So, call me a hypocrite. These are made in China. The top flashlight and radio were purchased in 2006 and the light’s been used frequently since then, including last night.
The crank side
Radio
Here’s how those came into my life:
Friday, September 22, 2006 Placitas, New Mexico
Winterizing
Today I was finishing up battening down the hatches on the old adobe for winter. The last week or so it’s been into the low 40s a couple of times, nights, so I’ve been pecking away at putting up plastic over the insides of most of the windows to cut down on the amount of wind blowing through the house. I came across some car-covers free a while back when the lady was wrapping up at the flea market and was going to haul them to the dump because they didn’t sell.
I’m cutting up those to staple over the plastic in hopes it will provide insulation. Last year it got cold enough in here to impress me with my pansyish non-pioneer spirit, even with Mexican blankets hung over all the windows and the front door on the inside.
Anyway, I ran spang out of staples and plastic, mid-job, so I toodled down to Rio Rancho Home Depot to buy more. The clerk asked me in passing, “Does it look like snow out there to you?”
I’d been asking myself the same question almost from daybreak onward. “Pretty early for it. Almost never get snow before the first of October. But it’s happened.”
Clerk laughed, handed me my bag, and I headed back through Bernalillo toward the mountains.
As I passed the Dollar General I was reminded I was running short of tortillas and a couple of other incidentals, so I swung in. I always take a look at their half-price clearance items, which are dirt-cheap and sometimes something a man could use.
There on the half-price clearance table was a plastic package with a hand-crank flashlight and a handcrank AM/FM Weather radio. $12 regular price. Hmmm.
Some little voice in my mind says, “Jules, old man, batteries are dead on your flashlight, and likely are dead on your radio. You need to buy that $6 package of flashlight and battery just in case the power goes out for a few days.”
So I put it in the plastic box hanging off my arm, picked up a few extra cans of canned fruit and fruit c*cktail, and headed for the checkout. Clerk knows me by sight and we’re amiable.
“You think it looks like snow out there?”
“You been talking to the guy down at Home Depot?”
Blank look.
“Guy down there just said the same thing. I think you might be right. That’s the reason I’ve picked that half-price radio and flashlight off your clearance table.”
Another blank look, then he squints at the plastic thingie with all that in it. “Was this on the clearance table?”
“Yup.”
He calls the manager over. “Is this half price?”
“No. The half-price stuff was all the summer stock… barbeque things and that.”
I scowl. “Okay. I’m not paying $12 for it. Don’t ring it up.”
“You’ll buy it for $6?” She grins at me. We clown around some when I’m in there.
“Five and a half.”
“Six.”
“Sold. Ring it up.”
Sooooo. I ended up with a hand-crank charging flashlight and radio.
The hosses are getting thick coats of hair. I’m thinking it’s going to be an early, bull-goose of a winter.
Mainly the radio and flashlight thing. I confess I haven’t gotten a good look at what the hosses are doing, hair-wise.
Jules
Edited in:
As I re-read this entry I noticed the censor had edited out the nasty part of the word c*cktail. So here I was claiming I’d bought some fruit tail, which I might if I ever come across any, but this wasn’t the day for it. That old censor’s always catching me out when I try to use that nasty word, full-c*cked pistol, c*ck fights, and now fruit c*cktail. Lucky thing for me that old censor’s on the job. Otherwise I’d be saying just awful stuff.
2011 observation regarding automatic censoring out of nasty language: Me, I’m sorry that’s gone away. Having a computer perform the job of straight-man instead of having to wait for some commenting reader to do the job’s a lot more 21st Centuryish. I’m old fashioned that way.
Turned out I was so impressed with that flashlight I included it here: SECTION 10: SURVIVAL AND EMERGENCY SUPPLIES and if I were writing the book again I’d say a lot more about it, including what’s in this post. I have a lot more experience with these now than I did when I wrote the book.
2011, I still use the flashlight frequently and it still does a good job at what it’s supposed to do. The radio was up on a shelf until I began writing this, hadn’t been turned on in a couple of years, dust covering it. I cleaned it up, cranked it for a minute, turned it on and picked up several stations immediately. These things are ‘way too good to be made in China.
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Here are some others I’ve picked up over the years. They’re good too.
I’d wondered when something of this sort would happen without actually believing it ever would.
Someone keeping better track of current events than I do will probably see this as a yawn. . old news. But when someone sent me an email after talking to me on the phone about it yesterday you could have knocked me over with a feather. After pondering it a while this entire grassroots Occupy [fill in the blank] thing strikes me as rhyming a lot with what happened during the early 1990s when the Eastern Block, the USSR, and Iran all fell to pieces in less time than it takes to tell it.
Rich, a close friend, sent me a link to a site, We Are the 99 Percent, which if there’s any substance to it, might be the beginnings of something unpredictable enough to keep it interesting for a while. I suppose I didn’t think there was enough of that left in the world to even consider. My initial reaction was a bit of a ho-hum. These seem to be peaceful folk demonstrating peacefully, which, while gratifying to see going on isn’t likely to undo anything.
But then, in walks someone, or some group called ‘Anonymous’ and joins hands with the Occupy folk.
PC Magazine Article
Here’s the transcript of the latest Occupy Wall Street video from Anonymous:
Greetings, institutions of the media.
We are Anonymous.
The events transpiring within Wall Street have caught our eye.
It seems that the government and federal agencies enjoy enforcing the law a little bit too much. They instate unjust laws as mindless automatons, blindly following orders with soulless precision.
We witness the government enforcing the laws that punish the 99 percent while allowing the 1 percent to escape justice, unharmed, for their crimes against the people.
We have observed this same government failing to enforce even the minimal legal restraints of Wall Street’s abuses. This government who has willingly ignored the greed at Wall Street has even bailed out the perpetrators that have caused our crisis.
We will not stand by and watch the system take over our way of life.
We the people shall stand against the government’s inaction.
We the people will not be witnesses to your corruption and ill-gotten profits.
We will not labor for your leisure.
We will not assist you in any way.
This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.
We will show the world that we are true to our word. On Oct. 10, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On Oct. 10, expect a day that will never, ever be forgotten.
Vox Populi, Vox Anon.
The Voice of The People is The Voice of Anonymous.
That seems to shine an entirely different light on things. I don’t know whether anyone’s actually able to jiggle remote computers in a way that allows them to shut down something like Wall Street Stock Exchange, especially after giving warning ahead of time they plan to do it. But I think making the threat is bound to have every capability in the kingdom concentrated on keeping them from doing it, first, and hauling their butts off to the slammer as soon as they can slap a pair of handcuffs on them.
Gutsy stuff, or a level of confidence surprising from the perspective of a person who figures the powers-that-be can do anything they want to do with impunity. If they manage to do it the resulting power-shift leverage would inevitably seem to make a sharp turn in favor of the people calling themselves the 99 percent. But do or don’t, it pulls things out of the realm of peaceful demonstration and gives the powers the excuse they might have been wishing for to drag out the machine guns against the 99 percenters.
The people posting on the 99 percent site appear to be just regular people with a lot of justified bitterness about how things are going and a determination for legitimate change. But thinking back on the history of revolutions, the signs and banners walking out in front of the parade have always been followed back in the baggage train with enough guillotines to separate a lot of fact from fiction after the dark underbelly of human nature is exposed.
What comes out the other end tends to look a lot different than anyone thought it would going in. If this isn’t just a flash in the pan it sounds as though the people in the collateral damages zones might be in for some interesting times. But, hell. I guess we’re all in the collateral damages zones.
No monsters, no drug-crazed uglies, no cancer from second-hand smoke, no cops kicking down the door with guns drawn interrupted your sleep-path to set you loose from this reality.
It’s another day, and all those things you feared haven’t robbed you of getting to plod through it as best you can.
There’s something to be learned from that.
All that worrying and fretting you were doing yesterday, being scared of germs, or bosses, or cars running over you, or terrorists from somewhere else in this madhouse crawling up on the beaches of America with butcher-knives clenched in their teeth didn’t come in and set off a bomb to destroy you, didn’t poison your water because they’re jealous of the perfect existence you have.
The economy didn’t collapse during the night, dissolving the value of that plastic card with the strip on back telling whether you like cream in your coffee and other essentials about you.
Chinamen didn’t quit working three shifts manufacturing toasters for your breakfast, hair-dryers so’s you don’t have to use a towel instead of wasting a megawatt, sneakers to keep your foots off the carpet, rubber monster toys to give the kids something to do while they eat their burgers. Their factories are still cranking out US flags for you to wave, and rubber SUPPORT OUR TROOPS magnets you can put on your Japanese car.
They’re still believing the imagination of your plastic card means they’ll get something back for their labors eventually, so civilization’s still alive.
All’s well with the world. The things you worried over yesterday didn’t happen.
_________________________________________
Ho hum.
_________________________________________
You might conclude all that worry and fear you allowed to sneak into your life yesterday to influence your thoughts and choices was wasted.
No. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
All that fear caused you to project negative energy and anger all around you.
It helped you make lousy choices to give you more challenges for this life and gave you a leg-up to just keep on doing exactly what you’ve been doing so’s you can keep on doing it while the back of your mind keeps whispering something’s going to go kerplunk. It kept your antennae waving around listening to the airwaves for which monkey wrench is going to stop the flow of rubber monster toys, keep the commode from flushing, or raise the cost of whatever you’re putting up your nose.
But the sun’s up for a new day. Time to decide whether to repeat yesterday, or leave some of that fear behind and try something else. Worrying about getting an ulcer over worrying about getting an ulcer’s not the answer.
A man I went to grammar school, junior high and some high school with, then several decades later became reacquainted and huff-puffed a lot of up and down mountain canyons recently began visiting this blog. If no other reader enjoys the tale, at least he will, because he was there:
The following is copyrighted material from a book I wrote once. I give myself permission to use it here. [ Crazy Lost Gold Mine-ism]
I’ve never concerned myself much with the dangers of wild animals during my extensive time in the woods. Mostly they’ll mind their own business if a person takes reasonable precautions and doesn’t go out of his way to provoke them. In New Mexico backlands of the late 20th century the real threats usually come in the form of humans. When those happen they usually come as suddenly and unexpectedly as finding one’s self in the middle of a herd of elk.
Grasshopper Canyon and Stinking Springs are on the northern end of the Zunis below Oso Ridge on the west face of the mesa. Two canyons run north and south, parallel to the face, half a mile apart, separated from one another by steep, narrow walls several hundred feet high. These two walls consist of coral reef from some ancient time when Oso Ridge was an island. The canyons aren’t easily accessible, so I prospected there a while.
The land below Oso Ridge around Grasshopper Canyon is checker-boarded in ownership. Grasshopper is all National Forest, but immediately south is a section of Navajo tribal land. Adjacent to the Navajo section is a section belonging to the Zuni tribe. Fences between these sections allow a person to always know whether he’s on public land or tribal land.
I was working Grasshopper Canyon with my friend Keith, a stockbroker from Santa Fe. We separated and worked the arroyos southward parallel to one another, gradually moving toward the fence delineating the Navajo section. Occasionally we’d call out through the woods to make certain we weren’t out-distancing one another. The last thing either of us expected was an encounter with another human in those woods.
I was bent over taking samples from the bed of a shallow arroyo, just deep enough so when I straightened I could view the small meadow around me. I stood getting my breath and stretching the kinks out of my back when I saw a man dressed in cammies backing out of the woods at the edge of the meadow. He was being stealthy, carrying a .22 rifle in a ready position. He had twenty to thirty colorful birds hanging on a string around his neck the way a fisherman carries a stringer of fish. As I watched, almost invisible to him with only the top of my head showing above the arroyo, his eyes searched the woods to his right where Keith was working. Keith had called out from there a few moments previously.
Still watching Keith’s direction the man backed toward me until he was only a few feet away from me. “Nice string of birds.” I scrambled up the bank while he spun and pointed the .22 in my general direction.
“My partner’s in the woods back behind you. You don’t want to be firing in that direction.” We studied one another. He eyed the shoulder rig I was wearing and the butt of the 9 mm automatic showing from the bottom. “’You out here killing songbirds?”
Mister Songbird was a young man and from appearances, a Zuni. He stared a moment longer before answering. My impression was that he was considering whether I was a game warden or other law enforcement official. “I’m getting them for Zuni New Year. They let us do that.”
We talked for a few minutes, me accepting what he said at face value, and the tension gradually dissolved. He agreed to get the hell out of the canyon because we were working there and wouldn’t want any shooting. Besides, we’d probably messed up his hunt with our yelling and bustling around the woods. I watched him back into the meadow to the south and allowed myself to sigh with relief.
Back in Santa Fe I called the US Fish and Game Department. I thought there was a remote chance the feds were really allowing Zunis to kill protected species birds on National Forest land. If so, I was prepared to be indignant.
When I told my story the fed was silent a moment. “You are a lucky man,” he observed. “You confronted an armed man committing multiple Federal felonies and he didn’t shoot you.”
* The following didn’t make it into the final draft of the manuscript: The fed also observed the Zuni lad would have spent a lot more years in prison for killing those songbirds than he would have for killing me. I drew a good bit of comfort from knowing that.
Eventually logic won out over the other appeals of the Zuni Mountains as a location for the lost gold mine I was searching for. Although the Zunis were handy for me, being only a few hours drive from Santa Fe, they were too far from Tucson.
Also, too many prominent landmarks in the area would have immediately brought the original survivors back. The route I imagined them following would have taken them within sight of Los Gigantes and enough other one-of-a-kind eccentricities to make the location unmistakable.
Even the Big Notch and Little Notch in the Continental Divide can be seen from miles to the west. There’s nothing else similar to it in North America.
Three of these four worthless felines are getting a bit long in the tooth, two longer than the next in line. It’s been a tough summer with the drought and heat wave, so I’ve had to take some measures to give them some relief I couldn’t provide for myself.
Shiva’s not one of the two oldest, but she had a health event a couple of winters ago that’s taken a long time to recover from, and she has a special job here if the cows ever come back. She’s Shiva the Cow Cat. Loved chasing cows back when they were bothersome. [ Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3 ]
I might add some other meanderings here today as other things come to mind, but what’s on my mind this morning is I need to start working on the front porch cat houses I put together last fall to give them all places to get out of the elements. Now that the heat’s bending in the other direction I wouldn’t be shocked to see a winter rearing it’s head before I’m ready for it.
Old Jules
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7:45 AM – Escape Route Possibilities – Fridge and trailer
Another issue that’s been on my mind a lot lately is creating myself a place to live if anything intervenes to insist I get the hell out of Dodge. The whole thing’s complicated by the contract I have with these cats, all but one of them, to take care of them until they die off, or I die off. I’ve talked with them about it, and they have some strong views about minimum living conditions, etc, which I’m obliged to consider. A tent or under a bridge doesn’t meet their minimum criteria.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m looking around for an old travel trailer I can get for a price I can afford, and the new truck up there Gale’s going to help me pull to town to let an honest-to-goodness mechanic fix the wiring mess, inspect it to get it legal, and eventually pull whatever I come up with for it to pull.
While I’m scouting around looking for an old travel trailer I’ve also been looking at this, considering whether it mightn’t offer an alternative:
Of course, if I select this option I’ll be building it from salvaged recycled materials.
This trailer below has been sitting there with that load on it from the time Gale and Kay moved here from Pflugerville. His shop building was full and he didn’t have anywhere to put all that stuff, so it’s stayed there, everything on it getting ruined by the weather and the tires going flat.
another view:
That lathe, left rear, is troubling to see. But so’s a lot of the other once-useful items on there.
another view:
another view:
If I can think of somewhere to put that junk, protecting whatever’s left worth protecting, I just might be able to talk him out of the trailer if I decide the building a house on a trailer option seems the best after everything’s considered.
On the other hand, the fridge is now a sure thing. I was talking with Gale while he was doing some jewelry work the other day and noticed this, down there bottom center:
Turns out it’s the gas/electric fridge out of an old travel trailer I gave him about 30 years ago. He says it’s mine if I want it.
A friend and I were chewing the fat outside a car wash business he owns next to a convenience store in Las Lunas, New Mexico a few years ago. A pregnant woman who worked at the convenience store came outside and plopped down out of sight of the front door, smoking a cigarette, sitting on the concrete and leaning against the building.
We’d discussed this woman before…. a nice young lady with a life a person wouldn’t wish on anyone…. last time I’d seen her she was sitting in the same spot crying, which is how I came to ask my bud about her story. Anyway, seeing her brought her into the conversation again.
Most recent weirdness in her life:
The lady was 20 years old. She’d gone into Isleta Casino a while back with a friend, began feeding her paycheck into the slot machines. Now, it was illegal for this woman and her friend to be playing the slots, minimum age being 21.
So what happens? She hits a $5000 jackpot on the machine she’s playing. It lights up like Times Square on New Years Eve, making all kinds of commotion, people coming from all directions to see. She knows she’s going to have to show an ID to get the money. So what does this poor lady do?
She and her friend beat feet out of there, leaving the jackpot.
I suppose the first thing that comes to mind is this: What the hell was she doing putting her money into a gambling machine if she couldn’t accept a payoff, supposing she hit? Did she do some heavy thinking about this?
But, even so, she ought to have been able to get someone legal to accept the payoff and split it with her, thinks I.
But she knew she was breaking the law, and what do you do when you get caught red-handed? Why hell, you run if your knees are still good enough to allow it.
That’s what’s called thinking on your feet. Thinking afterward what you done-already should have thought before-wards.
This post requires some background to get to what it’s about. The first part is background. The actual subject of the post doesn’t start until ‘way on down toward the bottom.
Back before Y2K happened I spent a lot of years and energy researching and searching the mountains of SW New Mexico for a particular lost gold mine.
Doing a thing of that sort, the smart individual would keep his mouth shut about it. But I don’t qualify in that regard. I spent several years poring over records and winter nights poring over maps with a magnifying glass, almost always certain of knowing where it was, chawing at the bit to get out into the barrancas to file a claim on it. But also putting my research into a form others searching for it might find helpful. Insane.
Eventually I found a location where evidence on the ground fit the legend locations well enough to keep me working the west face of that mountain, climbing and unclimbing it with friends and associates, building up a lot of muscle, finding a lot of interesting rocks, and getting surprising assays, but no joy to speak of on gold.
“A burned out cabin ruin with an aspen tree growing out of the inside, bear claw marks 12 feet up, 3 hand forged nails, a longtom sluicebox axed out of a 3 foot diameter log, a spring 75 feet above the sluice, an arrastra below. A mysterious map chiseled on the face of a 300 pound rock surface depicting the exact layout of the canyon, the cabin, the waterfall, all so accurately depicted the person had to have scrutinized the layout from the mountaintop, then scratched it on this stone 600 vertical feet below and half a mile away. The rock was carefully placed on the canyon wall above eye-level so it was easily seen, but only by someone looking up.”
By 1998 I’d spent a lot more treasure, worn out vehicles, worn out relationships with lady friends and put a lot of friends to sleep going on about it and spending all my waking hours thinking, searching, or talking about it. I decided it had taken up enough of my life and it was time to move on to other things after one final effort.
I took several weeks of vacation from work and spent it determined to get that gold mine out of my life, or into it in a way that didn’t include continued searching for it. During part of it Gale and Dana, another old friend, joined me up there.
But that’s all another story.
During the 1990s I used to get several letters and phone calls a week from other people who were searching for the mine, asking questions about specifics of my research findings, asking questions about various terrain features, or just wanting me to go climb a mountain where they knew it was but didn’t feel like climbing themselves, willing to give me 10% of it if they were correct. Of course they always knew they were correct.
But gradually that all tapered off. In 2003, in the desperate throes of surviving the desperate financial aftermath of Y2K I published a book about my research, and the calls, emails and letters started coming in again for a while, but again gradually receded after a few years. Those guys all got old and everything quieted down.
That lost gold mine slid spang out of my life.
But finally, here’s what this post is about.
Suddenly, beginning a couple of months ago, my old email address box began a new trickle, becoming a stream, of questions about all manner of details about those canyons and researches I elaborated on in the book. Old guys, some older than I, were suddenly making noises about ideas, searches, evidently studying the book and maps, wanting refinements on what I’d described.
2011, every old worn-out has-been treasure hunter in Christendom is suddenly wanting me to search my memory-banks about canyons I once stomped around in. I’ve mostly answered the emails, tried to remember and flesh out what most of them were asking about, but a lot of it’s just too mixed in with too many other canyons, rocks and trails to recover with clarity.
But some of them are actually being subtle but provacative, wanting to argue with me about research findings, value judgements I made regarding 160 year old documents I dug up in the US Archives, military records, and a particular Apache I consider a key in the affair.
Heck, it ain’t as though I found the damned mine. I don’t know where it is, though I spent a lot of years, treasure, sweat, and women thinking I did. Now, suddenly I have people coming out of the woodwork wanting me to change my mind about where I thought it was because my reasons for thinking it weren’t the same as their reasons for thinking it’s somewhere I didn’t think it was.
Absolooooodle, incomprehensibly, insane.
Yeah. It’s real important where I think it is. If I don’t think it’s where it is, that old gold mine’s likely to switch places with where it thought it was. Next thing you know it will be where I thought it was. And that ain’t where these other guys now think it is, so I need to change my mind and think it’s where they think it is. Otherwise it won’t be there.
I have no idea what the hell this is all about. Maybe the price of gold combined with worrying about Social Security has the geezers going crazy thinking they’re 50 years old again.
Old Jules
Billy Vaughn And His Orchestra – The Shifting Whispering Sands ( 1956 )
Having to haul water offers up a rare challenge insofar as cooking and cleaning up afterward. Before the drought became so severe I’d mitigated the problem by putting my dirty dishes into potato or grapefruit bags and placing them on imported fireant beds. A day later, voila! Clean clean clean!
All I had to do is pull them out of the bags and wipe them down with a moist towel or cloth and they were ready to use.
But as the summer progressed and the soil dried the fire ant beds became more difficult to locate. Without moisture in it the soil here has no structure. The beds became invisible, and concurrently the ants seemed just to go underground. Imported fire ants, common name: red imported fire ant scientific name: Solenopsis invicta Buren (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae) are eating machines. They’ll eat anything.
“Mounds are built of soil and are seldom larger than 46 cm (18 in) in diameter. When a mound is disturbed, ants emerge aggressively to bite and sting the intruder. A white pustule usually appears the next day at the site of the sting (Cohen 1992). ”
I looked for other alternatives with other ant species, no joy. What I discovered is that good American fire ants just don’t want to do that kind of work. I tried it with every kind of ant bed I could find, dishes stacking up in the sink, me gradually being forced to use hauled water and scouring pads to clean up dishes and utensils.
If I couldn’t find some good American fireants willing to work or some way to locate illegal imported fireants for the job I was going to be reduced to hauling water a lot more, or get a dog to lick that stuff off the eatingware.
Luckily that 24/7 September 13, moonbows and canned thunder outdoor canned thunder brought in the first measurable rainfall in 100+ days here, just as you thought it would. There’s enough moisture in the soil now to let the fire ant mounds get some altitude so’s I’ll be able to locate them for my dishwashing.
On the other hand, the rain proved my chimney-fix didn’t entirely accomplish what was intended.
Water was hitting the chimney outside, intruding and running down the stovepipe as far as the elbow, then dripping in.
Hard to think of a good quote to sum up all this. “It’s an ill wind that blows no good?”
But it’s all good. I just have to cut that oversized chimney-pipe and put it on there as a sleeve over the old chimney soon. Better knowing it now than discovering it when Mr. Bullgoose Daddy-Longlegs storm comes in.
A performance of Don Giovanni with the great Italian baritone Antonio Scotti (as Don Giovanni). Scotti sang the role of Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, London, in 1899 and again at the Metropolitan Opera, New York in December of the same year.
It never dawned on me I was proud I didn’t like opera. I’d never heard any opera except brief snatches or in spoofs. I’d never given any conscious thought at all to the fact I thought people who went to operas did it to show off to other people who went to operas, or were snooty and just wanted to impress someone, or were sissies. Never gave it a single thought.
To my mind a person who went to operas was just naturally, naturally, naturally someone I had no respect for, had no time for, would never take seriously. I didn’t need to think about it. I knew. I don’t recall anyone ever trying to change my thinking about it, either. I imagine they all knew same as I did those opera goers were phonies and sissies.
So, sometime in the late-1980s when my ex-wife got a couple of opera tickets for a performance on the University of Texas campus I wasn’t overjoyed. I suited up and traveled down there under duress, grumbled behind her to our seats, scowled when the lights went down and battened down the hatches for hard weather.
Over the next couple of hours a pair of blinders was removed from my eyes, plugs removed from my ears. A war went on inside me as the realization dawned that I loved this stuff. The next time an opera came to Austin it was me insisting we get tickets.
That would be bad enough if it had stopped there. But when my marriage broke up in 1992, and I relocated to Santa Fe, mildly affluent, I discovered a Santa Fe Opera exists. I attended a performance, and thereafter every year bought season tickets and used them as long as I could afford them.
I’ve attended a lot of concerts and live performances in my life and enjoyed many with Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Kinky Friedman, Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright and others, including a few Broadway performances. But I’d be lying if I claimed every opera I ever attended wasn’t as thrilling and uplifting as I walked out as any of those.
And naturally, I hate myself for it and hang my head in shame admitting it.
Florida Grand Opera-DON GIOVANNI, The Don’s final scene
I was reading clickclack gorilla’s hitching story and it dawned on me what’s going on in Europe with hitch-hiking is entirely different from it in the US. Evidently thumbing rides there still includes ‘respectable’ people. It wasn’t so long ago the same was true in the US.
As a youngster and young man I hitched across the US up-down and sideways more times than I’ve traveled it any other way. In the military it used to be the most common way soldiers traveled, but it was also a legitimate way of getting to a destination for anyone else, as well. When I got out of jail for riding trains in Rochester, New York, in 1964, the judge at the arraignment told me, “Don’t you know hopping trains in New York is a FELONY?”
“No sir. I didn’t know that.”
“Is there someone you can contact to get money for a bus ticket to get back to New Mexico?”
“No sir, there isn’t.”
“I’m going to say this, then I’m going to let you go. Hitch-hiking is only a misdemeanor in New York.”
After I was released a police officer drove me out to the Interstate and let me off at a freeway entrance. And way led onto way.
All that hitching as a youth was an adventure I suspect a lot of people alive today haven’t experienced. Every trip was a hundred stories, including the one above. And every hitch-hiker I’ve picked up over the decades since [I still do] has been a story in itself. I keep a case of Dinty Moore stew in the truck and usually give them a can or two if they’ve convinced me they’re hungry.
Today people are generally frightened of hitch-hikers, or just don’t believe the potential feel-good rewards of picking them up is worth the risk of getting robbed, assaulted, or just being trapped inside a vehicle with a person who smells as though he’s been on the road a while is worth it. I’d opine they’re thinking smart. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had some close calls, both hitching, and picking up hitch-hikers.
But I do it anyway, and I’m glad I do, glad I have, wouldn’t trade having done it for the alternative.
I’m thinking I might throw in a few of those hitch-hiking, hitch-hiker tales on this blog occasionally. Some are chilling, some are strange, but every one is unique.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
