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2021-06-09
Professor Vanlife
In the summer of 2021, I accepted an adjunct job at a college back East. Rather than spend half the salary on rent and in order to socially distance from others, I fixed up a Toyota Sienna minivan so I could live in it for the summer. This was the first trip I had taken since the late winter of 2020. On the drive out from California, I stopped to climb a mountain in Wyoming and had the trail to the summit mostly to myself. Here's what I wrote about it on Facebook: "View of Laramie Peak (elev. 10,275) in present day Wyoming, an important landmark on the Oregon Trail. For those emigrants not from Appalachia or northern New England, it was the first really big mountain they’d ever seen and it loomed in front of them for several days as they approached it from the plains. Mark Twain passed by here in 1861 and recollected later, speaking about the mountain in the third person: 'Looming vast and solitary -- a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows of storm-cloud. He was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right.'" -
2021-02-07
Nature Endures
This photograph shows the imposing Catalina Mountains (Babad Do'ag to the indigenous Tohono O’odham) to the north of Tucson, Arizona, USA, with a majestic saguaro in the center front. The rocks in these mountains record millions of years of history. The multi-armed saguaro has stood for at least 75 years. Viewing these natural phenomena has always been a favorite pastime of mine, but during this time of pandemic, contemplating these forces of nature reminds me of the endurance of nature and the long stretch of environmental history. The pandemic and our current difficulties will pass just as other the saguaro and the mountains have seen many other calamities pass.