This one’s just a placeholder while I’m on the road.
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Last Drink Before The Storm
This morning we went for a canyon hike before the latest front rolled through. We saw this little herd of bighorns getting their last drink before the storm.
On our way back downstream, the herd was already high-tailing it uphill to hunker down on higher ground.
Anne captured this striking image of the cold front from our back yard.
Although it may not end up amounting to much snow, I’m staying inside by the fire for the rest of the day. All due respect to my phone’s weather app, but can a herd of bighorns getting their last drink be far wrong? Nope, I think not.
US and UK
For those of you outside the FB/Instagram metaverse, this post will be something new. For those of you still enslaved under the evil purview of Lord Zuckerberg, you’ve likely seen it already. In any event, it occurs to me that over the holidays we had most of the family together, but precious few photos of the whole gang assembled. Here are a couple from both the US and the UK.
Wait… WHAT?
You all have been good so far this year. So, as a reward, you get more humor. Just know that if you’re bad, you’re getting more exegesis.
Wait… WHAT?
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The “shoes in sink” one maybe requires a small bit of explanation. This photo was taken by my wife in the women’s restroom at the Roxborough State Park visitors center. And I am here to tell you, I used the men’s room, and no such sign appears there. Why? You make the call.
Oh, and also…
God Bless Betty White!
Exegesis
Today’s Word of the Day (WOTD) is “exegesis.”
It’s a noun, defined by Merriam Webster as:
ex·e·ge·sis | \ ˌek-sə-ˈjē-səs
: exposition or explanation, especially
: an explanation or critical interpretation of a text.
Here’s the etymology: English speakers have used the word exegesis — a descendant of the Greek term exēgeisthai, meaning “to explain” or “to interpret” — to refer to explanations of Scripture since the early 17th century.
Below is a fine example of exegesis from Rachel Held Evans. I’ve written about her before. If you’re so inclined, you can find my previous post here.
“Whoever has ears, let him hear.”
– Matthew 11:15
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What, you thought 2022 was going to be all fun and games?
Well, think again, dog-breath.
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Last but not least, here’s something I stole from one of my relatives.
Think of it as my little contribution to the grand endeavor of exegesis.
Never Underestimate
Never underestimate the power of hard work.
Also never underestimate the power of drinking more wine.
Aww, who are we kidding?
Things are gonna be pretty much the same this year as last.
Happy 2022 anyway, y’all!
Big Wind
There’s a big wind blowing today. When the wind comes down off the mountains, the elevation change causes a paradoxical increase in temperature in a condition known as a “Chinook.” Supposedly that’s what we’ve got today. But after our little half-mile jaunt down to the end of the block and back just now, let me tell you, it felt anything but warm out there.
A couple of weeks back there was a similar big wind that, though it didn’t do much damage here in Denver, blew down trees in Colorado Springs. Below are some shots from the Old North End to give you an idea of the carnage that can come with a big wind.
Still Life With Fence.
Photo credit for all: Lisa Noll
When another old friend from the Old North End asked if I “still had access to a wood splitter” because “a neighbor’s tree fell in the backyard and there’s quite a bit of wood to take care of,” I replied with the name of a tree service guy I knew back before I retired from firewood cutting. And thereby hangs a tale….
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His name was actually Darrell Fortner, but his business was known as Dundee’s Tree Service. This was because the sandy-haired and sinewy Mr. Fortner bore a striking resemblance to movie star Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame. He even carried around a big buck-knife strapped to his belt just to cement the image. When snow would drift too deep for me to get in and out of the National Forest cutting area up in the high country – this usually came between Thanksgiving and New Year’s – I sometimes needed access to dried firewood on the flatland to keep my late-season firewood customers happy. And Dundee’s place out in Black Forest fit that bill to a T.
I still remember the first time I pulled up to the compound. A rusted-out bulldozer was parked just inside the front gate. Inside the perimeter fence, and surrounding the house, were big piles of un-split rounds cut to perfect 18″ firewood lengths. In some cases those piles went higher than the second story. On the crest of the roof stood a couple of peacocks, tails fanned out, making that unearthly screaming noise peacocks make when they’re aroused, angry, or just plain bored with life.
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Shambling out the front door, Dundee himself wore red suspenders. Despite the cold, he was shirtless and barefoot. He broke off an icicle from the eave of the roof and stuck it in his mouth like a lollipop. I swear I saw him pause to pee off the end of the porch, but I can’t be 100% certain. Sometimes memory plays tricks, you know?
What I do know for sure is that next to him snarled two of the largest, most ferocious mongrels I have ever seen in my life. They were restrained only by his easy command, “Stay.” I’ve got to admit, their lack of leashes coupled with bared canines left me feeling something less than sanguine. Dundee shooed the mutts back inside, closed the front door, then picked up and threw something brown – a shoe? – at the peacocks on the roof. His abrupt action blessedly silenced their inhuman screeching. Thank God for small favors.
He invited me in for coffee, but I politely declined. It was early still, before breakfast in fact, and I had a full day of splitting, stacking and deliveries ahead of me. I just wanted to get on with it. “Just as well,” he replied. “The missus is probably not dressed yet.” Was that a leer on his face? Hard to tell. Later, after doing my due diligence, I found out this was Dundee’s second wife, and she was an exotic dancer who hailed from somewhere warm in South America. Who knew the life of a humble woodcutter could be so exciting, eh?
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After the Black Forest fire in 2013, Dundee lost his house, his equipment, and presumably his peacocks. But his business was in trouble even before then. I mentioned before about doing due diligence. While doing so, I found out that the intrepid Mr. Fortner was being sued by one of his tree service clients who presumably took too long to pay, then took exception to the woodman’s method of past-due billing: Rather than rely on the fickle court system for enforcement, Dundee loaded up his trusty dump truck one starry December night with several tons of those perfect 18″ rounds and deposited them in the offenders’ front yard. Imagine the guy’s surprise come morning. Presumably he had no use for the firewood, and no splitter to turn the rounds into anything usable in any case.
I never found out the final outcome of the legal dispute. More importantly, I also heard no word on the sultry second wife. One can only hope she and Dundee are still together enjoying all the benefits of warmer climes. In my mind’s eye they recline on a white sandy beach somewhere, each sipping through a straw something sweet and colorful from a tall glass topped with an umbrella: No shirts or shoes required, no big wind in the forecast, and only a deep blue expanse to the horizon, unobstructed.
Omelette
A little while back I made myself an omelette for dinner. In the omelette I included salsa, bacon bits, cheese, sauteed onions, peppers, and tofu – along with eggs and milk, of course. None of the ingredients appeared spoiled. None smelled bad. But later that night I got violently ill. To my mind it was clearly a case of food poisoning. This despite the fact that no one else in the family experienced any symptoms at all after having consumed each of the ingredients in other dishes prepared separately. More recently I was considering what to make myself for dinner and my wife suggested I make an omelette. Nope, I replied. I’m off omelettes for a while.
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Molly Young has an article in the current NY Times magazine called “How Disgust Explains Everything.” It is a long one, so I’m guessing you’re not likely to read it start-to-finish. But on the off chance you’re even mildly interested, you can find it here. Trigger warning: There are a lot of pictures of maggoty meat and spoiled raspberries and sketchy mushrooms in this piece, so think twice before clicking the link and partaking. As a more hygienic alternative, feel free to read the selected excerpts I’ve culled for your consumption below. One thing Ms. Young fails to mention is the linguistic derivation of the word, which I’m including here just to make the gustatory roots of the term clear.
dis·gust |
\ di-ˈskəst \ dis-ˈgəst \
: marked aversion aroused by something highly distasteful
: repugnance
: to provoke to loathing
: be offensive to
: to cause (one) to lose an interest or intention
Derivation
Middle French desgouster, from des- dis- + goust taste, from Latin gustus; akin to Latin gustare, to taste.
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Once you are attuned to disgust, it’s everywhere. On your morning commute you may observe a tragic smear of roadkill on the highway, or shudder at the sight of a rat browsing garbage on the subway tracks. At work you glance with suspicion at the person who neglects to wash his filthy hands after a trip to the toilet. At home you change your child’s diaper, unclog the shower drain, empty your cat’s litter box, pop a zit, throw out the fuzzy leftovers in the fridge. If you manage to complete a single day without experiencing any form of disgust you are either a baby or in a coma.
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Disgust shapes our behavior, our technology, our relationships. It is the reason we wear deodorant, use the bathroom in private, and wield forks instead of eating with our bare hands. I floss my teeth as an adult because a dentist once told me as a teenager that “Brushing your teeth without flossing is like taking a shower without removing your shoes.” Do they teach that line in dentistry school, or did he come up with it on his own? Either way, 14 words accomplished what a decade of parental nagging hadn’t.
Unpeel most etiquette guidelines, and you’ll find a web of disgust-avoidance techniques. Rules governing the emotion have existed in every culture at every time in history. And although the “input” of disgust — that is, what exactly is considered disgusting — varies from place to place, its “output” is narrow, with a characteristic facial expression (called the “gape face”) that includes a lowered jaw and often an extended tongue; sometimes it’s a wrinkled nose and a retraction of the upper lip. The gape face is often accompanied by nausea and a desire to run away or otherwise gain distance from the offensive thing, as well as the urge to clean oneself.
The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you might be that disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena: From our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.
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<… Disgust is> above all about food and the fact that humans have immense dietary flexibility. Unlike koalas for instance – who eat almost nothing but eucalyptus leaves – humans must gaze at a vast range of eating options and figure out what to put in our mouths. Disgust evolved as one of the great determinants of what to eat: If a person has zero sense of disgust, (s)he will probably eat something gross and die. On the other hand, if a person is too easily disgusted, (s)he will probably fail to consume enough calories and will also die. It’s best to be somewhere in the middle, approaching food with a healthful blend of fear and love of the new…
The focus on food makes intuitive sense. After all, we register disgust in the form of nausea or vomiting — nausea being the body’s cue to stop eating and vomiting our way of hitting the “undo” button on whatever we just ate. If disgust were solely a biological phenomenon, it would look the same across all cultures. But it does not. Nor does it explain why we experience disgust when confronted with topics like bestiality or incest or the smell of a stinky armpit or the idea of being submerged in a pit of cockroaches: None of these have anything to do with food.
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As you will know if you’ve already clicked the link and read to the end, it’s in the political realm where this tale gets really interesting. But to get there you may have to endure some disgusting details that might make you queasy. The upshot? For reasons having to do with links between our moral matrices and our political convictions, liberals are more likely than conservatives to be “disgust-insensitive.” <Sorry folks. I don’t make ’em up, I just report ’em.>
But hey, look on the bright side: No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, unlike me you can still have an omelette for dinner. That’s gotta be worth something at least, right?
Ulysses
Afterword** for “Ulysses” appeared in a recent issue of the New Yorker.
Read it below, or here.
Of course, he was looking for love. Aren’t we all? And he seemed to be looking for it in all the right places. Namely, the southern coastal counties of California where he was, literally, the lone wolf, with seemingly no male competitors at all. In fact, OR-93 (2019-2021) was the first gray wolf to appear in the wild in this region for two or three hundred years.
The absence of rivals was good news for him. But the rest of the equation was hopeless, because there were apparently no female counterparts for him to encounter there. No one to meet and mate with. To be honest, OR-93’s journey from his birthplace in Oregon to California was reproductively doomed from the start. He could have crossed party lines with a wayward labradoodle or a lusty mountain coyote, but he showed no inclination in that direction. Still, it was thrilling just that he had made the trip – signifying, or at least suggesting, the return of the species to an area where it had once thrived.
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Some people hate wolves. They consider them merciless and sneaky. Ranchers rage at them for their predation of lambs and calves. Gray wolves once lived just about everywhere in this country including up and down the West Coast. The hunting and trapping and poisoning of wolves peaked in the early nineteen-hundreds. It effectively eliminated them from the continental United States except for a few stragglers in Minnesota. In 1974, wolves were added to the list of animals that are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act because there were so few left. A handful of gray wolves in Yellowstone and central Idaho, reintroduced to the region from Canada, did go forth and multiply.
In time their descendants began wandering westward, establishing several packs in Washington State and in Oregon and, in recent years, a few in the northern counties of California: The Lassen, Whaleback, and Beckwourth packs. Another pack did exist in California, but it mysteriously and abruptly vanished, suggesting that hunters may have killed those animals, which is illegal in the state. In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed wolves from the endangered-species list because their population was considered “stable.” However, they are now found in less than fifteen per cent of the range they used to occupy.
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OR-93, a member of Oregon’s White River pack, was born in April, 2019, near Mt. Hood, about an hour-and-a-half drive southeast of Portland. Wolves can be coarsely built, big-boned and thick-necked, but OR-93 was lean and lithe. He had the long legs of a dancer, a large black nose, and a resting smiley face. In June, 2020, he was briefly detained by a biologist from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Fitted with a purple radio collar, his movements from then on were tracked as closely as a teenager’s using Life360.
He was also then given the name OR-93, indicating that he was from Oregon and was the ninety-third wolf to be tagged there. When he reached adolescence — between a year and half and two and a half years in a wolf’s life — he set off on his own. As young males are wont to do, he hoped find a mate. On January 30th of this year, his collar signaled that he had entered California for the first time.
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After the initial border crossing, he turned back. Then a few days later he headed to California again. He wove through territory belonging to the Lassen pack — a dangerous passage for a young male on the make. Then, to the great surprise of Oregon State wildlife officials who were tracking him, he continued south and toward the coast. He was the first wolf to do so since Napoleon Bonaparte was born. We can’t know if he was driven by an unusually keen sense of adventure, but we do know that he was still on the hunt for a mate. Apparently he thought he would have better luck in California.
Roaming through the snow of Modoc County, the ragged edges of the Yosemite Valley, the almond groves of Fresno County, and, finally, into beachy, exurban Ventura County, he had walked nine hundred and thirty-five miles through the state. Crossing sixteen counties and three major highways, he was not only intrepid in having come so far south, but also smart enough to navigate hostile territory, particularly roadways. He kept such a low profile that almost no one reported seeing him on his odyssey. Besides a September sighting, the closest anyone got to spotting him occurred in August, on months-old camera footage from a property to the east of Los Padres National Forest. Only the pinging of his collar gave him away.
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Can you imagine what it would have been like to see him? A wolf roaming free in territory where no one alive had ever seen one? Many people would surely have celebrated. But others would have been gunning for him. That’s why wildlife officials didn’t broadcast his whereabouts, for fear he would be targeted. That’s also why, when a truck driver found OR-93’s body near I-5 on November 10th, some people might have suspected murder.
A necropsy confirmed that he had met the usual end for wandering wildlife: He had been hit by a vehicle. He died some eighty miles from Los Angeles, and only a short trot from the Tejon Ranch Conservancy, a two-hundred-and-forty-
thousand-acre refuge where he could have lived out his days as a bachelor in peace. His body’s discovery came just two days before a federal court in California heard arguments in a case fighting to have gray wolves added back to the endangered-species list. He never had a name other than OR-93. But Amaroq Weiss, the senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, thought that Ulysses would have suited him. “It would have been a good name except for one thing,” Weiss said. “Ulysses managed to come back from his journey.”
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Tejon Ranch Conservancy, near where Ulysses met his untimely demise, is just a short jaunt from Mt. Pinos where I used to love to car camp while working in SoCal during 2018-20. A few photos from that time follow. Many more are in a previous post, here. I never saw Ulysses on Mt. Pinos. But I did sense it’s the kind of place he’d have loved to call home.
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** Afterword is a column that pays homage to people, places, and things we’ve lost. Besides Ulysses, some others we’ve lost, in no particular order, are below.
Thank You Sincerely
I know you’ll all cringe when you hear me use the word “sincerely,” but there you have it: I’m sending out a big “thank you” to all those who, even unwittingly, provided us with a smile this past year.
Also special thanks to my son for providing stellar web support again in 2021.
In your honor Ben, here are a few from Randall Munroe, author of the iconic comic xkcd. (Hey folks, don’t blame me – it’s an acquired taste!)
Last but not least:
Happy 2022 everybody!
And don’t forget to stock up on… well, you know.
We’re going dark here at DEWConsulting.net for the rest of 2021.
So if you need to reach anyone, I suggest you send a text to 719.641.4010.
Thank you – sincerely.