Do you ever had the feeling that someone…or something…is watching you just out of the corner of your eye? You spin around and nothing is there. Or maybe there is a fleeting glimpse of color or movement? The English scientist Rupert Sheldrake studied and tested the phenomena and even wrote a book with his findings titled, “The Sense of Being Stared At”. He reported that, in tens of thousands of trials, 60% of subjects reported being stared at when being stared at, or a little better than random guess. Sheldrake gives, as example, animals that have a sixth sense and know they are being pursued by a photographer or hunter. Having been both, I honestly can’t say that I’ve noticed this sense in animals beyond acute sight and hearing.
Early cultures had invisible worlds where kachinas controlled the winds, leprechaun hid gold, and shaman in the Amazon still walk with jaguars among the stars. Western science considers these as myth and has even cast doubts on traditional religion, but at the same time has discovered their own magic world where brain waves and can control the artificial appendages of quadriplegics. Places of wonder exist even among the most rational.
Myself? I think that we are being watched and that there is indeed an invisible world beyond our normal senses. Sometimes when I turn around I only see a glimpse, but what I see is good.
"Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the color from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion."
The Moody Blues
When you are young some days seem to last forever. Some of those days are like living in the magic kingdom and others like suffering in the eternal dungeons of Hades. In my summer playing left field with the Crown Discount team I had two great wishes. First, please don’t hit the ball to me. And second, please don’t hit the ball to me. Many of my lifetimes in hell were saved by shortstop, “Scooper” Hill, who could deftly snag wild hits before they reached the outfield. The Hill clan consisted of five young male scrappers, sons of drifters, who lived in paint-peeling hovel surrounded by a grassless yard and a handful of man eating half bred mutts. A few of the younger Hills defied Darwinian evolution and had possible remote links to Mongol hords. Scoop was the exception, and despite his faint odors of urine and sweat, a fine fellow and a good shortstop. He can be identified in the team photo by his missing hat, which may have been consumed by Doberman/Mastiff canines. Soon after my Crown Discount summer the Hill family drifted off to another blue collar town and faded into obscurity. In my mature years I imagine Scooper as foreman in some crude steel yard somewhere and somehow hope that he relives many lifetimes in the magical kingdom thinking about his expert glove work in that summer of baseball. He was a good kid.
Unlike noxious invasive sports like British football or Canadian basketball, baseball is an American sport. It is a true democracy where average folks, tall and short, young and old, men and women, fat and skinny can excel. The game was originally played with improvised equipment and informal rules, often on a sandlot. In its early days the game ball would be used for the entire game. By the end of the game, the ball would be dark with grass, mud, and tobacco juice and it would be misshapen and lumpy from contact with the bat. Balls were only replaced if they were hit into the crowd and lost, and many clubs employed security guards to purpose of retrieve balls hit into the stands.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is considered by many to be the quintessential American novel. It begins, “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.” The book ends, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." In between is an American story.
Brain wave researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have dubbed Ricard Matthieu “the happiest man in the world”. Ricard, the son of a renowned French philosopher, received a doctoral degree in molecular genetics and spent his early years working at the famous Institut Pasteur. Through his youthful exposure to intellectual circles of philosophers and scientists, he observed that success and achievement often did not go hand-in-hand with satisfaction with life and he set off on a new path to find happiness. This led to a life in the Himalayas, where Ricard became a Buddhist monk, a published photographer and writer, and a humanitarian. Henri Cartier-Bresson said of his work, "Matthieu’s spiritual life and his camera are one, from which springs these images, fleeting and eternal."
Lacking sophisticated university equipment, I have less scientifically determined that Randy Ramsley is the happiest person I have met. My meter of measure relies solely on enthusiasm, wide smile and generous personality. In 1971 Randy had a dream of becoming a farmer. The plot of land he chose was a dry, barren and alkali saturated 50 acres he called the Mesa Farm, which is now a mini oasis producing some of the most wonderful lettuce to be found. Randy grows organic produce, makes cheeses and breads, and is an advocate for local environmental issues. If you are travelling west on highway 24 from Hanksville, Utah on your way to Capitol Reef National Monument and pass this old cement truck, you have just gone past the Mesa Farm Market. Please go back, have a coffee, a fresh roll, and say “hello”.
The core of the Declaration of Independence grants us the unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. These words are considered to be among the most well-crafted and influential phrases in the history of the English language. I believe in the pursuit of happiness, not as a destination, but a journey that may be very different from what many call success.
During the 1990’s several Tarahumaran Indians from the remote Copper Canyon in Mexico were brought to the Colorado mountain town of Leadville for the running of the Leadville 100 mile ultramarathon. Running, for games, transportation, and pure fun is part of the Tarahumaran culture and they traditionally run in simple open toed sandals called huaraches. In 1993 fifty-two year old Tarahumaran, Victoriano Churro, placed first ahead of a field of elite young American athletes, followed by his 41 year old teammate.. Their near-barefoot running style has sparked a minor revolution among runners, hikers and walkers (and a small boom in sales of Vibram five finger shoes). The more natural foot position is thought to reduce repetitive motion injuries to the foot, ankle, and knee. It's also fun to feel the grass and dirt between your toes.
When I was in my early teens, Dad used to take me down along Burnt Mill Road to a small community called Crow Junction to go rabbit hunting. Crow Junction was later bought by a developer who changed the name to the more pleasant sounding "Colorado City". For that matter, rabbit hunting is probably not quite the acceptable father-son bonding trip it once was. Fortunately, Burnt Mill road remains unchanged. Driving down the road, Dad would often tell of his classmate, who‘s family home was along the road and who was born without hands. He said he could remember seeing the fellow out working on his car, screwdriver held in his toes. In our modern times of cubicle work spaces and electronic home entertainment, our feet, much like our brain, are an under-utilized resource.
It’s possible your toes are held hostage against their will. Let them go free!
Do you know the names of your ancestors? These two women are my ancestors. The lady on the left is Lydia, and Emma is to her right. Lydia's husband called her, "my little Dutch." Not many women of the day were fisher people and fewer were flyfisher people A fact I'm proud of, being a fly fisherman myself. There may not be a proper term for a lady who fishes with flies? You are either a fisherman or a fisherperson.
Lydia and Emma are not very common names these days. Nor are the names of many of my other ancestors. Ira, Jenkins, Orville, Platt, Silas, Ketura, and Martha among them. Trevor, Skyler, Tyron, Peyton, Addison, and Kayla might have seemed foreign names to Emma and Lydia. Biblical names seem to have held their own, which seems appropriate, as several of the apostles were fishermen.
Things change in ways that are sometimes hard to understand. At one time folks thought fish were a nearly limitless renewable resource. Now we practice catch and release and many of the large ocean fish are endangered. In 1915 there were about one and a half billion people on the earth. Today there are about 7 billion, and in thirty more years there will be about 9 billion. Playing the odds, there could be 10 Einsteins and Gandhis among the next generation. We may need them.
Hopefully we will have fly fishing and fisherpeople for a long time. And we will eventually have a proper term for women who fish with flies.
"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."
( Albert Einstein)
This is George. He is perhaps one of my ancestors, but more distantly related. George came to his final resting spot on the Pawnee National Grasslands in northeastern Colorado. Colorado is better know for more popular areas, like Rocky Mountain National Park. In size, the Grasslands is nearly it’s equal. It has many diverse and unusual wildlife populations and it’s short grass prairie ecosystem is by some accounts more rare and endangered. It has it’s own form of beauty and in the late springtime the landscape is like an emerald jewel dotted with a rainbow of colors from wildflower blooms.
George and his many friends nibble down the tender grasses eliminating cover and food sources for wildlife. More recently, wind turbines have sprouted on private land surrounding the area, and now this simple windmill to draw water for livestock probably has several towering wind turbines surrounding it. Wind power is turning out to be less “green” than many have hoped so far. The wind only blows part of the time and coal plants cycle up and down to compensate for the wind. This cycling makes them inefficient, sort of like a car in idle that has to suddenly speed up and then hit the brakes. There are studies in Colorado and Texas say that more coal plant related noxious gasses have gone into the air as the number of wind turbines has grown. And there are no easy solutions to this yet.
I have dreamed that Colorado’s national grasslands might some day be a home to native prairie chickens and roaming buffalo rather than browsing cattle in a wind turbine perimeter.
Young boys, young girls, and the snipe hunt were at one time inextricably connected. Among some cultures the theme may vary to the saga of ghost stories told in ancient cemetaries, of ficticious submarine races, or the hunt for sky hooks. The intention remained the same. To lure the opposite gender into a situation invoking early adolescent intimacy.
There is an obscure mining ghost town up an obscure road in southern Colorado where only bits of foundations remain. The graveyard for the town has a few rotting pickets lying on the ground from the old perimeter fence and little else. As the story goes...in the town's hayday three young sisters, daughters of one of the miners, lived a happy and carefree mountain life near the town. They spent summers playing outdoor games and picking wildflowers to arrange into bouquets or to tuck behind their ears. Winters were spent warming around the woodstove reading the bible, doing school work, and telling stories.
A dark time swept though the town with the flu epidemic of 1889. One after the other of the sisters came down sick and soon they were gone. The little girls were buried in a sad ceremony in the old graveyard. Other than the story, little evidence of the girls and their lives is left. But out of the girls gravesite grew three aspen trees connected at the base.
Even today the white aspen bark of the trees glows under a full moon. The story lives to be told by a young boy to a young girl who have driven down the obscure road to the obscure town site to visit a little history and share a glimpse of intimacy.
The Eagle Mine near Minturn, Colorado was once a producer of zinc and lead. In the 1980's the EPA declared it a Superfund site due to heavy metal contamination into the ground water and subsequently the Eagle River, which caused damage to the aquatic life in the river. It's off limits to the general public, but in 2008 I was privilaged with a photography session through geoligist Dave Hinrichs. Mr. Hinrichs is involved in remediation efforts that so far have promised to return the river to a healthy biological condition. Unfortunatey this water quality and treatment operations wil need to continue...forever.
It was fun to photograph these historic buildings without the graffiti and vandalization common to old buildings close to public access. But in a sad way it is a story too common to other old mining sites, where ground water pollution and major surface disturbances have ruined aquatic habital and area aesthetics. Colorado's early days were shaped by the gold and silver booms. The Crystal Mill site near Marble, Colorado is one of the most photographed scenic locations in Colorado, and other historical mining sites across the state are big draws for tourism.
These old places understandably evoke a romantic image of the early days. More realistically they are a mixed heritage of the pioneer spirit and good intentions gone very bad. The U.S. Bureau of Mines estimates that 12,000 miles of the waterways of the Western United States, or about 40 percent, are contaminated by metals from acid mine drainage, mostly by abandoned mines. They are little sisters of the gulf oil spill and the whaling industry.
"I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it -
Came ourt with a fortune last fall, -
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.
No! There's the land. (Have you seen it?)
It's the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it's a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there's some as would trade it
For no land on earth - and I'm one."
From the Robert Service poem, "The Spell of the Yukon".
There was a time when I purchased way too many old cameras, mostly from the 1930's and 1950's. A couple were huge clunkers that were standard issue for newpaper photographers of the day and used 4X5 inch sheet film, but my favorites were the "medium format" 645 cameras with folding bellows that could be tucked into a jacket pocket. These were probably the iphone of the day and some examples are still in functional use. A few of the finer models are quite desirable by a modern cult following and command prices of several hundred dollars.
These entirely mechanical devies may at some time stretch the imagination of the digital generation. Picture, if you can, the ultimate destination of the modern digital devices 5, 10, or 20 years from now. Where will all those digits and pixels files reside? Will your children's children have a photo album to remember the history of your family and friends or will they have a collection of obsolete MPEGs and JPEGs that will be gibberish to the next digital generation.
Or imagine the day when the technical and industrial giants were located in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, rather than China, Korea, or Taiwan. Was there a day when wars seemed to make more sense? There is indeed some romance to history and some value to the old ways. It's is probably good to go forward, but bad to forget.
Maybe my old camera bug was just nostalgia. To borrow a theme from Mad Men, "Nostalgia...In common, less clinical usage, nostalgia sometimes includes a general interest in past eras and their personalities and events, especially the "good old days" of a few generations back recast in an idyllic light, though in a clinical sense it might include painful memories."
Photo of an old guy near an old truck taken with an old camera. (Photo taken by Tim Vaughan).