On the Road Again

Deborah and I are on a camping trip in the Sylvania Wilderness Area, so I won't be posting for several about a week.

Sylvania is an interesting place from the point of view of welfare economics, as I point out here. I posted some pictures from an earlier visit here.

To the left here you see the view from our camp site. We have an entire bay to ourselves!

Our house is being guarded by our son Nat and a pack of attack-trained Shiba Inus.

On the Road

I'm driving to River Falls, WI to visit my good friend and fellow Nietzsche scholar Imtiaz Moosa, who teaches at the UW campus there.

Here is a web account of a recent trip Imtiaz (who happens to be blind) paddling 700 k. of the Yukon River with entrepreneur/adventurer Howard Fairbank. Imtiaz doesn't get internet in his house (one of several eccentricities) so I may not be posting for a while. See ya!

Anti-Scanner/Grope Civil Disobedience

The other day, as my class was discussing Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" a student raised the concern that Thoreau's method was not very practicable as a means of changing the law. I mentioned the possibility of refusing to go through airport scanners as a means of stopping their use. I later learned of Opt-Out Day, the day before Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving morning, I saw a report on Fox News gloating that Opt Out Day was "a bust" because travellers accept the judgement of the government, that these measures are "necessary" to "keep us safe" against (in a clip of Cong. Peter King speaking) "an enemy that's out to kill us." This AP story takes the same line.

The TSA is bragging that there were virtually no delays on Opt Out Day because the public accepts their policies. Meanwhile, traveler on their Twitter accounts blogs are indicating that this is basically a lie. There were no delays because a great many of the scanners were turned off. (See also this.) As usual, the mainstream press takes the government line, but there are a few local stories about local airports that give the same impression.

A lot of protesters are ticked off that the government did not give them the opportunity to opt out.

If this is so, the campaign of civil disobedience was a success of sorts: it provoked the TSA to back off for one day.

It was also a devastating admission on the part of the TSA.

If, as TSA chief John Pistole alleged (see "update" at the end of this article), the Opt-Out Day idea was "irresponsible" then turning off the scanners was much more so, and for all the same reasons. Imagine turning off security measures on the busiest flight day of the year, measures that are "needed" to "keep us safe," simply in order to avoid some slow-downs and some embarrassment to themselves!

It actually shows that they do not believe their own alarmist propaganda: they don't believe that, in any straightforwardly literal sense of the words, that this is necessary to keep us safe.

Airport Body Scanners

For weeks, I wasn't sure what I thought of those dandy new airport "pornocanners" but then I heard the arguments in favor of them. Mainly on their account, I decided these things should be removed and incinerated. Those arguments are so lame! For instance:

This policy was actually initiated during the Bush administration. Huh? When did Bush become the gold standard of what is just, decent, or even sane?

The alternative to the scanners is a mere back-of-the hand pat-down. Sorry, but according to this article that policy was rescinded by bureaucratic fiat last week. The alternative is now The Grope (Interesting that the photojournalist in this link had to break the law in order to get this evidence of what is actually going on.)

The policy isn't really coercive or unjust, because the alternative is merely to use some other means of transportation. It is simply a condition upon your right to get on the plane. Again, this is factually incorrect. According to the same above-linked article, if you refuse both scanner and "pat-down" you may be fined $11,000 and branded a threat to national security.

Further, even if it were factually correct, this would still be a bad argument. It would be like saying, in the event that the government subjected you to this sort of invasive procedure as a condition of walking anywhere, that you can still go by bicycle, Segue, car, etc., so this isn't coercive or unjust. The big difference between walking and flying is that, because of regulations and other coercive measures, the feds have monopoly power over access to flight. But this does not give them the moral right to do anything, in my opinion. It only gives them sheer, brute power.

But, you might be thinking, there is another difference between walking and flying: Where flying is concerned this is necessary to keep us safe. In the first place, this will not "keep you safe". These scanners will not detect explosive breast implants in women, or material packed inside the rectum (room for plenty of stuff in there!). In fact, according to a comment in this interview, the manufacturers of the scanners have admitted that their machines would not even have caught the Christmas Day underpants bomber. So forget about being "kept safe." It is a mirage. If you give up rights for that reason, you give them up in exchange for nothing.

Further, why is this "necessary"? What disaster has occurred, which these scanners are needed to prevent? Almost a year ago, a guy burned himself with a device hidden in his underpants. And, now because he burned his junk, a faceless bureaucrat can see yours. It just goes to show you, as government responds to problems, every reaction is an over-reaction.

Finally, I see one good reason to take this issue seriously. If it stays in place and becomes "the new normal," this policy could represent a significant change in the sorts of things Americans think government may legitimately do to them. If so, it may well lead to worse things in the future. If it weren't for that, I really wouldn't care about it that much.

More from the Parade of Human Folly

Okay, I know this is an obsession of mine and I go way overboard with it, but here goes. I am here in South Dakota, and I see this front page article in the Argus Leader: Wis. Town Mourns Loss: Victims Were Headed to S. D. to Hunt Prairie Dogs." I was startled -- not so much by the crash itself, as that is a more or less regular tragedy nowadays. It was to realize that three guys would go all the way from Wisconsin to South Dakota to "hunt" prairie dogs. That's taking into consideration what hunting prairie dogs means: 1) Sitting in front of a prairie dog town in which the prairie dogs (Cynomis ludovicianus) must leave their burrows or starve, 2) blowing their little heads off with a high-powered rifle and scope when they do, and 3) leaving their bodies to rot uselessly in the prairie sun.* They were doing this at the same time that I was coming here to watch prairie dogs through binoculars and telescope whilst sipping iced drinks and catching up on my reading. I just hope they weren't planning on killing the same animals that I was watching.

May these poor lost souls rest in peace.
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* As near as I can tell, humans do not eat Cynomis species. A search for "prairie dog recipies" turned up only foods to feed to your pet prairie dogs. Yes, people do keep them as pets. One owner has emailed me to say that they are intelligent and affectionate.

In the picture above (click to enlarge), the white mounds in the grass are prairie dog burrows.

On the Road Again

In in South Dakota now, cleansing my soul. Right now I am at a (privately owned) campground that has high speed wireless internet access (!), but there won't be too many of those. Just thought I would explain why I am going to be a mite scarce.

I notice that this place seems to have a lot more customers than last summer, partly no doubt because of the drop in gas prices. Also I guess campgrounds might be one of those "depression-proof businesses," being cheaper by far than a hotel. That would mean that this is a bearish economic indicator, in other words.

May prosperity find you nonetheless!

L.

My Lunch with Eddie

I met the fabulous animation blogger and Populärekulturmeister Eddie Fitzgerald Saturday, over lunch at Lido Pizza in the San Fernando valley. We talked for about three and a half hours. I’m afraid I uncharacteristically babbled on a great deal and missed opportunities to get more of Eddie’s unique perspective on the world, but I was so excited to be in The Presence that my impulse control was impaired.

[Any quotations below are approximate, being from memory only. Also, my apologies for the quality of these telephone pictures -- I forgot to bring my camera.]

The first thing we talked about was the elephant in the room – Los Angeles. It was all around us, in all its exhilarating philistine vulgarity!* I told Eddie I still think of something my father said when I was a kid, driving through identical ‘urbs with exotic-sounding names: “You know, these places look like they were built last night, in the dark.” Eddie said the real reason to live here is the people, it's got incredible numbers of the most interesting, creative people you can find. He talked about the brilliant Harlan Ellison, who can be seen banging on the hoods of cars that he sees driving unsafely. I talked about what a genius Rod Serling was.

Eddie has worked at every level of the animation art: drawing animation cels, storyboarding, writing scripts, directing. Like so many people with honest jobs (ie., in the private sector), he has worked for quite a number of different people. Right now, he works for an education company. His favorite work experiences were working for Ralph Bakshi and, on another occasion, John Kricfalusi (of Ren and Stimpy fame). His favorite sort of work environment is one that is dominated by a single creative imagination, a coherent and passionately conceived vision of the group's mission. His most horrific work experience was the Nickelodeon, having taken over Ren and Stimpy fired the brilliant John K. from the show he himself had created. Eddie was shocked that many of the employees failed to stand behind John and try to convince Nickelodeon that what they were doing was insane. He suffered mental scars from these events that he still has, he says, "to this day."

Eddie does some teaching, both at Cal Arts and Laguna College of Art and Design. In fact, he was going to give a lecture that evening, on animation. He rehearsed the little preface he intend to give, which would go something like this: "I'm going to tell you about animation as Eddie Fitzgerald does it, because that's the only kind I know. But I can tell you that no one else in the world knows as much about that as I do!"

About teaching: "Isn't teaching wonderful? You know, in the past, when you wanted to become a shaman, you had to have an uncle who would take you under his wing. Now, there's this stranger who knows all about something you want to know about, and he's willing to just tell it to you -- right now!" Yes, I suppose teaching is a peculiar sort of education that only exists in an economy with a division of labor. The Marxist would point out that it greatly depersonalizes the educational relationship, but it also greatly enhances the freedom (size of the choice-set) of the student. It also promotes equality. In the old system, to be a learner (or "apprentice") was a position of grovelling subservience. You would wait on your mentor hand and foot, and you had to call him "Master" (Maestro, Meister, etc.).

Eddie gave me a new and better reason to dislike what he calls “3 D” animation – ie., what I think of as computer animation. "You say, 'Okay, now the character takes his hat off' and they'll say 'He can't do that.' 'Why not.' 'His arm isn't long enough.'" It turns out computer animation has to work consistently and logically. "When you saw Daffy Duck's bill from the side, it was bent up at the end, because that's funny. From the front, it wasn't -- and they would do little cheats so you wouldn't notice it changes shape when he turns his head. Now, you can't do that, unless you have a huge budget, like Pixar, so you can afford a bunch of different programs for the same character."

One of the things I liked about old, hand-drawn animation is that it can escape from consistency and logic -- because that's funny! If 3 D can't do that except at great expense, that's another reason to regret it.

We also visited the site of the old Ayn Rand house on Tampa road, but I'll have to post about it later. Eddie blogged about our visit here.
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* Here is the Ali Baba Motel, which was near the house I stayed at in Costa Mesa. Do you have an Ali Baba Motel near you? Neither do I.

On the Road

I've been in Los Angeles for several days, doing research in the archives at the Ayn Rand Institute (photo at left from their web site). I was looking through her papers, searching for evidence I can use for an article on her attitude toward Nietzsche (the evidence, it turns out, is hard to fit together). I also had lunch with the great Eddie Fitzgerald at Lido Pizza in Van Nuys. Two exciting experiences! I'll try to blog about them upon my return.

Just thought I should explain why I have been inactive for several days.

The Zen of Staring at Scenery

Here are some images from our recent trip to Sylvania, in the Michigan Upper Peninsula.

I like it most when no one comes
Preferring fallen leaves and swirling flowers for company.
-- Ikkyu

Do not follow dusty paths in search of wisdom. If you cannot find the truth where you are, where do you expect to find it?
-- Dogen

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
-- Melville



What is of all things most yielding
Can overcome that which is most hard.
-- Lao Tse



This is not a face.



A Crazy Cloud, out in the open,
Blown about madly, as wild as they come!
Who knows where this cloud will go, where the wind will still?
-- Ikkyu



I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
-- Thoreau

Sylvania Wilderness: Truly Uncommon

My wife Deborah and I are heading for a camping trip in the Sylvania Wilderness Area, the largest virgin forest in Michigan. This place has never been logged. It is truly the forest primeval that Longfellow wrote about, the one with those murmuring pines and hemlocks. This is exactly to sort of country where his fictionalized Hiawatha lived and loved. To the left you see a very small part of this world. (Part of a rotting log.) When I visit these northern woods, I think of them in terms of little details, because that's where the beauty is, it seems to me. To a westerner like me, the big picture is kind of underwhelming. For those who insist on a larger view, one is included below.

How did Sylvania escape being logged, in a part of the country that typically shaved, clearcut, logged to death by "corporate greed"? That's a very interesting story. Unlike the land that was raped and abused, Sylvania was private property. It was owned originally by a group of US Steel execs (this was iron mining country) who called themselves the Sylvania Club. Some of them had logging interests of some sort, but they didn't wreck this piece of land because it was theirs. They built a few lodges on it, entertained guests like Bing Crosby and Dwight Eisenhower, drank, gambled, fished, and minded their own business. During prohibition, they stored their booze on Whisky Island in Clark Lake. (It is just beyond the spit of land in the picture below.)

Then, in the sixties, the Sylvania tract became government land, and a classic tragedy of the commons began to take shape. People rushed in to harvest the huge, almost unexploited fish population. Old timers tell stories of a boat that tipped over and sank because it had too many fish in it. Finally the Forestry Service slapped on some reasonable regulations. Fishing here is catch and release now, and camping now is in designated sites only. You have to reserve a spot and pay a fee, just as if this vast tract of primitive land were a hotel. But at least you can get some degree of privacy and a simulacrum of what it once was: perfection.

Endless Summer

Nat and I are on a car trip that is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. By now, it is starting to feel like one of those dreams where you are trying to get away from the monster and you can only run in slow motion. Except that there is no monster, only the broiling sun and the beautiful, brutal, gloriously empty West. (The fact that our air conditioner is broken and can't be fixed on the road enhances this powerful aesthetic effect.)

To the left, you see an area called "Little Park," an island of sagebrush in the vast lava flow of the Craters of the Moon Nature Preserve in Idaho. (Click to enlarge.) I figured I had to go there just because the name was so cute. Actually, as it turned out, the Little Park is only parklike in comparison with the desolate chaos of the lava beds that surround it.

The Ruby Mountains: No Longer Unknown

Last week, Nat and I, still on the road today, visited Nevada's Ruby Mountains on the way to our ultimate destination in California. I first found out about the Rubies when Backpacker Magazine published an article, "The Ten Last Unknown Places." It featured a tantalizing couple of pages about this isolated range and an eye-popping photo of Liberty Lake (love that name!) at dawn. No, the irony of this is not lost on me. When a magazine with a circulation of 340,000 describes you as "unknown," you are ipso facto not unknown.

Sure enough, the area around Angel Lake Campground is now a nice place to meet people and make friends, but utterly ruined as a place to find Nietzschean high mountain solitude. If you want to shriek from your crags without being molested by mental health personnel, you'll just have to go elsewhere.

Walking a couple of miles on the path into the Rubies from the end of Lemoille canyon on a weekday, we met over a dozen parties who were likewise walking the path. The Rubies are, however, stunningly beautiful. To the left is a picture that, I kid you not, I took as I sat at the picnic table at our site in the campground. I suppose that this means these mountains can't be unknown, even aside from Backpacker's lovely little writeup. You can't look for solitude in a place that is picture-postcard-beautiful (hat-tip here to Deborah Hunt). At least not in the lower 48 and Hawaii.

To the right you see the Sierra basin that was our ultimate destination in California. Near the left edge, on a pile of white granite, you can see a sliver of blue showing through a stand of pine trees (click to enlarge). This is "our" lake. I've been going there since 1969 and I have always had it to myself. It may not have the Rubies' fetching looks, but it really is unknown. And it has other virtues as well, enough of them to enable the well-meaning folks at Backpacker to ruin it if they find out about it. I may post about it later but, no, I won't be telling you what the place is called or where it is. Sorry. I've done some dumb things in my time, but I am not a complete idiot.

Well, back to the road!

The Real Devil's Tower

In the Devil's Tower KOA campground, guess what movie they play every night under the stars at 9:30 sharp. Of course.

To show a movie to an audience that is basically a random selection of humanity and to do so out of doors on a wide screen TV with mosquitoes buzzing around -- that may be the ultimate test of a movie's ability to entertain. And this one passed it beautifully. The audience clearly enjoyed it and so did I. It was a reminder of the good old days before Steven Spielberg decided he was an Artist. (A friend of mine describes him, perfectly I think, as the best second unit director ever.)

One thing that struck me on seeing it again is that this may be the one movie in which the composer is most important. The aliens and the humans communicate by means of a musical phrase, and there is that stunning sequence in which John Williams has to convey the impression of a human musician communicating with (so far) unseen aliens by playing a duet of variations on the original five note phrase. A sort of Dueling Banjos between galaxies. You have got to admit that he does it brilliantly. Interesting that to create the feeling of sense of alien-and-weird-but-beautiful he uses a modernist idiom that is not typical of him. (Any morals to draw about the aesthetics of modernism? And from the fact that the idiom used wasn't too modern -- nothing more remote than Hindemith?)

The other thing that hit me was something that I've never seen anyone else point out. The images of the Tower in the movie are all distorted. Often what we see is probably a model. In the internet screen grab to the right it is probably an altered photograph of the real thing, made in front of the KOA campground at the entrance to the national monument. Above and to the left you can see a shot I took from the rear of the same campground. It seems to me that the Tower in the movie is deliberately elongated. The two profiles compare like "Before" and "After" in a weight loss ad. The movie image of the tower seems obviously to have been artificially elongated. The real tower seems to me much more beautiful than the movie version. It looks, to switch metaphors, like a broad, powerful sumo wrestler among geological formations. The movie one looks, well, sort of stupid.

Miles of Wonderful Nothing

So far, we've gone 1,443.8 miles, through two time zone changes, sojourning now at the southwest corner of Wyoming. We dropped from I-90 to I-80 by taking I-25 South and two secondary roads, to re-emerge on Eisenhower's "interstate net" at Rawlings. In the meantime we were staggered by the vastness, vacuity and forbidding beauty of this section of the country where no one seems to live, and the few who do keep voting for people like Bush and McCain. It's like a planet where humans haven't landed yet. Nothing but prairie grass as far as you can see, except for distant mountain ranges, snow-capped in the middle of summer. "The Empty Quarter," one writer calls it, naming it after an area in the Arabian desert.

Who lives here, and what do they use this land for? Anything? Nat said, "It's almost a shame no one lives here." You could say the land is going to waste. It's not fulfilling its potential. Ah, but on second thought, it is doing what we should all do. Being itself.

Tonight, into the wild!

The Prairie Dogs: A Story With No Moral

I was almost there. The jeep road to the prairie dog town I came here to visit was just about three miles over the next hill. I drove past three guys by the side of the road who I soon realized were observing a prairie dog town by the side of the road. They had some fancy equipment -- big binoculars on a sophisticated stand and what looked like maybe some kind of directional microphone. Good, I thought. It's about time the Bureau of Land Management has begun to monitor a species that they and other branches of the government have done so much over the years to decimate and destroy. As my jeep flew past them, though, it occurred to me that they didn't look like rangers. Why not? That's it, they're not in uniform. Well, maybe they are scientists. Funny thing, though, they don't look like scientists either. Scientists aren't usually as chubby as these guys are, at least ones that do field work. Suddenly, bang!, I heard a detonation behind me. Then I realized that the thing I thought was some kind of directional mike was actually a high-powered rifle with a scope. These guys were waiting for prairie dogs to stick their heads out of their burrows and then blowing those same little heads off, for fun. Like playing whack-a-mole with real brain splatter.

Can you imagine a less sporting "sport" than this? Or a more perfect symbol of pointless, cowardly meanness? In South Dakota, licensed hunters are permitted to kill prairie dogs without limit. And since these Yankees don't eat prairie dogs, nor indeed any squirrel species, they just leave their exploded bodies to rot on the slopes of their burrow-domes.
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PS: For those who might be wondering about the answer to my two earlier questions: Yes, I was still able to get into the Indian Creek area. I guess having something declared a "wilderness" is not so easy. And, yes, my favorite prairie dog town is still there, and more or less as prosperous as it was last year, though still well below its peak.

Completely Rebuild New Orleans? Sorry, No.

The second anniversary of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina is upon us, and around the nation conversations about what to do about New Orleans are flaming up again. Needless to say, the blogosphere is no exception. Donald Pittenger over at 2 Blowhards has has an interesting post about this. Following Steve Chapman, he suggests and interesting analogy: Another awful hurricane devastated the then-major port city of Galveston Texas in 1900. In effect, the responsible parties decided that, gee, I guess it was a mistake to have a big port city, with a lot of expensive, delicate artifacts perched on a sandspit in a hurricane zone. Houston would be a better choice, as it is well protected from that sort of devastation. And today Houston, and not Galveston, is the major port in the area. New Orleans is like Galveston, Pittenger and Chapman are saying: there shouldn't be a big city with nearly half a million working stiffs like you and me living there, perched between a huge lake and a river, and large areas of it below sea level, in a hurricane zone. Baton Rouge and, again, Houston, are better choices.

I am a long time-time admirer of New Orleans, and of Creole and Cajun cuisine and music. I have been a fan of Joe and Cleoma Falcon, the lamented Clifton Chenier, and Breaux Brothers for decades. I have been known to stuff a Thanksgiving Day turkey with jambalaya. When Paul Prodhomme turned to healthy eating with A Fork in the Road, I turned with him. But I heartily agree with Chapman on this one.

However, a commenter on Donald's post suggests a competing analogy: So you want to abandon New Orleans. Would you abandon San Francisco, what with being in an earthquake zone and all?

This is a tough question for me. San Francisco and New Orleans are my two favorite American cities (Baltimore coming in third). But it seems to me that Galveston is the better analogy. Much of the city of New Orleans was simply a mistake: it only exists because of a government-built levee system which, we now know, government is not competent to maintain and operate properly. San Francisco can probably be maintained in existence by people who for one reason or another are willing to spend their own money doing so. Yes, I know, like the rest of America, San Francisco is on the dole. Probably, lots of government money goes into protecting it from earthquakes. This inevitably means money being mis-allocated (trans.: wasted). But the point is that San Francisco can probably survive on the resources of people who find it profitable or in some other way worthwhile to pay for it. In other words, protecting the whole thing is worth the cost.

New Orleans is an artistic and cultural treasure, and I am very attached to it. But completely rebuilding New Orleans would mean some of us indulging our sentimental attachments and aesthetic tastes at other people's expense. It can only be done by forcing the taxpayers to repair all the bad effects of this government-caused mistake. That's what makes New Orleans a special case. Further, as I understand it, the parts that are below sea-level tend to be the parts that were built after the formation of the modern welfare state -- ie., they aren't the parts that we get all aesthetic about. The old, "core" part of New Oreans is 48% at sea level or above.

Let's rebuild the parts of the city that make it great -- Tulane and the French Quarter, among others -- and move on. On to Baton Rouge, on to Houston! Some of the parts of the city that are just a place to live should be allowed to go the way of the Stutz Bearcat, the brontosaurus, and the liberal Republican.

Do I want to "let the hurricanes win"? I don't want the bad guys to win, but hurricanes are not bad guys. "Millions for defense but not once cent for tribute" is not a rational way to think about the weather.

Indian Creek: It's About Who Is Organized and (Therefore) Powerful

What harm is this car doing? That is the first question that is raised by the absurd proposal, originating from the Sierra Club and backed by the Forest Service, to ban motorized travel from the Indian Creek valley of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

Actually, I have to correct that. Contrary to what I suggested earlier, a closer look at the relevant documents shows they aren't really proposing to prohibit motorized travel, in general, at all. This is the one thing about this insane idea that is the most obviously unjust. Its this. In this "wilderness" -- the cows are staying!

Ever since the National Grassland was founded, ranchers have been allowed to pasture their cattle on this government land -- in fact, giving these people this government benefit has been one of the main functions of the National Grassland system. And these ranchers, unlike you and me and your Aunt Tillie, will have the right to use motorized vehicles here, even after it is declared a "wilderness." And believe me, they will come in, not only in pickup trucks and ATVs, but backhoes and bulldozers, to clean out their stockponds when they fill up with mud, as they do periodically. Forest Service rangers, in private conversations, admit that they too will be coming in with jeeps and trucks. Do you think they are going to be walking twelve miles across rugged terrain, carrying all their own water? They are representatives of the state -- they make the rules! The answer, of course, is no. Unlike the rest of us, they will ride.

Come to think of it, now I have to correct the way I put the question at the beginning. Since the proposal is to discriminate drastically between two groups of people, the question is not what harm does any vehicle, taken at random, ever do. The question is which of the two groups does more damage. Is it the hunters, the rockhounds, the guy who likes to watch prairie dogs through binoculars? Is it the people who will no longer be able to use this area except via means of transportation that are painful, constraining, and possibly dangerous? Or is it the ranchers and their servants in the Forest Service? Is it the people who will be allowed to bring all sorts of motor vehicles into the area as part of their work, and the ones who can roam freely over it at their leisure because they have horses?

In case the answer is not obvious, let me tell you about these cows. They poop everywhere. They do it in the water you wade into in order to cool off when the temperature goes over 100. They do it on the trails that you walk on. They attract huge, biting flies that draw blood and raise big itching welts on your legs and arms. Most of all, they poop copiously under all the shade trees, just where I want to sit down or unroll my sleeping bag. Spending the night here is like camping in a really, really badly kept barnyard. If you ever do it, you will want to (and I am not kidding about this) make sure your tetanus shot is up to date.

Worst of all, their grazing diminishes the presence of native grasses and encourages invasive species. The only way you can see solid stretches of buffalo grass is to climb to areas that the cows cannot reach. You can tell just by looking at the grass species when you have succeeded in getting away from them.

If the South Dakota Sierra Club had any guts, they would go after the ranchers, who do far more damage than the rockhounds could ever do. But no, in their lamely argued report on these issues, they simply take for granted that the ranchers will continue to dominate this otherwise-wild area, with never utter a peep about the damage they and their animals do.

Anyway, what sort of "wilderness" is it that has bulldozers, backhoes, stock ponds, plus hundreds and hundreds of lumbering, stinking, drooling cows? Isn't this just an abuse of one of the most sacred words in the language?

We see here a perfect example of how the system we live in really works. It is a class system. And no, the classes are not the capitalists and the proletariat (though there are times when that division does parallel the real one). It is the state and those who are sufficiently organized to influence it, and everyone else. Farmers and the Sierra Club are like the NRA, the teachers' unions, or General Motors: they are organized and therefore they have Leviathan's ear. On the other hand, those who will have to walk into Indian Creek or stay the Hell out do not constitute this sort of powerful interest group. That is the only explanation for the success, so far, of this ridiculous proposal.

The Proposed Indian Creek Wilderness Area: Just About the Worst Idea Yet

Since 1982, I've visited a vast, lonely area in the Buffalo Gap National Grassland many, many times. I've never told anyone where it is or how to get there, because, frankly, I didn't want to do anything that could contribute to attracting more people there. I go there because its a chance to be in a place where I can see wild terrain for at least ten miles in every direction -- and not a single human being, anywhere in sight! Now, I think I have to talk about it, because the Bureau of Land Management is apparently considering a move that in effect would cut me off from this wonderful source of inspiration. Apparently at the urging of the South Dakota chapter of the Sierra Club, they are considering declaring India Creek a "wilderness" area, banning all motorized travel there. If the always-objectionable Sierra Club gets its way (again!) it will be yet another example of government-by-pressure group, the rule of coalitions who have ends of their own, purposes that are quite different from the ones the rest of us have, or have any reason to adopt.

Why would this be such a bad idea? Because it would put most of the area beyond the reach of me or anybody remotely like me. Only local ranchers or wealthy people would be able to explore most of it. It is not practicable to visit most of it on foot. Only people who have horses, or can afford to rent or buy them, would be able to visit the greater part of this rugged area.

There are two reasons for this, both very simple.



One is the nature of the terrain. Here is an image I got from Google Earth. I have drawn a white line (click to enlarge) from the northern end of the area, at what the BLM workers call "Cardiac Hill," to the southern end, at the gate to the South Unit of the Badlands National Park. As far as I know, Cardiac Hill is the only practicable entrance to the place. That white snakey thing you see roughly following my line is Indian Creek. It's doing the typical prairie river meander. Each of the wrinkles you see around the creek is a draw or side-canyon. (More exactly, the dark fingers are low areas, the cretateous Pierre Shale Formation, while the white areas are higher elevation, the more recent oligocene Chadron Formation.) Exploring these twisting mazes is one of the main attractions of this place. It is also flanked by high, flat table-land, much of it topped with pristine short-grass prairie. To step onto one is to walk back into the days of Crazy Horse. To visit any of this to a significant extent, you have to stay overnight. Day trips will not do it.


Here is where the road snakes down into Indian Creek Valley, from the top of "Cardiac Hill." Maybe you can see why they call it that. As your Jeep tips over the top of the mesa onto the descending twists of dirt two-track, you feel at first that it will just keep tipping.


The other major factor, in addition to the nature of the terrain, is the water. As I think you can see in this picture, the water here looks like skim milk that has been spilled and swept into a bucket. It's gray. The pioneers used to say it's "too thick to drink and too thin to climb." )Why it's just a dern, cussed obstruction, dagnabbit!) And because the elements that make it undrinkable are actually dissolved minerals, not particles of any sort, it cannot be filtered. Solar distillation is not really practical either. (I looked into that.) This means, if you are going to be here for more than a few minutes, you need to carry your own water in. All of it.

I've done this many times, mainly in the years 1982-1992. I found that in country like this I need a gallon of water a day. The last time I weighed a backpack stocked for a two-day stay, it weighed over 70 lbs. And that I believe was without a tent. And here you do need a tent. It rains, even in August. (Unfortunately, this is not a desert. There's water, just not the kind you can use!)

It's beautiful country, but travel here is very arduous. On foot, it's almost impossible to get far at all. Local legend has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came through here fleeing the law and almost didn't make it.


In all the years I came there on foot, I never got much further than this large prairie dog town, about 2 1/2 miles (in a straight line) in from the entrance on Cardiac Hill. The white mounds you see on the ground are the burrow entrances. (You often see the US Air Force, from nearby Ellsworth base I suppose, doing exercises here in their choppers.) I tried everything -- returning to the car just to get water, caching water along the way (carrying two gallon jugs in my hands and two in my pack as far as the cache point). It was too darn difficult to get much further south than this.

I should add that traveling on foot here is not just arduous. It is also dangerous, especially if you are alone (as I almost always am). I've had two very close encounters with rattlesnakes here, one of which was so huge I didn't know what it was at first. There are also many opportunities to break a leg. (I once broke a leg in a remote location, and I highly recommend that you delay doing so as long as you can.)

Come to think of it, I have never, in the twenty five years I have been coming here, ever seen anyone who came in on foot, other than me and people I brought with me. The reason for this is obvious: It's not good idea! I hereby recommend that you not do it!


This summer, for the first time ever, I finally made it all the way from Cardiac Hill to the southern boundary of the area, where the national park begins, 6 3/4 miles to the south (that's as the crow flies: if you walk or drive instead of flying, it is further). I did it by driving the jeep three or four miles and walking the rest of the way. (I just couldn't trust the jeep to make it through those last creek-crossings -- too sandy and slushy!) Here you see the fence bordering the park, at the end of the road. That's Sheep Table Mountain on the horizon, the most spectacular feature in the South Unit.


To be fair, any sort of travel here is very tough (except, I assume, for horseback and helicopter -- speaking of which, you can see another 'copter here if you click and look above the hill). Even going by car can be full of trouble. On three separate occasions I have gotten stuck: once trying to cross Indian Creek, once in the sand on Cardiac Hill, and once in a quagmire produced by a sudden rainstorm. Each time I had to be pulled out by ranchers. Two of them were lovely, generous folks who wouldn't let me pay them. The third one was a bitter, angry guy on Spring Draw Road who charged me $250. He also kept berating me for being fool enough to go in there by any means other than horseback.

For travel by car, the biggest worry is weather. The two-track road in the valley is only passable when dry. If it rains for very long at all, this black Pierre formation clay turns into a nasty glue locally known as "gumbo." Think of trying to drive through a deep vat of old-fashioned library paste. A four-wheel drive vehicle is no protection against that. Believe me, I know!


The system I finally devised is this. I drive in and sleep by my jeep, ready to jump into the car and drive out if it starts to rain, even in the middle of the night. This is a burden, because I like to bring my telescope, to take advantage of these wonderfully dark skies at night, so far from city lights. Packing a telescope in the rain in the middle of the night is not fun. But I'm determined to never get stuck there again. And for five years, I haven't. (That schmuck who charged me $250 taught me a lesson, and I don't have to be taught twice!)

Now, I suppose someone at this point might say, Wait, you are arguing for allowing motorized travel, and yet you are telling me how hard it is to travel there by car? Well, the point is, as hard as travel by car is here, travel on foot is much worse. If that were all I was allowed, I would go back to being trapped in the area of the prairie dog town, and only exploring features in the northern-most one third of the valley. And I can just leave my telescope at home. It weighs as much as four or five gallons of water!


One obvious question remains: If prohibiting cars in this area is such a bad idea, why is it happening? The Forest Service has backed the Sierra Club's proposal. Now all that remains is to see if Congress will enact it. What is going on here? This post has already gone on too long, and I'll try to post on this question soon.

I [insert heart icon here] Prairie Dogs!

I've loved black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) since I first moved to the Steppes of central North America in 1982. I visit them as often as I can, and this week I spent another couple of days in their midst. I sat in a folding chair on the edge of a prairie dog town several acres in extent, watching them through binoculars. (I'm still in South Dakota as I write this.) I can't resist writing one (just one, I promise) post about prairie dogs. This is it. (On second thought there probably will be more of them. Sorry!)

Why be interested in prairie dogs? Well, if I can assume that you like nature and wild things, especially wild mammals, I can give you several reasons.

First, like you and me, prairie dogs are diurnal. Most wild mammals seem to be nocturnal. Prey-animals like the dark because its harder for predators to see them, and predators like it because that's when the prey is up and about. Prairie dogs are up when you are up, and they sleep when you sleep. That means more hours in which you can see them.

Second, prairie dogs are very conspicuous. Most herbivores live by lurking and sneaking. To be seen is to be eaten. Therefore, they avoid being seen. Prairie dogs developed an opposite sort of strategy of predator avoidance. The have an alarm system. When one of them sees a predator, he lets out a predator-alarm call, a rhymthic Cheerk! Cheerk! Cheerk! If you get close enough to hear the inhalations between the vocalizations, it sounds like Cheerk uh Cheerk uh Cheerk uh! They must be the most in-your-face herbivores in North America, except for the bison I suppose. The result, once again, is you get to see a lot of them.

Third, they have many interesting traits, some of which make them seem human. Like you and me, they are colonial -- they mostly live in groups. Heck, we even call them towns! You often see them visiting each other for no reason at all other than to exchange caresses, or a mysterious oral-contact gesture that animal behaviorists call "kissing." (See Wikipedia photo to left.) It seems to have something like the same meaning that a human kiss has. They practice polygynous mating (one male with a harem) and evidently stay married for life (a practice humans had here in the West until very recently).

One behavior that everyone finds interesting is the rather mysterious one that Prof. John Hoogland named "the jump-yip call." (See picture below, from City of Boulder CO website.)

Every once in a while one of these animals will, with no environmental provocation that anyone can see, suddenly stand up full-length, throw his little forelegs high in the air, as if in exaltation, and let out a yell that sounds like Wah-hoo! or sometimes Whee-ya! And it's contagious. One will go Wah-hoo! and another member of the same coterie (male plus harem plus offspring, mainly) will go Whee-ya! Nobody can be sure just what it means, but hearing it you can't escape the impression that it has something to do with well-being. Some researchers call it "the all clear call" (ie., the opposite of the predator warning). To me, it sounds like an Ain't life grand? call.

They are fairly good at recognizing their enemies too. This week I saw them giving the predator warning call when a coyote walked through their town (he was actually just trying to avoid getting too close to me), and a double-time, extra-loud version of it when a prairie falcon swooped down at them -- but they ignored cows, cottontails, a thirteen-lined ground squirrel, and a family of burrowing owls. (Burrowing owls do not eat prairie dogs or their young -- they just like to live in their abandoned burrows.) It hurt my feelings that they classified me with the coyote and falcon -- barking if I ever got too close, and in one case even giving the heavy-duty swooping falcon version of the call. To prairie dogs I am at least as harmless as a cow, it seems to me. Come to think of it, though, they are right. They don't know me as an individual. They have to think of me, as racists do of their fellow humans, not as an individual, but as a member of a group. (Oh, you're one of them.) As a species, I have to admit, we are predators, not to be trusted by the likes of these little guys. (More about man-versus-prairie-dog in a future post.)

Anyway, they are charming, interesting, and not at all shy. What's not to like? Let's hear it for prairie dogs! Whee-ya!

I'm in South Dakota!

Actually, I'm leaving in a few minutes. My plans to go to California fell through for lack of funds, so I am returning to South Dakota, even though I was just there in July. Also, I wanted to visit once again my favorite camping spot east of Donner Lake, the Indian Creek valley, while I still can. There is a chance it will soon be taken away from me by an evil corporation with vast powers and international reach called -- the Sierra Club. Unfortunately, I'm not making this up. I'll blog about this insidious cabal of kleptocrats on my return, if not before.

By the way, the first time I saw the bar on the left, in Scenic, SD, it was 1982 and the sign (click to enlarge) said "NO INDIANS ALLOWED." They later painted out the "NO." I hear it is now actually owned by Indians. Even in western South Dakota, we have progress!