Chainsaw Logic, Part II

In January, I wrote of my feelings concerning Stihl and Husqvarna saws. Now I'm ready for a farm-yard necessity: a second saw.  

It's a good idea to have two chainsaws handy when you cut as much wood as we do, and of course trees fall across roads regularly in hurricanes and ice storms. If one saw fails, the other can be brought right out. We did this for years, and in winter, when our Stihl saws could act up, I loved having a backup chainsaw.

2022 brought down at least 20 trees on our Buckingham County Property, across all the farm roads. Those are the ones I can see. I suspect more than 50 will have fallen, by the time we re-open the back road to our upper field.

Sadly for my wood stove but luckily for the forest, most are pines. I'll cut, season, and burn the pine mixed with hardwood to maintain a good burn temperature and avoid creosote.

Wood cutting with my current "Husky" is just not going to do this job. So several of their larger saws, ranging in price from $800 to $1400, are in contention.

First off, for most home-owners and casual sawyers, a small saw like my current one will be more than anyone needs. You can see other tips at my earlier post. And for your safety, please read this guide for using a saw from The University of Missouri's extension service. With hurricane season coming, there will be many emergency-room trips for new saw-owners. Do not become one of them.

Yet there comes a point when only a bigger saw can do the trick.  I'm still not ready to buck and fell large trees, a job best left to a professional. But our situation in Buckingham remains in my realm of experience, with the right tool in hand (both hands).

What is "bigger"? In a saw, it does not mean a longer bar but a more powerful engine. With that power, however, comes weight. Let's consider stats for two saws I may purchase as soon as next week:

• Husquvarna 572 XP: 5.3 hp, max torque 8200 rpm, 14.5 lbs.
• Husquvarna  372 XP X-Torq: 5.5 hp, max torque 6600 rpm, 14.6 lbs.
  

Both feature a 20" bar though longer ones can be had (and are not of interest to me). My current saw, a 440, has an 18" bar and gets categorized as a "residential" rather than professional model. It weighs 9.7 pounds and has 2.4 hp. It suffices for cutting limbs and firewood, as well as felling small trees (a foot or less in diameter and perhaps 30' tall). 

Both of the contenders are a LOT heavier than my current saw, which means no lifting the saw high. It's unwise to use a saw by reaching up above one's shoulder, in any case. 

Most of my heavy-duty cutting involves keeping the saw's center of gravity below belly height. I learned early to "let the saw do the work" by never pushing on a saw; that's a recipe to get the bar pinched or worse, have it kick back right at your face. Keeping the saw low avoids exhaustion, in any case. Gravity becomes friend.

Of one thing I'm certain: I want their pre-computer models. I've already had a long telephone conversation with one of my dealer's salespeople. Their newest saws promise smoother power and lower emissions but are not user-friendly to a DIY mechanic like me. That means I cannot replace key parts like a carburetor. I'd depend upon service, likely expensive service, at the shop.  If the X-Torq system (which does lower emissions and fuel consumption) can be had without too many electronics, one of these saws will be coming home with me.

If I were to go the really high-tech route, I'd consider their professional-grade electric saws, but I need to learn a lot more about Husqvarna's battery tech first. I dislike being what I call a "Dewalt orphan" with a bunch of 18V cordless tools for which the maker no long makes replacement batteries. In consequence I have to source re-manufactured battery packs from China. These replacements work until they don't.

I will continue this series as I get a new saw and put it to work stacking logs. As noted in my first post, the old saw is not going to be idle. It already got its annual tune up: new fuel pickup, spark plug, and air filter. Now is the time for a second chain in the case and maybe a new bar. I'll have my dealer look at the old 440 when I go shopping.

Stay safe in the woods. The dealer does not stock new arms or legs.

A Mechanic's Lesson From the Yoga Mat

Before you know it, seven years pass. It has been nearly that long since I purchased a deceptively decent-looking 1974 Buick Apollo advertised at Hemmings.

My next column for Hemmings (the 12th installment of "Project Apollo") will focus more on some lessons leaned from failure, but here I want to wax a little more philosophical for my general Tractorpunk reader.

After more than $5000 invested over 6 and a half years, the car does run well enough to take regional road trips, but despite the money spent and many skinned knuckles since 2015, it's been on the lift since February 2022. Why would I do such a thing? Old cars are meant to be driven, right?

The answer is "it depends." My goal for the car has also as rolling classroom, so I'd get over my fears of being a first-time restorer and novice mechanic. To a large degree, I've met that goal. I have a 99 Miata to flog on backroads when I want some cheap thrills.

What I did not anticipate, however, was how failure with a relatively minor-seeming repair would lead me to realize an important lesson that applies far from the garage.

Gearhead Yoga, Parking Pawls, and Flight Attendants

During the pandemic, my Thursday evening Yoga practice moved to a Zoom conference. One benefit of Yoga, physically, has been my ability to contort myself in a car, while seated upside down on the front floor, legs over the driver's seat as I cram my head under the dash to fix wiring.

Little did I know a more subtle and probably more important benefit would happen. Our teacher, Kerry,   shares a short mindfulness lesson with us early in class, as we begin to warm up for the stretching and strength-building ahead. One week she noted how a woman on a crowded, tense, and very uncomfortable flight summoned an attendant for some small need. It took a while for the flight attendant to arrive. Just before barking at the airline employee about how awful things had gotten, an epiphany struck the passenger. Instead of barking, she apologized for interrupting the harried woman and thanked her, personally, for what she'd done on the flight thus far to make it as pleasant as possible.

Instantly, the attendant's face went from wary to grateful, and she and the passenger talked for several happy minutes. A weight was lifted  and of course the passenger's need got addressed speedily. The lesson? Try to turn frustration into gratitude. 

I began to try this with humans, and the effect resembles a magician's spell. It fails sometimes: the UPS clerk who replied to my "How are you?" with "I'm here" answered my "better than the alternative" with "not really." But I tried, and by being pleasant, I got a real smile by the time I left the UPS store. 

Outside, the sky was tumbling with storm-clouds that said something to me about the need to look at the sky. Life is short. You can fix a car easier than a life. Two days later, a tornado ripped through a spot about five miles from that UPS store.

Trying the Technique on the Toughest Person of All

Then I tried Kerry’s idea on myself. My car's parking pawl, a small metal piece in the guts of the Apollo's transmission, looks undamaged, but it does not hold the car in park, no matter what I try. I've replaced the spring, checked the fit of the rod that engages the pawl, and kept the bottom of the transmission off while doing all this work. While I was at it, I realized that the car needed new universal joints. Getting the correct size for the front of the drive shaft proved tedious, involving calipers, some guesswork, and lots of searching around local parts stores. When I got a fit, I saved the empty box for next time!

The delays taking off parts and re-installing them multiple times were infuriating for a while, until I recalled Kerri's story of the passenger. A few worn parts, some hard to source, are not my fault. Would I rather be stuck by the road with the drive shaft on the ground, something that happened once to a friend's 1974 Dodge Dart? So I would tell myself "every time you do a chore again and again, you are turning it into muscle memory. Soon you will be able to remove a drive shaft or install a universal joint blindfolded. Be grateful for the lessons."

When I got both u-joints home, the attitude learned in Yoga Class made all the difference. I learned to install the joints with my shop vise, lubed them properly, reinstalled the drive shaft, and went back after the errant pawl, teaching myself to adjust the car's shift linkage in the process (I did that at least five times. It is getting there). When the flimsy plastic tab that holds the shift-indicator needle in the dash broke, instead of screaming I took the dash out for the seventh or eighth time, and using a pin vise from my scale-modeling supplies, I drilled a tiny hole for hooking the little spring in place. It's better than stock now.

Even when I learned that the parking pawl could not be mended without pulling the transmission, I decided to be grateful. Now at least I'd isolated an issue to its probable cause. I will pay a shop a thousand bucks or more (if the gear the pawl engages is worn) to fix it later. Maybe I'll eventually pony up $2000 and have the entire transmission rebuilt, as I know a good shop for that work. Meanwhile, parking the car in gear is not an option as it is on my manual-transmission Mazda. I'll keep a chunk of 4x4 wood in the Buick's trunk as a backup to the emergency brake, so the car does not roll off, park it on level ground or touching a wall (Yay, 1970s 5 mph bumpers with thick rubber pads).

One Over-Torqued Bolt

As I finish work under the hood (at least until I add a heater) I'm focusing on upgrades, such as new finned valve covers, plugs and wires, and a dipstick from the parts car I found in South Carolina. Yes, the cheap aftermarket one that a prior owner had installed broke, with the end of the dipstick falling off.

Remember how Tom and Ray Magliozzi warned us about that, on their wonderful, and sadly gone, Car Talk radio show?

So be careful when you check that oil!

One justifiable, rather than cosmetic, upgrade to the car is a new transmission pan with a drain plug. Transmissions notoriously spill fluid everywhere when a pan gets removed for service or a fluid change, so lots of gearheads add a drain to the existing pan or switch to a pan that has a drain, as I wanted to do. Summit Racing has some good aluminum pans for my car's TH 400 transmission, so I ordered one to the tune of $130.

I installed it with an upgraded gasket and new filter in the transmission. Yes, I was proud of myself. Too proud.

On the final bolt, tightened to spec of 10 foot-pounds by the manufacturer's instructions, the pan cracked. I felt it rather than saw it.  Looking up, I saw the pan was ruined, a solid crack running from the bolt hole down the side of the pan.

It would have really been  easy, even on a Sunday when Summit's phone lines are closed, to "scream" at them through their text-messaging service. Instead, heeding that lesson from the Yoga mat, I texted what had happened and said how sad it made me, because I like the product and so appreciated all the other products I'd purchased from them over the years for the car and others. What might we do next?

In five minutes, I had their customer-service person thanking ME and sending me a return authorization, under warranty.  Everyone was smiling. I got a full refund and for now, my stock steel transmission pan goes back on the car, which then goes back on the road. Maybe later I'll tap it for a drain plug. Steel lasts.

 Out of the Shop and Into the Mean Check-Out Lines

Side benefits of this new approach to frustration continue to multiply. I am the least-likely peacemaker imaginable but recently I stopped a fight in the making in line at Food Lion. 

Letting a man with two items in his hands go ahead of me, I thought to an unattended shopping cart. I figured he'd forgotten two things and stepped back to fetch them. No. Another man came rushing up and began berating the shopper for pushing into line past HIS cart. The man I'd let in line retorted with an unfortunate and unearned "I think you should show some respect." That the speaker was white and the man with the cart was black turned those words into a dangerous spark.

There I was, with two badly over-torqued bolts. 

It hit me to take the blame. So I said "Gentleman, Let's show some mutual respect. It's all my fault." I quickly told them what I'd done. They both looked at me, none too happy, so I rushed on. "Everyone is so angry nowadays. I'm to blame. I'm sorry. Life is short. "

It ended there. They both gave me a nod and though neither apologized to the other, we all checked out and went home. I needed a stiff drink after that. It could have blown up into a fist fight. And these days, maybe one or both of them would have a gun.

Still, my words worked. Maybe breaking aluminum pans and fixing a balky transmission "well enough for now" provides a life-lesson to take outside the shop into our imperfect, angry world.

 Coda: Let The Good Times Roll, Even When The Car Won't

The Buick is about to go back on the road with the old steel pan back on. I fired it up--no leaks!--but it won't move in any gear. Time to adjust the shifter linkage--for the nth time. It will roll. I have an assembly manual for the car now.

I even changed the oil. When it rolls, I can get back to upgrades for the engine bay and a center console I'm building for the interior.

So what frustrations repairing things have you dealt with, creatively? And have you turned frustration into gratitude, like the lady on the airplane?

A Simple Fix For Old Stihl String-Trimmers

I avoid like the Plague any advertisements online that claim "One Simple Trick..." because I know click-bait when I see it. So for this post, I avoided the urge.

But really, I did find one simple trick to avoid a common frustration: My two-line string-trimmers (with heads like the one shown) getting tangled, no matter how fastidiously I wind the line. From the factory, a Stihl line-head seems to work like a miracle, but over time and wear, they fall short, with lines breaking and tangling. I nearly switched to Husqvarna, as I did with my chain saw, but decided that I have a lot invested in the two premium trimmers (one is a multi-tool with six or so attachments).

These trimmers are great, unlike Stihl saws, which I find finicky to start in cold weather despite my attention to every detail (including seasonal settings for the air-intake and using 93 octane non-ethanol fuel). Every year I add a tune-up kit and once, for the older unit (perhaps 14 years old now) I changed the carburetor, an easy job but one that needed a lot of tuning later to get the trimmer to run to spec, which it does.

None of that helped with lines tangling, and just at home I have to trim some 400' or more of borders, tall weeds that hide rabbits and Copperheads, weekly.  The trimmer simply MUST work.

So I started seeing what local groundskeepers and lawn services do. To a one, when I observed them they had a SINGLE line, not two, coming from their trimmers. Looking over the line-head, I figured that the bottom-most spool would be best.

Winding it in my type-A way, I began this one simple trick. Guess what? Not a tangle in two years. Lines break off, especially hitting stone edging and posts, but my frustration level has gone down 90%, the remaining 10 being the humidity and heat of July and August. I went out before 8 today to trim and though I needed a shower after, it was done perfectly. Look out marauding rabbits and Copperheads. I now can see you.

So try this with your trimmer and let me know how it works.

Image Source: Stihl

Rock and Sun: Desert Solitaire at Age 61

 

When did I first run into Edward Abbey? My 20s, certainly: a dangerous age to make his acquaintance. Had life gone in a different direction, I might have blundered out into the desert and died there. Lots of young men get tempted to do stupid things after reading certain authors.

Nearly 40 years later, nearly the same age as Abbey when he passed, I found myself in his neck of the desert, the place he most felt at home. In Prescott Arizona's Old Sage Bookshop, a copy of Desert Solitaire appeared. My wife spotted it, thank God, because I'd given my old paperback away and had been hankering to read the book again while we were in the West. I wanted to see if Abbey could cast his spell on me a second time.

The essays in the 1968 book, set during Abbey's time as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 50s, opened up for me in a way they'd never earlier. Partly I've lived a lot more, and partly I have become familiar with authors Abbey notes well, from Joyce to Chuang-Tzu. The man Abbey, at least his younger, angry self who did this writing, did not escape my censure so easily. He was in his late 20s and early 30s when he did this writing, and he comes off as a bit of womanizing misanthrope, a guy we might call a Doomer today, eager to see technological civilization collapse. Easy to claim that at such an unripe age, I thought; one broken ankle and your post-collapse adventures would end forever. The naive enthusiasm and egotism that leads him to get trapped in a side-canyon that nearly kills him remind me of the antics of the Beats; they too have sent more than a few young men to their dooms. I'm looking at you, Chris McCandless and Timothy Treadwell.

Yet Abbey redeems himself, in the prose he crafts and in his ultimate, hard-earned humility. His epiphanies of being so small in so vast and uncaring a landscape make an older reader nod in recognition, something a selfish 20-something could never do.

And the writing! Kerouac would never type a sentence like this:

Turning Plato and Hegel on their heads I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

The beautiful indifference of wild nature, moving according to its own calendar, redeems Abbey and his essays, published in the rebellious year of 68. Time does that; petroglyphs from 700 years ago look permanent, until one grapples with the deep-time of a 600-million-year-old vista where the artists put down their marks. As Abbey learns these truths, he's at his best when confronting a stubborn rattlesnake or when the side-canyon temporarily defeats him and he breaks down crying, facing starvation, then mummification, in a spot he cannot escape. Nature repeatedly slaps him silly, and he learns from the harsh lessons. Kerouac and Neal Cassady never learned; Kerouac died a sad drunk, and the same year as Abbey published the  book, Cassady's body was found beside a railroad track in Mexico, dead from exposure following a party. Neither Beat made it out of their 40s. They had raced across the desert in a car they drove to pieces, saying they were "digging" it but really only digging the sound of their own unceasing voices. They should have shut up for a while and listened to their friend Gary Snyder. Or Abbey.

Conversely, Abbey spends a lot of time in this book being quiet. After all, he's alone for much of it. To whom is he going to speak? A Prickly Pear?

If you do not know Abbey's fiction, save them and start here first, but read with care if you are still young or impressionable. The book spawned a cult following for many reasons, some good. Abbey and the writers he knew and influenced, like Terry Tempest Williams, in turn changed the nation's ideas about the sanctity of untouched wilderness. Even as what he called "industrial tourism" thrives, we rarely hear any longer calls to dam the Grand Canyon or run paved roads into every remaining tract of wilderness. The Park Service is not perfect, but it stands a little closer now than in the late 50s to Abbey's vision in its "leave no trace" philosophy. Tourism helps to fund preservation.

Perhaps I'm overly charitable in a time when a new and global threat to civilization has arisen. The pressures on us grow every year with additional gigatons of carbon dioxide. We might end up, in a few centuries, with little more to show for our folly than postmodern petroglyphs beside drowned coastal cities. 

I would like to leave a better world to the bright and eager young people I teach. Their children will hate and curse our selfishness and laziness, as bitterly as Abbey did at  his bleakest moments.

I am uncertain if I will read Desert Solitaire again. I don't have another 40 years, but one other fact remains clear. The past 40 mark how far I have come from the angry young man who, like young Abbey, felt it best for a rotten and rapacious civilization to fall.

Now I want us to make it. Not for my short-lived self, for a human nation sure to fall some day, or even for an undying God. I'm a Deist and know now in my bones that God, who blessed us with this lovely world, does not meddle. I learned that from Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. We are free to wreck or thrive. God made chaos and put evil inside us too. Get behind me, Satan, you sham, you lie. Loser in the basement, you don't exist, but we have hell enough in each of us to make a hell right here.

Why keep hoping we'll endure and do better? Hope makes one happy. Even if it is all just rock and sunlight, we have others around us. Human contact is sacred, too, in whatever time each of us has.

Restaurant Nation? Maybe Not

 Today I spent just over $130 for groceries at Kroger. That seems alarming for the contents of 2 (admittedly very heavy) reusable bags. In another era, I'd have said "obscene" but consider this: for two nights we ate dinner in Abingdon, VA, at admittedly fine-dining establishments. Each meal cost the two of us more than I just spent at the supermarket.

Why the photo of Andy Warhol shopping for his preferred subjects? The artist brought the quotidian to our attention: the design of everyday (and humbly priced) things. One wonders if today he'd paint the boxes of artisanal pastas or containers of Seventh Generation's guilt-free, eco-safe detergents in refillable containers. Since his time, we've become (at least among the educated elite) a nation of gourmands...I mean foodies. Consider our cooking shows, our urban districts chock-full of bespoke dining options, even after COVID.

Expensive groceries, however, do not compare to $40 entrees.

Discovering this, made a decision to not eat out as often, recently. Our garden is a bit smaller this year, because we traveled at peak-planting time. But we have a vegetable stand nearby and these things called cookbooks. I do like recipes on the iPad, but something about a paper text, ad-free, on the counter charms me.

When away from home, we've learned the art of using lunch to test a restaurant out, but more often lunch means a picnic or a modest place like a taco-truck or burger place. It continues the trend we noticed, nationally, during the pandemic. I can also safely say that we won't again be eating at fine-dining places more than once or twice per year: an anniversary and a birthday, perhaps. Or not at all? Maybe not until restaurants offer more down-market options; a looming Recession may force their hands. 

Even now, options abound without resorting to a Big Mac: one of our favorite places in Richmond, a bistro called Bacchus, attracts a diverse crowd and is understated cool without being trendy. It features specials for about half the price I quoted, and the food is wonderful. I no longer feel the need (never a very strong need) for "restaurant as experience." Besides, at one place in Abingdon, the noise inside was deafening. We insisted on the patio, telling the hostess "inside is too loud." In Charlottesville for a concert, we found Sal's Caffe Italia, surrounded by upscale eateries, still offering an 80s vibe of oil paintings, quiet dining, and reasonably priced yet amazing Italian food. We'll be back.

I'm baffled why people enjoy overpriced, over-hyped, and overly loud dining but even more baffled by how anyone thought building an economy around going to movies and eating out could be sustainable. Someone enlighten me. 

Somehow, somewhere, we lost a thread of dining that once looked like this (courtesy of 1950sUnlimited at Flickr), to build an entire economy (it seems) out of going to dinner.

My family never looked or ate out like that, but we knew folks who did. Except for the very rich, those  experiences were reserved for special occasions. We all, however, aspired to be like Jet-Setters, who apparently lived like that all the time.  Remember, that was a time before credit cards. Now we can pretend to be the elite, paying later.

It won't end well, and maybe the $40 entree signals that the end is nigh. Good.

Thank you, Harry!

Dear reader, the object above is a tiny piece of lead (shown far larger than actual size) called a "crankshaft key" or "flywheel key" (or to some a Woodruff Key!) for a push lawn-mower. The little part sacrifices itself when when mower hits an unmovable object: rock, stump, Godzilla's little toe. It shears in half, along its longest dimension, to keep the mower from bending internally and breaking permanently.

Now why on Earth am I talking about such a thing? 

It's the first DIY job on a motor I ever did, with the encouragement of Harry Delolian, our neighbor. He was the son of Armenians who had fled the genocide in the Ottoman Empire and he was one of the most resourceful human beings I've ever known. Harry kept both a giant Ham-Radio antenna and the fuselage of a single-engine airplane in his tiny yard, which earned him weirdo points with adults and cool points with 1970s kids.

Harry showed me how to fix our very expensive Toro mower, my dad's pride. I'd used it to cut a neighbor's grass, as I did for several folks in order to earn model-airplane money. Dad was livid when I "broke" the mower, because dad, for all his great qualities, was no DIYer. To him a tool box consisted of a pair of slip-jaw pliers, a claw hammer, and one 16D nail about 4" long. Plus lots of cussing and sweating. If those items would not fix something, it was time to "call some guy."

Dad was ready to load the Toro into the Pontiac's trunk but Harry waved that off. "Joey," he said to me, "go to Lorraine Hardware and buy a crankshaft key for a Toro." As I walked down the street I kept saying "crankshaft key," so I would not look the fool in front of the serious and slightly judgemental men at that emporium of all things holy and perfect. I preferred (and still do) a hardware store to a church, since I think God meant for us to fix things, as part of some inscrutable and larger plan, not sit around with people we don't know well while singing poorly.

In any case and for under a dollar, I soon had the part. Harry pulled the top cover off our mower, thus ushering me into a realm of metallic mysteries. He talked me through every bit of the work, something he'd probably yell at kids in boot camp (he was an Army DI who had served in The Battle of the Bulge and as a Recon Scout in Korea).  The tiny part dropped right into place, and as soon as the Toro was screwed back together, it started and ran as well as new.

I thought of Harry the other day when I broke the crankshaft/flywheel key on our 13-year-old Craftsman self-propelled. When the mower would not start, I knew right away what I had done and said "thanks, Harry!" Two YouTube videos later, I knew how to find my mower's engine number and how to change the key. But it was Harry's hand that guided me. Amazon, not Lorraine (long and sadly closed) supplied the Briggs and Stratton key (I ordered 2, because things happen). Price now? $2.49 each. But imagine the cost of taking a mower to the shop.

The old Craftsman fired up on the first pull. That it still runs after 13 seasons is also testimony to Harry's annual reminders to change oil, swap spark plugs, clean air filter, sharpen blades, and keep the deck clean above and below.

Now don't you want to go fix something? Don't be like another neighbor who filled the gas tank with the motor oil supplied with the new mower (of course not reading the owner's manual). That new mower never, ever ran right.

 So fix something instead of breaking it!

It's God's tractorpunk plan for you. See you in the yard on Sunday.

Of Desert Rats and Deep Time

Winter and now Spring flee before my calendar. Concurrently, my posts here have been a bit thin on the ground, as thin as trees in the high deserts of northern Arizona. 

We have been there for a short visit, one that somehow seems longer. I would love for time to always pass in this manner. My wife and I have a theory that when we travel, time slows down. We do not go fast enough for time-dilation to occur, except psychologically.

I also have a particular theory about this vacation. The desert itself has something to do with our altered sense of time’s passage. Without driving all that far in a rented Mustang convertible (highly recommended) we have seen many varied arid and semi-arid landscapes in just a few days. Save for the scarcity of water, one might not expect such diversity in the same state. We visited the Granite Dells near Prescott, the scrubby and arid grasslands around Williams, the magnificent rock temples of the Grand Canyon, the primordial landscape of Petrified Forest National Park, the Ponderosa Pine-Forest above Flagstaff, the red-rock coffee-pots, broken arrows, and Snoopy Rock (kinda-sorta) of Sedona.

I loved the Western desert the first time I saw it, outside Phoenix, going on 25 years ago. At that point, I was a young writing teacher with big ideas about a technological revolution in the classroom, at the annual meeting of the CCCC in Phoenix. Now I approach retirement having slowed, marveling at the haste and earnestness of that younger self. The revolution occurred and computing is ubiquitous. Students still struggle to make the transition to writing academic prose, albeit with more distractions and new sources of dopamine addiction. Sometimes the Internet, so wild a frontier in 97, seems a desert and not a majestic one.

Now where did a quarter-century fly off to?

This post cannot answer that, but in an odd manner, returning to the desert did.

We have met decidedly eccentric Arizonans who live under a vast sky with ravens, jackrabbits, Bighorn sheep (saw one!), elk, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. They (human and animal) know something the rest of us don’t. Arizona’s “desert rats” share some inside joke about how one lives in harmony in an unforgiving but majestic place, under all that sky.

Could I learn how to be in on their joke? I doubt it; I do not have enough decades left on this rock. Soon enough I was looking forward to going home, humidity and all. By the time we got to Sedona, our last stop, my favorite place was the Ace Hardware. I was looking forward to working in the garden and seeing the place we live. Something in me changed, and I didn't feel the "further" urge on my wanderlust 20s.

What did I learn? Watching how other visitors react interests me a great deal. Silence, often. Now past (thank God) a stage in my life where I condemned what Edward Abbey called “industrial tourists,” I instead enjoy talking to all sorts of folks on holiday. Even if their idea of paradise is a packaged resort somewhere, I get a window into their world.

Reactions to deserts particularly prove educational. Nan and I chase ghosts of Puebloan cultures while others rush through ancient homelands, pulling 40’ long RVs into fast-food places. I admit, their choices no longer disgust me, as they once did. I don’t even mind a McDonald’s cheeseburger from time to time, mostly for nostalgic reasons. Out of my own discomfort about time passing, I feel some empathy for those who want the security of hauling every conceivable item from home along. The desert unnerves me, just beyond the town limits. Night falls so fast and utterly. But it also draws me like a magnet. Was it Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom who told someone that he liked the Spanish Meseta because he thought that was what he looked like, inside?

The flat expanses between Flagstaff and Winslow (where you can indeed stand on a corner) might be an excuse to put the pedal down on I-40, since old 66 is gone, the ghost of the Mother Road buried under the new superslab. Yet even that open and ostensibly monotonous landscape holds old tales, even old civilizations.

Like the vanished swamps that became the Petrified Forest, the Pueblo ruins of the Sinaguan people teach lessons about time that can terrify or comfort. The night after visiting The Petrified Forest, where I actually had two mild bouts of vertigo because of the altitude as well as the distortion of distances, I could not go to sleep. I thought I was about to stop breathing. The vista of 230 million years of history makes one less than a speck on top of a speck.

Luckily, some saline spray to open desert-dry nostrils restored me.

At Walnut Canyon, one of the Park Service’s final sign boards notes how the Hopi and Navajo believe that “migration is not abandonment.” When life changed the Sinaguan people moved on. A theory holds that they merged with other local tribes, and some current traditions reach back, many centuries, to those old and sacred pueblos.

Compared to the mineralized tree-trunks two hours away, the Sinaguan people were here yesterday. One day something happened. We know a drought sizzled for five years, and dry-land farming cannot survive that. A Hopi man I met described his corn, beans, and squash farming. His photos revealed a very canny way to irrigate from saved water in the monsoon season and from snowfall.His son is working to teach young Hopi how to garden as their ancestors did, to insure food that is healthy and shares a spiritual connection to their ancestors.

That mission, not purported vortexes of energy above Sedona’s T-Shirt shops and celebrity mansions, sticks most with me. The Permian rock that looms above the town will see the Earth’s next Ice Age. We won’t likely be here then.

That continuity of growing food and remembering one’s ancestors may be all we can ask for.  Maybe, all we need.

Get busy with that.