Category Archives: Travel

Friends, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The Quiet American

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53  bar falls 29.88 4mph NE dewpoint 33 Beltane   sunny

               First Quarter of the Hare Moon

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                                  The Quiet American

Here’s my buddy, Mark Odegard in Thailand.  I can’t tell if this is the palace grounds or not, but I do remember just this sign.  It made me stop and think, too.  He’s just finishing up a safe sex exhibit for UNESCO and says he has come to love Thailand. 

Southeast Asia has a fascinating pull.  Mark and Mary succumbed to it years ago and have spent much of their adult lives there.  I’ve visited only once, but the memories are fresh and pull me back.  Part of the allure, of course, is the unfamiliar.  Southeast Asia as a place has figured little in American thought and history with the notable exception of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.  In those instances subjugation, not understanding was our goal, so the cultures and the people there remained opaque.

Another part of the attraction is the sense of confidence in their culture that these small countries have.  Thailand has not been conquered since the Angkor days of Khmer invasions.  Cambodia, though pummeled and ruined by first the U.S., then the Khmer Rouge, has a sweet, ancient flavor that overcomes even those dismal moments.  Singapore is a confident, bustling country, Asia lite as my sister says.  Malaysia has an old culture, too, layered over now with Islam, but still retaining a rotating monarchy and other traditional customs.  Burma remains largely the old days when the flying fishes went to play in far off Mandalay.  It retains a more traditional cast because the ruling junta has placed an umbrella over the country, blocking out the light and keeping the people subservient.  Indonesia has a huge population and much diversity with its many islands, but its Indonesian reality seems strong to me.

It is also cheap, easy for Americans to navigate financially and in that regard much more appealing than the Euro dominated Europe.

Since I travel often to become a stranger, an outsider, a foreigner, Southeast Asia fulfilled my need at each stop, but each time in a different way:  food, ruins, people, cities, colors, art. 

Someday I will return

Family, Garden, Travel, Weather +Climate

Compounding Pharmacies

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44  bar rises 30.06  2mph N dewpoint 31 Spring

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

A gray, cool start after a shirt sleeve day yesterday.  We’re still in the hurry up and wait phase of gardening.  It’s a bit too early for clean up, certainly too early for planting anything but cold weather crops.  We don’t tend to do those, at least not so far, so the hydroponics are our primary entry in this years vegetable garden.  The lettuce seedlings and tomato plant I put under the light first have grown rapidly.  Not ready for harvest anytime soon, but on the way.

Kate made me aware of compounding pharmacies, a vestigial remnant of that which all pharmacies used to be, independent pharmaceutical manufactories.  There are six in Minnesota including one in St. Paul, St. Peter and Wayzata.  The Wayzata pharmacy has a glitzy name, RxArtisans.  I knew a few of those when I was in college.  The growth and reach of pharmaceutical companies has reduced the average pharmacy to nothing more than a retail distributor of already compounded drugs.  This results, of course, in a matching of patients to available drugs and their available dosages, whereas the compounding pharmacy matched drugs to patients both in dosage and delivery vehicle. 

The Delta buyout of Northwest, not a merger, will not be certain for some time to come.  The pilots association of Northwest and the other unions flight attendants, ground crews and mechanics are about to become part of a larger, non-unionized pool.  This creates probable labor and culture conflicts from day one.  Also, congress and the regulators still have to approve, as does Wall Street.  Both companies share price dropped the day after the announcement, an unusual event.  Also, both airlines have an aging fleet of planes and debt hangover from their respective bankruptcies.  The State of Minnesota wants its incentives back since Northwest, with the merger, violates the remain in Minnesota provision.  All this reflects the turbulent nature of an industry who excels in nothing quite so much as an uncomfortable experience delivered for hundreds of dollars.

Family, Travel, Weather +Climate

Air Conditioning

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33 bar steep fall 29.69  7 mph NE dewpoint 32  Spring

                Waxing Crescent Moon of Growing

Just got a call from the Sierra Club inviting me to my own party.  I said, “OK.”

The rain turned to part snow around 4:50PM and looks like it’s mostly snow now.  As soon as the temps drop, it will transition to full snow and if it comes up this rate, it will accumulate.

Checked out airfare to Dallas/Ft. Worth in July.  Only for family would I go to Dallas/Ft. Worth and only for a family reunion would I go in July.  Once, long ago, I took the train from Indiana to Ft. Worth where my Dad’s brother, Charles, lived.  On the way I got molested while taking pictures with my Brownie camera, but I said, “Don’t do that.” to the guy who put his hand between my legs and he went away.  It was not a big deal then or now.

I hit Ft. Worth just as the temperature racked up 107.  I didn’t know the temperatures in the world really got that hot.  I knew it theoretically, but empirically?  No way.   This would have 1956/7 and I’d only experienced air conditioning on rare occasions.  I remember repeating after I got back:  I went from an air-conditioned train, to an air-conditioned car, to an air-conditioned house.  This was remarkable.

What the temps will be like this time I have no idea, but air-conditioning has gone from a comment-worthy rarity to a personal necessity.  I have no doubt we’ll be well cooled. 

That weather seems a long way from the winds today, which hit 34 at 2:10pm, and the driving snow that builds up on our lawn as I write this.

Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Travel

Really Creepy Vampires

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42 bar rises 29.73 0mph W  dewpoint 28 Spring

         Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

OK.  I’m taking off my hair shirt and hanging up my cilici.

Today is Ruth’s second birthday.  Ruth is our first granddaughter.  The thought of another life, connected to your own, just starting out, makes the world seem a more congenial and more precious place.  Her blue eyes, mischievous quality and alertness augur an interesting and bright future.  She feeds the dogs, carrying their bowls with that peculiar toddler rolling gate.  She also crawls in the dog crate and closes the door to go night/night. (She’s just pretending.)  Jon and Jen are good parents, another fact that makes the world more congenial and more precious.

A quiet evening after the workout.  Started watching 30 Days of Night.  Vampires attack Point Barrow, Alaska just after it heads into 30 days with no sun.  One of the vampires says, “We should have come here a long time ago.”  A bit of Draculian humor.  A good movie so far.  Great production values, interesting actors and really creepy vampires.

Kate leaves tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM (with me as taxi driver) for Denver to celebrate Ruth’s birthday, then onto San Francisco for a family practice CME.  I plan to do some garden work tomorrow, like put down weed preventer and remove some mulch, maybe rake a bit.  It’s still too early to do much, but I’ll be able to get started.

Family, Garden, Politics, Travel

Airlines Not Required to Provide Food, Water, Clean Toilets or Fresh Air

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42 bar steep rise 29.71 1mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

           Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

We soaked the rock wool seed pellets in 5.0 ph water.  This will neutralize the natural high alkalinity of the rock wool. Tomorrow I’ll sow seeds from a lettuce mixture we got at Seed Saver’s Exchange.  Tomorrow, too, the tomato seeds will got in the peat pots.  Action on the indoor garden and some (the tomato seeds) on the outdoor garden proceeds apace.

The library provided a couple of books on DVD for Kate and her drive to Nevada, Iowa over the weekend.  She’s doing a sort of homecoming/reunion thing.  Meanwhile I’ll celebrate Chinese New Year’s in Lauderdale.

The beat goes on.

In the ongoing journal of outrage at the way things are, this from today’s newswire: 

A federal appeals court has rejected a law requiring airlines to provide food, water, clean toilets and fresh air to passengers trapped in a plane delayed on the ground.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that New York’s new state law interferes with federal law governing the price, route or service of an air carrier. It was the first law in the nation of its kind.

The appeals court said the new law was laudable but only the federal government has the authority to enact such a regulation.

The law was challenged before the appeals court by the Air Transport Association of America, the industry trade group representing leading U.S. airlines.

Garden, Great Work, Politics, Travel

The Sons of the Soil

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 37  bar steady 29.78 0mph windchill 36

   Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

 

Below is a reply to my brother Mark about this e-mail he sent to me:

Charles, This is pretty amazing. It really needed to happen. Mark ** Penang abandons pro-Malay policy **The Malaysian state of Penang says it will no longer follow a government policy favouring ethnic Malays.< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7289509.stm >In re:  the sons of the soil.  When I was in Hawai’i, I learned the natives call themselves kama’aina, literally children of the land.  Businesses offer a kama’aina discount and there has been some effort to get civil service preference to kama’aina.  In Hawai’i, where the indigenous population has experienced considerable oppression (plantation slavery for sugar and pineapples) and marginalization (numbers cut by 90% thanks to disease), it seems just.

It made me think a lot about this notion of belonging to a land, or a place.  The problem with identifying one ethnicity or one particular population as sons of the soil is its ahistorical nature.  That is, at some point in time, virtually every population on earth, outside of a miniscule group in Africa, emigrated. In other words, kama’aina is not a permanent characteristic, rather it reflects an acquired relationship, one that reflects a love for this place.  Others, too, can become kama’aina.  That is the essential injustice in the Malaysian situation.It is, too, an injustice in Hawai’i, if Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and white inhabitants cannot, at some point, also be kama’aina.

 

As I thought more about it, I realized I am kama’aina of the American Midwest, the heartland of the North American continent, yet I am also a son of immigrants.  Am I less wedded to this land than the Annishinabe or the Lakota?  I don’t think so.  My life depends on it. When I return, I see home in its lakes and forests.

In fact, the whole notion of an ecological consciousness comes down to seeing ourselves, each of us, as kama’aina of the planet earth.

Anyhow, thanks.  I agree, amazing and hopeful. 

Memories, Travel

An Indiana Farm on Kauai

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                             9  bar rises 30.24  1mph NNW windchill 5

                                                    New Moon

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When I was a boy, say 12 and under, each summer I would visit my Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia for a couple of weeks or so.  They lived on the farm my grandfather had put together.  It was a couple hundred acres of corn, a few cows, a pig or two, harness-racing horses and chickens, Bantams with the Banty roosters and their mile-high attitude and morning curdling cock-a-doodle-doo.  These memories have a particular smell, a mixture of gravel dust, hay and cow manure.  They also have an increasingly antique feel as they recede further and further from the present day.

Imagine my surprise when these memories came alive all day, every day while we were on Kauai and all because of Hurrican I’niki.  In 1992, just before we first visited Kauai, it was struck by a rare and devastating hurricane.  This hurricane eliminated many resorts, including the famous Coco Palms where Elvis shot his movie, Blue Hawai’i.  Many homes blew away, trees and plants got pushed over and beaches changed their shapes. 

I’niki also opened up all of the many chicken coops on the island.  Once free, the chickens never again came home to roost, but instead have now made the entire island their home.  They are, like the feral pig, wild animals, freed to roam wherever they like in a paradise of bugs and small worms.

The result is that often throughout the day the sound of a Banty rooster crowing reverberates whether you’re on the beach, in the forests, up a mountain or near a river.  The chickens come around pic-nic tables and wait patiently for food.  Local children pick up the roosters and carry them like puppies down to the beach.  As a result, Uncle Riley and his farm came to mind day after day on the most isolated islands in the world, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. 

Now that was unexpected.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

The Days Look Potent

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26  bar rises 29.93  5mph  NNW windchill23

       Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

The angle of the sun has changed; the days look potent, ready to burst open and let plant life smash through winter.  Even the snow today has a futile, last gasp appearance.  It is not the snow fury of midwinter when the drifts pile up and driving snow blinds motorists, making the home a cozy refuge.  Yes, temperatures will plunge the next couple of days, but we know this is just the Hawthorne Giant reluctant to let go his grip on the land.  The Oak King has already seized the season, opening the eyelid of nature wider and wider until one day soon the snow will melt and the ground begin to thaw.  Then, all hail breaks loose.

This drama, the back and forth of seasonal change, is not felt in the tropics.  I remember the struggle my brother Mark had explaining snow to his classes of Thai students learning English.  How to grasp cold and frozen water falling from the sky when all you know is wet seasons and dry?  As a child of this land between the Rockies and the Appalachians, the vast Midwest, and as an adopted son of the northern reaches of it, the seasons long ago seeped into my bones.  The sun’s countenance changes and I know it; I know it in the animal part of my brain that tells me when it’s time to migrate toward the growing season or to put up stores for a coming winter.  The subtle variations between late season snow and the early spitting of snows in November have deep meaning for me.  We are, all of us, practitioners of meteoromancy, attempting to tell our futures through cloud cover, length of day and temperature.

I would have it no other way.  Visiting the tropics is  wonderful, a chance to see another life way, another adaptation to the planet’s many faces, but to live there, to wipe out lifelong learning about spring and its puddles or summer and its heat, does not appeal to me.  This has been and will be my home.  As I said the other day, I am kama’aina of the heartland, a child of the Upper Midwest on the North American continent and this is where I belong.

Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Travel

Kama’aina of the Heartland

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15  bar rises 30.17  2mph WNW windchill9

    Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

“People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this, that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.” – John Jay Chapman

I would add to Chapman, it often means a taking a bone from a vicious dog and a strong one.  That’s why it’s fun.  And dangerous.

Just made an attempt to sign up for the Sierra Club’s political committee for this election year.  I want to put my hand back in, but with Taoism as my mentor this time, rather than liberation theology or neo-marxism.  We’ll see what that means if I get selected.

Slept late today.  Still getting used to the center of the continent. 

One realization I had while in Hawai’i is that I am kama’aina of the heartland, the center of a large landmass, the actual geographic opposite of island life.  As a child of this land, I relish significant even sudden changes in weather.  The cycle of planting, growth, maturity, harvest and a fallow time is as essential to my Self as it is to the rhythm of life here.  I am, in every sense of the word, an American.  A Midwesterner.   A Northerner.  Each of those geographic identifiers impacts key aspects of my person, my approach to life and my deep values.

Travel

Deadlines, Bah!

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Gray, dirty snow, chill with humidity.  A dull, gray day as my Aunt Roberta used to say.

This morning I looked at my calendar, the stuff that March requires of me.  It looks ok, doable.  That’s thanks to writing a sermon, my workshop for the Woolly retreat and a presentation on the strange place of religion in contemporary art for the docent book club before leaving for vacation.  A good move.

Deadlines do not stimulate me, unless they are a long way off.  I can finish tasks well before they’re needed, but as time gets closer, I get frustrated and willing to put up with whatever to get stuff done.  Not a recipe for my best work and I like to do my best work.

The blog presents an interesting quandry in that regard.  By its nature the blog is better fresh and without edits.  It’s more like speech than writing.  Still, over half the time I run spell check and go back over the entry after it’s written, just to check.  Even if errors sneak through, I’m ok wid dat.  It’s a blog, not War and Peace.

Seem rested, but still undermotivated.  A trip into the MIA should help tomorrow.  There’s a continuuing event and I can check Matt Welch’s lecture on the Weber exhibit.  After going on a few tours next week I want to start touring that exhibit the second week in March.  I’ve also picked up a China tour later in March that should be fun.

By tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be back in the Aeron and ready to write. I still have mail to go through, but that’s about it as far as vacation-related catch up I have to do.