Earthgirl and I gave ourselves a weekend, a drive Saturday southwest to below Charlottesville to hike to the top
Crabtree Falls then a good dinner and sleep in Staunton (pronounced STAN-ton, don't you know), then yesterday drove the entire Skyline Drive south-to-north, stopping to hike the Rose River Loop. The video above is Earthgirl's photos of the Rose River Loop hike. Look for the bear - we saw two, only one stayed around long enough to be photoed. Oh heck, because I love you, here's a mini-movie of the bear:
Crabtree Falls was OK, very crowded, full of fools, uphill immediately which is - for me - the worst a hike can start - no chance to warm up, to find the breathing rhythm, for old knees and ankles to loosen before work. Rose River Loop was wonderful, a hard hike with a payoff. It's the typical Shenandoah National Park hike: straight downhill on side trails off the Skyline Drive/Appalachian Trail spine through gorges and hollows and then straight uphill back in a loop. The Hog Camp Branch uphill of the loop was longer, steeper than Crabtree Falls uphill but not nearly as hard. We picked up the latest book of circuit hikes in Shenandoah at the Visitor Center at Big Meadows. Our $15 pass for entering Skyline Drive yesterday is good through next Sunday, so....
- There's a story about The Bears and a concert we saw at the original 930 back in 1987. Ask Hamster.
- Today's dose of aargh: What US citizens need to know about Israel and Palestine.
- One more: Massacre of the innocents. On Gaza.
- One more: James Boyd's (and our) hell.
- Briefer futility: a bleggalgaze, reminiscent of bleggalgazes elsewhere, with more determination to act rationally on its conclusion than that other guy.
- Outer Heaven in our time.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
- Oh, the World Cup. The better team won, the lesser team should have one, gacked two sitters, but that's why they are the lesser team. And shut the fuck up, Higuain, you choking whiner.
- After Planet texted us photos of a foster puppy she met on Sunday I thought of Jim's post on his puppies this past Saturday. We set ourselves up for heartbreak.
- Josipovici, for those of you who do.
- Blogfriend reviews blogfriend's novel. Ed had sent me a copy, I promptly set it down, it got caught up in a house-cleaning, I searched and found it last week or two, it's next.
- The Last Ramone.
- I know enough about jazz to know the name Charlie Haden, not enough to make a playlist for you. Here, Kurt does.
KOREAN SOAP OPERAJohn AshberyMy sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore.
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals
don’t suit her teal, rust and eggshell color scheme.
Of course, I was a buyer when she was still on the street
peddling the Communist youth weekly. I have a degree
in marketing. Her boyfriend thinks I’m old-fashioned.
Well, I guess I do have an old-fashioned mentality.
What kind of a mentality
causes men to commit suicide in their air-conditioned glass boxes?
It has been a life of adjustments. I adjusted to the postwar boom
though it broke up my family. Some took their honor to the mountains,
to live on wood and water. But the investment years
wrought havoc with the landscape. Everything is modular now, even the trees.
Under the dizzying parabolas of the railroad bridge, where the thud
of laundry mallets used to resound, the swiftly flowing
current is like green cream, like baize unfit for fulling.
So old are the ways,
for lunch one might select a large smelly radish.
In the streets, as always, there is a smell of frying fish
no one notices. The rain cannot make up its mind.
Other people like it other ways.
I need to interact with postal employees, civil servants, that sort of thing.
Just being asleep isn’t enough.
I must cry out against injustice in whatever position
sleep overtakes me. Only then will I have understood what the world
and servants mean by self-abolishment, the key, it is said,
to success. To stand and contemplate the sea
is to comprehend part of the package. What we need, therefore,
is market gardens bringing a sense of time with them,
of this time, honed to razor-sharpness. Yet the whole
scheme is invisible to any shareholder, and so the feeling
lessens, the idea that a composite portrait
may not be so important after all takes over like the shoulder
of a mill-wheel, slogging patiently under water, then back
to the zenith, where the watchword presumably is.
In schools they teach things like plus and minus
but not in the gorge, not in boiling mud.
Area residents were jolted to find what in essence
was a large swamp, pythons and all, in their communal front yard.
To me, this is insensate. I cannot stand the wind at my back
making of me nothing, to be handed
over, in turn, to this
man, this man. For though he weathered patiently
the name, the one that occurs to all of us, he went out
and came in, not in the best interests of abundance;
not, it seems, being anything but about to fall.
Here’s a paradox for you: if the men are segregated
then why are the women not?
If the rich can survive dust-storms thanks to their red-and-gold liveried
postilions, then you are playing with an alphabet here: nothing
you invent can be a plenipotentiary,
turn itself inside-out, radiate
iron spokes at the mini-landscape, and so side with a population
of bears, who knows? Who knows how much there can be
of any one thing if another one stops existing? And the word you give to this
man, this man, is cold,
fossil fuel.
One snorts in the laundry, another
is broken beside the bed. A third is suspended
in a baobab for all the sins
no one ever knew, for sins of omission are like pearls
next to the sin of not knowing, and being excused
for it. So it all comes round
to individual responsibility and awareness,
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by.
