A Headwaters Hike

This is classic old school archives material, from December 1990, 25 years ago to the month. Here on the Voz Silvestre blog I share the scanned images of an old North Coast back-to-the-lander independent newspaper. It was fun to find and remember how I once scrabbled out a "natural history essay" that came from rooting around as an early-twenties "forest defender" that the hippy activists I admired so much at the time decided to publish on the cover of the very last edition ever printed of the Country Activist. Simple title: A Headwaters Hike. In a media that was truly independent. Technology was kicking in--I think I wrote the piece by hand but then edited and typed it in to a word processor that was in the old Ancient Forest International (AFI) office, that is now Persimmons, in Redway, California. But this was still distributed on paper, a very old school (and effective!) civics affairs organizing tool.

This is another example of how keeping a journal back in the day translated into relatively coherent and complete (in some few instances!) writing pieces. But I never was (nor will be) a true writer or wordsmith, I am simply not prolific enough. Still, this is a funky and authentic archive glance at my writing from back in the day. It is pretty fun to soak up the idealism and the fire of youth as captured in this piece that I put together and submitted literally in the very days before launching out as a mochilero south bound, to eventually arrive to a pre-determined destination with a commitment to work in Nicaragua as a volunteer for more than six months. It was different traveling back then. I was so fortunate to learn of the world on my own terms. From the old growth of the Pacific Northwest to the social movements of Central America, my explorations were always heavily diversified. I understood early on that biological diversity included and was completely interdependent with cultural diversity. Little by little I have been uncovering some curious old samples. Sooner than later though the memory lane silliness won't be sufficient to keep me entertained, the boxes will get put away in storage, and I am going to have to generate some new material. It is however very grounding to look back.

 

Tracking Oneself To The Source

Here is a sample of writing from my notebooks kept in that age before I relied on the Internet or anything too technical for communications. These are scanned photos of a write up from a journal that I must have transcribed some long time ago and then thrust into a scrap book stored with old photos. This piece is built from a journal kept on a November 1993 backpacking trip in the Trinity Alps, praying for snow, touching earth. It is worth the read, at least maybe just for kicks, but also to think a little about identity with place, and the long journey of this life of mine.

"It is possible to look upon humans and their civilization as a biological and geological force not qualitatively different from the volcanic eruptions, glaciations, and other catastrophes that have disturbed organic evolution. Nuclear wars and wholesale industrial pollution may do life on earth more damage than a billion years of exploding volcanoes, but anthropoid greed and convection currents in the earth's mantel seem about equally random and senseless. Molecules swimming in the skull of a primate or sixty miles underground - what's the difference? Both explode when pressures get critical." -- David Rains Wallace from The Klamath Knot

Pray for snow!

Android Antics 2015

A long and very warm year is underway on the North Coast, the dry dry climate is literally accentuated by unprecedented warm temperatures. It is one thing that there is water scarcity, it is another that things are so warm. I am hardly the documentary maker of all things drought like in California, but things on the landscape and on the political cultural front do seem to be intensifying. In our crew we stay grounded with family vibes, as we get ready to move on into the world, out of provincia, as it were. Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yet, undoubtedly, things, that being, las cosas, are changing. Prospects are looking up for new adventures that promise quality avenues for affecting positive outcomes.

The images to follow have absolutely nothing to do with any of that which is written here, they are simply some of the Android Antics of these past many months.

Arcata Alley Art Antics

EurekAntics

Baker Beach Antics

Redwood Antics

Once A Jock Always A Jock? A New Found Love for Ball Sports

This week the regular season starts for the San Francisco Giants!

What are the chances that we would get to do this yet again in October 2015?

Why have I gone back to my childhood fascination with ball sports? 

The answers are simple, but deserving of some explanation. 

Kids

That should say pretty much all of it.

The New Digital Reality Juxtaposed With The Healthy Essence Of Play And Kicking And Throwing A Ball Around

There is little question that the push and drive for young people to plug in to screen time and to lose hours of their lives to electronic devices is a major factor in my new found love as a parent for ball sports and simple play. What could be more natural and physical than kicking, throwing, catching, and batting a ball, in all their spherical shapes and sizes and different games? Ball play is a full on living experiment in pure perfect physics, and it is with out question a healthy escape from the digital madness that is making robots out of entire generations.

Stupid Sportball - Outrageous Salaries and Violent Videogames and Movie Commercials During Broadcasts 

There are things about sports that I still find aberrant, such as the fact that most owners of professional franchises are rich, white, and pricks. Or the crazy salaries. Or the militarization of society, the violent videogame and movie commercials that bombard the family during a sports broadcast, is there no understanding of the violation of family friendly culture such violence represents? How the commercials penetrate and negatively impact the healthy aspects of sports? Or how pathetic it is that during the playoffs they make everyone sing "God Bless America" during the 7th Inning Stretch instead of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame?"

Still, with all of this in mind I have been living a major resurgence in the last 5 years of the passion I had through much of my youth for sports.

As well, it makes it exciting to appreciate sports as a fan in Nor Cal because of the success of teams like the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors. I can't claim to be a long time fan of the Warriors but I have been watching them closely this year and they are good!

How it is that a kid who grew up a Dodgers fanatic in the 1970's would turn into an old man fan of the Giants is connected to my original authentic admiration of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, and of my favorite outfielder when I was a kid, Dusty Baker. When Dusty Baker became a Giants manager it was possible for me to pay attention to Giants success, and root for the Giants.

Admittedly, I was on the fringes for the 2010 World Series, though I knew what it meant to have Edgar Rentaría drive the Giants through to the championship. It was having friends actually witness the Matt Cain perfect game in 2012 and tell me all about it after wards that made me focus on the Giants in a way that I had not been doing. I had been interested in their progress but I was working way too hard slaving away for no real reason to watch the games at that point. Being a fan of sports helped me reclaim time for my own life again. In 2013 I simply began to make time to be a Giants fan, watching games and reading about the team, even though their performance was not so good that year. Basically, my love for baseball began to explode as I began to play ball sports and get outside more and more with my daughter Kiara as she got big enough to play. So 2013 was a bit of a slow Giants year, but that did nothing to keep me from falling in love with the game again.

Then being a Giants fan in 2014 in a real day to day pitch by pitch manner was about as much fun with sports as I have ever had in my life.
 

I will never again work a job from which I cannot take a break in the summer to check out day games, at least once in a while. That will be one of my permanent measures of whether I am being abused in any employment that I might have in the future.

Taking in and learning of baseball in the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico took it even further. That baseball could be a public space that was family safe in the midst of all the convulsion in México took my love for the sport to a very serious place. It is a fun game, and even more so when it is played as a statement of regular people claiming their right to live regular lives. People in the USA know so little about México, and the brilliance of the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico is a prime example, so good, so fun, such an opportunity to understand how much we all have in common, and still totally unknown to most people in the USA. We went to games in Sinaloa and it was a blast.

Baseball and basketball are not the only sports I am having fun with. We did by the way have a great time with the World Cup again in 2014! What a gorgeous and strategic sport is futból!

So sports. Take it all with a great deal of skepticism, but love the play and the level of passion a young person can bring to their sport. Whether it be a ball and a field, roping up for a climb, mounting a bike for a ride, or putting on shoes to dance, it is all the most healthy place for any of us, and especially our children, to be putting time and energy.

Go Giants! Go Warriors!

Las Montañas Sí Tienen Memoria

The mountains remember us, they are attentive to our thoughts and moods as we pass near and within their domains. Some of my best trips to the mountains never had any possibility of actually getting up high, much less attaining any technical summits. I have felt fortunate to climb mountains, and I have felt fortunate to see them in the distance. Such was my trip to Torres del Paine, Región de Magallanes, Chile, South America. Me acuerdo mucho de mi experiencia con el macizo de Paine. I remember the mountains for what they remind me of as much as for what I touched and felt when I was there. I hiked the W, as it seemed fitting at the time, and I did amazing day hikes into the glacial carved valleys, solo trekking with always interesting company if needed to be found in other campers and trekkers. Torres del Paine in March and April 2003, can you imagine, an austral fall paradise, a dream trip, surreal and hard rock, with the USA invasion of Iraq as the backdrop. I had been working in the field in the Aysén Region of Chile before trekking south through Argentina and into Magallanes upon finishing my contracts, finally seeing Fitzroy and Torres on my own time, free to take advantage of the gorgeous austral autumn, colder weather, shorter days, but less wind, and incredible colors. It was a culmination of many months of planning and work, and an extra bonus after having finished my masters work at the University of Montana. There are times that I just feel fortunate to cast my gaze on world class mountainscapes, and this was definitely one of those times.

I was escaping, as we always do to some degree when we go to the backcountry, but I was still tuned in, literally and figuratively. In the fall of 2002 I had repeatedly made my opposition to the possibilities of a USA war in Iraq very public and clear. I still stand by my position with greater conviction everyday. Though there would be little I could do to halt such ill conceived madness, in early 2003 from Southern South America I was going to track this historically tragic moment closely. For my travel south that year to work in Central Chile and Patagonia I kept a small, energy efficient, and effective shortwave radio in my pack at all times. I could follow the travesty of the invasion, listening from my tent to BBC and Chilean and Argentine news sources, and still confer with the mountains watching our petty human conflicts erupt with their global ramifications. The mountains remember, las Torres del Paine se acuerdan de nosotros, y valoran nuestra pasión para un mundo silvestre que conoce una paz verdadera.

Valle Francés

Valle del Silencio

 Torres del Paine

 

A note on the photos -- this series of images are digitized but it is from a time before I had a digital camera, I think I had one roll left of the bag of good slide film that I had brought all the way from Montana with me, and maybe a roll or two of cheap print film that I had picked up in Puerto Natales. I must have all of the originals stashed in a box in the attic, but these are the digitized ones that I could find on my current drive. Only a few of these are really quality images. But they are worth a great deal to me, they remind me of all that I had thought and felt during that time, my love for the mountain, and my angst regarding the premonition that the invasion of Iraq was not just violent, that it would have unforeseen repercussions that our communities would be reeling from for decades. The mountains help us see the truth, and they see our true selves. Las montañas sí tienen memoria.