silence hung long and low on the ashen air and Patrick didn’t think they were going to respond. Finally, Andrea spoke up.

“We have never met you.”

Whatever Happened to The (American) Heroes?

There's a song by The Stranglers called Whatever Happened to the Heroes. It describes how Leon Trotsky "got an ice pick that made his ears burn." The theme is "no more heroes anymore."

I'm not convinced the Machiavellian Trotsy was a hero. A visionary, perhaps. But there are certainly no more heroes anymore.

The American hero has been on his last legs for a while. He's that Monty Python knight who fights on limbless. He's riding out into the sunset on a horse with no name. This realization hit me with the deaths of John McCain and Burt Reynolds.

McCain, as we know, was a real-life hero who endured torture and went on to do great things. I don't know much about Reynolds' personal life but he was a loveable kind of all America tough guy who loomed large on the screens of my childhood. I never really rated him as an actor. Some of his characters were downright annoying. Then I reassessed my opinion after seeing his Oscar-nominated performance in Boogie Nights.

Since his death, the refrain "boogie nights are always the best in town" became lodged in my head and won't go away, even though the days of disco have receded to the margins of my memory.

Back when I grew up the American heroes loomed larger and cast long shadows. Their fortitude offered a curious contrast with the spineless cast of liars who strut today's stage clad in the transparent clothes of reality TV.

Reynolds was hardly a loveable character in Boogie Nights. He was a hard-hearted maker of pornography. However, his character has an avuncular adherence to a certain set of values. In Deliverance, Reynolds is Lewis Medlock, a dashing and swashbuckling Atlanta city slicker with a smattering of outdoors knowledge. His gung-ho character is eventually brought crashing to earth by an arrow.

The Reynolds in the closing stages of the movie is unrecognizable from the character who stepped boldly into the wilderness. So it was with Reynolds' life. In his last days, the fragile character in a wheelchair bore no resemblance to the heartthrob of yesteryear.

Reynolds saw a lot of potential movie roles slip away. He could have been Han Solo. Loves eluded him too. Sally Field, his other half, slipped away. After his death she said. "He will be in my history and my heart as long as I live."

Like the classic American hero and the greatest of Shakespeaker's characters, Reynolds was flawed. He is one of the last of a dying breed. No more heroes anymore.

In Devil's Garden

You have to drive all the way through Arches National Park to get to Devil's Garden but it is far from undiscovered. The trail from the parking lot leads through a narrow defile in the rock to arches, spires and a maze of narrow rock walls called "Fins." These form where persistent rainwater erodes parallel features caused by the uplift of salt deposits below the surface.

At least that's the official version. I prefer to believe that the devil was tending his garden one ghastly night and hewed these features out of the rock with his hideous pitch folk.

This section of Arches may be in God's Own Country but the weirdness of the red and rugged canyons here feels more like walking through a simmering slice of hell that the green pastures of heaven or Jerusalem which we all know is found in England's green and pleasant land.

I looked up to the red chimneys or rocks and the buzzards soaring above me and followed a trail that wound up the rocks like the spine of some long dead sea creature. There are many arches up here. Many may lack the 'wow factor' of Delicate Arch but it's thrilling to find one hidden away behind a canyon framing a bright green shock of foliage in the afternoon sun.

Landscape Arch, however, is far from humble. It towers between two rock walls, stretched to an almost impossible width.

In 1991, a 60-foot wide slab of rock fell from Landscape Arch and headed for the trail. Miraculously nobody was hurt but one brave or foolhardy visitor had time to snap a picture of the rock as it rolled toward him.

Devil's Garden is not a place for the meek. It bristles with dangers and the path heads up to a precipice. The crowds fall away the deeper you travel into Devil's Garden. 

I felt alone but also at peace in the wilderness. I didn't all virtuous like Christ tempted by the Devil in the desert. I don't believe in the notion of finding ourselves in the wilderness or in uncovering clues in stream beds or under juniper bushes. I do believe that we all need to get away from it for a while and look on savage and remote places. I believe in letting the scale of it all wash over us, of letting go of our pent up obsessions.

It's a bit like that first time your parents introduce you to the night sky and try to explain the vastness of it all. How it would take millions of years to travel to the nearest star and the light you see from a celestial body may be long dead.

We are a vast universe within our own skin but we are as insignificant as the fleeting white flowers on the columbine. Even great rulers waste away in the vastness of the desert. In the words of that fleeting genius Shelley.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Between a Rock - Reflections on Arches National Park

The desert can be an unforgiving place. Still, there are times in your life when you crave extremes. When I headed to Moab, I wanted to be between a rock and a hard place, although the cliche jars. I wanted dry stream beds and cactus as brittle as broken glass.

Perhaps I was haunted by that time when I drove back through Bakewell, so many years ago back through the Derbyshire Dales with their quaint tea rooms and honey colored stones. When you are pursued by your intrusive thoughts, you don’t want Bakewell pies. 

You don’t want meandering brooks and bridges and hordes of tourists or to wander around Chatsworth to see ladies in frilly frocks. You want sand as hard as iron and unyielding rock faces.

I wasn’t so shaken this time but there was the sad realization of the breaking of the human spirit, of something that seemed of substance but crumbled like a foundation of sand. It had been a long journey across the bone-dry ridge to a shimmering mirage. Had the last few years been so illusory like the world viewed a looking glass, down a rabbit hole?  Perhaps I had been blinded by the lidless sun. I had ignored her jagged flaws and discounted my own. I had glossed over it, belittled it.

I had learned lessons too. Pedestals are only for athletes and the memory of the elevation fades as soon as they step off. Gold is a base metal and it gleams rather than glitters. Nobody is perfect. Not even a perfect stranger. The colors leach under the glare of the desert sun.

Today we retrace some of those footsteps. I fall into an easy rhythm next to her. I adore her but I eschew those old notions of perfection. We are far from symmetrical. We are two steps from the edge. The human spirit is like Balanced Rock and it will fall into the abyss without care.

Moab can quickly remove the layers from the soul. The earth here is so red and the approach into the town with its gas stations, wreckers’ yards and Jeeps chewing up the earth, made me feel small. 

I drove to an unprepossessing hotel and paid above the odds for a room. I didn’t shop around. I wanted to get out of Moab and into Arches. I wanted to see the weirdness, the deformed rocks, the high arches or stone and the far-off snows of the La Sal Mountains,

Arches does not disappoint. The only downside is the crowds. After enduring the long lines to the visitor center, I drove up to Park Avenue and walked down a dry riverbed surrounded by high buttes. The last time I was in a place called Park Avenue it was in the middle of the city. We drank too much and forgot where we were staying incurring the wrath of a New York cabbie. The place with the canopy. Behind the big tower.

Park Avenue in Arches has towers too, hulking great masses of sandstone that line the path. The heady cocktail of languages here reminded me of the Parthenon or Venice. However, walking usually thins out the crowds and Park Avenue was no exception. Within 20 minutes, I was in relative solitude under the austere castles of rock.

I fell into a pattern, stopping at the viewpoints along the route. I admired the petrified hills that formed a labyrinth of hobbit homes into the desert, the livid green of Fiery Furnace with its fierce yellow foliage.

It took me a couple of hours to see what people come to Arches for. You don’t need to be Columbo to deduce people come to Arches to see arches. 

Our spirits crave an illusive perfection. We have built cathedrals replete with arches to glorify God for centuries. Still, we worship such structures. This national park has the largest concentration of natural stone arches in the world. There are more than 2,000 but most of them are unvisited.

At the trailhead that features Double O Arch and Double Arch, I started to get a feel for the structures that define the park. Many of those who went to see the arches had the air of visitors ticking off items on a shopping list. They talked about home prices and neighbors with drug problems. They used names of places in California that made me feel far from home.

It seems crass to talk about home prices amid the serenity of the arches, sacrilegious even.

Evening was approaching by the time I embarked on the path to Delicate Arch. 

It’s described as a short trail of 1.5 miles each way. I had little water but the temperature was falling. The reds and greens of the desert came alive as the sun slipped away. Delicate Arch is the most photographed place in Arches National Park and it was crowded even later in the afternoon. Still, there is serenity here in open spaces, even though the path felt like far longer than 1.5 miles and my last gulp of water was soon gone.

So many iconic places can be a disappointment in real life. The Bridge of Sighs is so small, the Parthenon always seems clad in scaffolding. 

Even the Grand Canyon can fail to convey its sheer size. Delicate Arch is as breathtaking as I imagined it would be.

The arch rises from a bed of smooth rocks framed by the snow-capped mountains. It's a lovely and lonely place where it's possible to steal a moment away from the crowds. Although Delicate Arch is the highlight of many visits to the national park, I decided to return the next day to explore Devil's Garden.

On The Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde

Back east hemmed in by the heat, the tall buildings and trees teeming with insects, I often think of the west and its honey-colored canyons.

Being in the desert fulfilled a dream from long ago when the swing would point west and I would close my eyes in the setting sun and think of cowboys, stream trains and cacti crowding the skyline. The old cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado live on in my imagination now. I think of the faraway world of the ancient people and the words of Willa Cather from The Song of the Lark.

"From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified, unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter - like the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the sun - but always present, a part of the air one breathed. At night when Thea dreamed about the anyon - or in the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it - her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in the sunlight the swallows, the cedar smell, and that peculiar sadness - a voice out of the past, not very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally."

Cather has always encapsulated the feel of the West, the loneliness, and the promise. The melancholy ghosts of the past.

The Ancestral Pueblo people made Mesa Verde their home for 700 years but in the end, their simple dream of living off the land died. In a precursor of what was to come, they used up the resources and could no longer sustain themselves. Still, the dream of waking up and falling asleep to the rhythms of the canyon lives on in the quiet places under the cliffs.

In Mesa Verde, I found myself alone in the honey-colored canyons. There was no cellphone coverage and 21st Century distractions. Just a simple museum with a visitor center, the serene cliff houses, the skeletal desert trees and the buzzards circling overhead. I was passing out of one world into another for the afternoon.

I took the Petroglyph Trail, walking briskly in the still chilly afternoon sunshine. I was alone on much of the trail that traverses the side of the canyon. I took a guidebook and stopped at many of the markers along the way to read the descriptions. It struck me that in this age of information overload and the 24-hour news cycle, how little I knew about these plants that sustained the Pueblo people, how little I knew about the bedrock of life hundreds of years ago.

In the desert, I found a search for knowledge and a world miles away from our money-obsessed existence. At least for an afternoon.

Without the guidebook, I would not have recognized Mormon Tea or known its leaves are merely small scales that aid in conserving water. Mexicans, Indians, and early Mormon pioneers brewed a tea from the stems of this plant and it was used to cure a raft of diseases.

The pinyon pine had been ripped open by porcupines exposing wounds on the tree, allowing organisms to infect it; a large juniper was infected by bark beetles. If porcupines damage too many trees, their food supplies will be depleted and they will die. Thus nature has its checks and balances and the relentless cycle will go on, probably long after the extinction of man.

Walking the Petroglyph Trail reminded me of the microscopic nature of our world. One man is a small speck in the canyons out east and not even a pinprick in the vastness of the Cosmos.

In this borderless wilderness, we are all destined to wander companionless like Shelley's moon for much of our micro existences. The ancient people recognized as much when they carved the petroglyphs in Mesa Verde in the rocks that were once part of an ancient sea.

The symbols on the rock include the Horned Toad Clan that denotes the split of the people who migrated here from the other clans and the Lizard spirit symbol whose influence over the people led them into a period of directionless wandering that approached a state of lunacy.

Looking over the mesas, I could see how you could lose your mind out here. In a curious way, I could also see how I could regain it.

Mark Z and His Infectious Facebook Habit

In 2011, I wrote in this blog about how it was time to defriend Mark Zuckerberg and surgically remove Facebook from our lives. Facebook, I argued, was becoming increasingly Big Brother and was monitoring our every movement. It was doing it in a more insidious way than having an angry face staring from TV screens into every room. Of course, a lot of things have happened since 2011 but a lot of things have stayed the same.

Two things strike me about that blog. The first is that I did not heed my own advice. I probably check Facebook at least 10 times a day and not because I derive any pleasure from it. It’s become a habit as mundane yet as routine as making one’s bed. I’m not sure that’s a good example.

Secondly, the Big Brother concerns about Facebook have grown beyond the theoretical to become a great big orange, in your face reality.

Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump’s election campaign, improperly obtained data from as many as 50 million people from Facebook and used it in nefarious ways that may or may not have impacted how we voted.

The result was a rare appearance of Zuckerberg before the U.S. Senate and an article in The Guardian by Julia Carrie Wong about a mistake she made 14 years ago with a boy and no, while Zuckerberg did not give her herpes, the virus of Facebook has wormed its way into our lives and infected relationships.

Given all we know about the corrosive nature of Facebook, why do we still do it? To be fair this can be said about many facets of life. Why do we derive perverse pleasure from pulling nose hairs on the freeway in front of loved ones? To some extent, this may be because we are oppositional and take some pleasure from making people squirm.

It's like those people who publish stomach churning ‘couple’ pictures on Facebook and frame them in a heart for good measure. The subtext here is 'we have love in all it’s sickening lovedom and you are stuck home alone cleaning up cat sick.' We are getting action and you are not. We are far too cool for school.

Much of Facebook is about projection rather than reality. We post the pics that hide our sagging double chins. We breathe in. We seek to look debonair or like 'dad of the year' taking the kids to Billy’s Popsicles to rot out their teeth on an estranged parent’s watch.

We don’t wake up in the night and tell Facebook what we are really thinking. To be fair I have a Facebook friend who does that. S from a less desirable London borough who tells us less desirable things about her life, her workmates who generally make her want to puke, the fact she hates getting up so early; the delayed train, the broken arm, the ex-lover who should be avoided with a poopy stick because he’s a stalker. Her life is as rancid as anything that has ever come into contact with Sean Hannity. And we all need to know every putrid detail.

Funnily enough, nobody wants to read this stuff. We don’t want to read about someone’s life as a train wreck because there are elements that are disconcertingly familiar. We may not be S from the sad London Borough but we are all a few inches from derailing.

My trip back to my 2011 blog self makes me realize how much things stay the same. Mark Z can look as nerdy as the nerdiest kid in physics class and we still won’t defriend him. Looking back to my blog of 2011, I realize something else. People read me and responded. I was the popular kid in the class. Mark may even have wanted to be me before he started making $2 million a minute. Now I write to a void but hey – I have 482 friends on Facebook and plenty of love pictures. What more does a self-respecting guy need in 2018?