Far from the madding crowd

The land as God made it.  No sound but the wind. No sign of civilization.

 

See the cattle in the distance?

“Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside—neither of which the sovereign state finds in its interest. The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicitous silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance from the historical record.”
― James C. Scott

 

A lonesome road in a lonesome land at twilight.

“The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”
― Henry Beston

I hitched a horse trailer to the old 4x4 truck and drove as far as four-wheel-drive would take us, unloaded my horses and rode far, far away.  I had two horses in my mount; one to ride and one to pack.  Each day I would switch them around. We traveled at a slow pace, I often dismounting to walk because I wanted to walk. I had no particular goal other than to see the land and be alone.  I enjoy being alone. I like the silence, the freedom, the ... looseness, for want of a better word.  My personality is other-directed and I am sensitive to the moods and desires of others and try to accommodate them.  I try and fail to not be so much that way because it stresses me out.  Not in a big way, but just a constant, low-voltage current crackling through my nerves.  The only way to stop that is to be alone and to know I won't be disturbed, something that in the normal course of a typical day is impossible.  I wasn't even aware, or not very aware, I was this way, until I came here and discovered being truly alone -- alone as in no other human being around for miles.  At first it alarmed me, but I've come to enjoy it.

When I found a place I liked, I made camp, usually a dry camp, but, anticipating that, I packed two old Army surplus 36-gallon Lister bags, each filled with only 15 gallons of water -- only that much because a pint's a pound the world around, and a horse can carry no more than about 30 percent of its body weight.  So, adding in the weight of the bags, the pack saddle (about 25 pounds), and some supplies, the horse was carrying all she could. Each horse drank about 10 gallons of that a day, so whenever I found a water source I let the horses drink and I refilled the bags, popping in a chlorine capsule. The water, so far away from any sources of pollution, was crystal clear and potable, but, being a bit of a germophobe, I took no chances.  

Since I'm not that heavy, probably no more than 135 pounds with boots and clothes, jacket, hat, sixgun strapped to my hip and some possibles in my pockets, my riding mount could carry full saddlebags and my trusty Winchester -- yo ho! beware ye ravening beasts, one mightier than thee approacheth!

As it turned out, I saw nary a bear nor lion and the big grazers I encountered ignored me or regarded me with mild curiosity.  I did hear the ever-present yipping and yowling of coyotes during the nights and should they have chosen to harry my mounts they would have been mightily sorry. I expect that, being the clever creatures they are, they knew that and so kept their distance.

Anyway, I would start looking for a good campsite when the sun began sliding down the western sky and usually found one a couple of hours before nightfall.  That gave me plenty of time to look things over, gather fuel and prepare the ground for and get a campfire going in time for it to burn down to hot coals by the time I was ready to cook supper -- I make a small fire, Indian fashion.  Indians say the white man makes a fire so big he can't get close enough to get warm: the best fire is no bigger than a man's hand. I make one bigger than that, but not by much.  

I also had time to select a good spot for a high line for my mounts, or if none were possible, hobble them comfortably and securely, see that they were fed and watered, inspected for wound or injury, rubbed down and relaxed.  I brought along my backpacking tent but only used it if it looked like we might have rain during the night.  But I did bring a sturdy camp cot to raise me well off the ground because I am afraid of rattlesnakes and didn't want any crawling in with me as I slept. Fortunately, dry camps were less likely to harbor snakes as they and their prey prefer damp areas with access to water.

As the sun lingered low in the west, I heated water and scrubbed down: you can't imagine how must dust and dirt you can accumulate horseback trekking across open land.  Once the fire had burned well down, I would prepare my grub.  Typical would be made-on-the-spot corn tortillas, rice and fried pinto beans mixed with home-made chipped beef, dried tomatoes, Serrano peppers and jalapeños, with a slice or two of hard cheddar cheese melted on top.  Salad a carrot, eaten Bugs Bunny style, dessert an apple.  Other nights I might make pan biscuits and bacon gravy, served with fried potatoes and onions, with maybe a garlic clove sliced and tossed in. What I wanted, what I needed, was chow that would stick to my ribs.  When I made pan biscuits or tortillas, I made enough for lunch the next day, eaten with some cheddar and an apple.

Clean-up was quick and easy.  After putting everything away, I would patrol the campsite, maybe take a bit of a stroll, check on the horses, wash up again (I told you I was a germophobe!  And also a clean freak.) and hit the hay, tired to the bone.

The nights were warm, only getting chilly in the hours before dawn, and I could lie comfortable under a single wool blanket, gazing up at the night sky, usually moonless until after I had fallen asleep, the waning, shrinking crescent only rising after 1 am.  There was the Milky Way in all its splendor, the Pleiades, the constellation Leo low in the west after sunset, Regulus at the bottom, dim Mars just to the right, closing for a conjunction, and bright Venus lower and farther right.   And the other constellations and stars -- Aldebaran, Vega and Arcturus,  Scorpius and Antares, Altair, Vega, Deneb, and so many others.  Some nights, in the north I saw noctilucent clouds, electric blue high, high in the sky up in the Mesosphere, 50 miles and more above the earth.

They are formed by water vapor condensing around meteor dust.  They look blue because they are above the ozone layer and ozone absorbs red light.  When I wake before dawn there is the moon sinking in the west, accompanied by Jupiter. This earth, this sky, this universe, is filled with so much beauty sometimes it is almost too much for me.

 

First thing I do when I get up is go check on the horses and see to their needs.  Then I stir up the banked campfire, feed it some fresh fuel and make hot water to wash with and make coffee.  It's chilly and usually I sit hunched by the fire wrapped in my blanket, hands cupping that first wonderful cup of joe.  For breakfast, I have oatmeal and raisins sprinkled with nutmeg and doused with brown sugar and powdered milk, followed up with an orange.  Or I may have cream of wheat.  Then a final cup of coffee before breaking camp, saddling up and hitting the trail just as the sun peeps over the horizon, heading out for wherever whimsy takes me.

 

And where were my house apes all this time?  The two future warrior-conquerors were off with their grandfather and uncle flying cross-country in a Beech D18S to visit relatives back east, see the Pennsylvania Dutch country our Dunkard Brethren ancestors settled after being hounded out of Germany and the Delaware Valley where our English Quaker ancestors built their homes.  They'd also visit Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, especially the Dunker church at Antietam, museums, etc.  I was invited to go, too, but I thought it would be good for the boys and men to hang out together without the constraints of a female tagging along.

And my mini-me?  Her grandma grabbed the chance to rescue her from my pernicious influence and have her all to herself for a change.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate, for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
― Henry Beston