There's A Hole In My Bucket-List.

I did something this past weekend I've been wanting to do for nearly twenty years: I took a three day Advanced Wilderness Life Support course.  It was eye-opening.

It opened my eyes to the fact that bucket-lists should be revised from time-to-time, to keep up with the changes in body and mind that come with age and experience.  When I first added an AWLS class to my bucket-list I was obsessed with mastering the wild places and feeding a hero-complex.  Most of the 38 students in the class last weekend fit that same mold; lean, hungry, happy, playful, young doctor-gods dreaming of medical triumph, drivng Subarus and Jeeps draped in bikes & boats.  I, on the other hand, am a pudgy, middle-aged, shy, cynical, slightly neurotic male nurse dreaming of napping and solitude, driving an 11 year-old truck with an REI sticker on it.  I realized I'm a wanna-be who no longer wants-to-be.  If you fall of a cliff while hiking, you had it coming, you knuckle-head; I'm not going to save you - it's too much work and you'll sue me anyway.  This runs counter to the philosophy of the Appalachian Center for Wilderness Medicine, the sponser of last weekend's class, whose actual motto is "Disrupting Natural Selection Since 2007".  It's run by some pathologically optimistic doctors who literally vibrate when they're forced to stand still, hands still curled around imaginary kayak paddles or bike handles, eyes darting toward the mountains and woods like opiate addicts in line at the pharmacy.  They reminded me of Henry Benton's wild creatures, "finished and complete, gifted with extensions 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".  Some people's bucket-lists include visiting other nations: mine does not.  I've already been to other nations, they're lawless and smelly.  As I proceeded through the course I concluded much the same thing about the "victims" I was supposed to rescue and was shocked by the realization that 1.) I already know how to do this stuff, 2.) I have an extremely low desire to actually do it.  The self-image I'd spent a lifetime cobbling together fell apart. The other nations are thrumming to fanciful visions of heroism, this one has been unspooling a strip of ribbon wire at the 38th parallel and shutting down the grid. Other than that life-altering observation, it was a great weekend.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go scrub out my bucket and put a patch on it, so reality won't leak out.

ConFrencherate Revolution?

I love reading history.  This month's Imprimis - the erudite monthly newsletter from Hillsdale College - features an outstanding article by Wilfred M. McClay, professor of history at University of Oklahoma. You can read it here: (https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/)

McClay's jeramiad is the fragmentation of American history into ever-tighter sub-cultural histories, kicking out the foundation stones of a national memory uniting us and replacing them with subjective, angry, politically-correct tribal histories.  The article brings to mind the warning undertone of Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a reminder that united cultures build luxury cars with robots, while tribal cultures kill each other over who owns a tree. Both the article and the book are outstanding; I highly recommend reading them along with, of course, historian sans pareil David McCullogh.  History provides context for present; without it we're adrift and infantile.

The problem with reading and loving history is that very few people share your enthusiasm and your pithy additions are met with glassy-eyed yawns.  Also, if history is all you care about, you will live in poverty.  At least math majors (another yawner) can build rockets or manage an index fund.  But history teaches those of us living in a democracy that we cannot escape our civic duties.  We must educate our civic leaders (or become one ourselves) with history or they will absolutely doom us to repeat it.  McClay provides a thought-provoking correlation between the current Confederate flag flap and Robespierre that will make your hair stand up (if you know who Robespierre is).  Read it!

A Poet Named Pancake.

A worldview dark as West Virginia coal dust.

A few years ago I came across a skinny book at the resale shop written by an author with an intriguing name.  It was an example of why browsing resale shops is fun: every now and then you find a treasure.  This Pancake could write!

Breece D'J Pancake grew up in West Virginia; its bleak, haunting history leavens his writing.  One local describes Milton - Pancake's hometown - thus: "It stinks.  It's beyond stink. It smells dangerous, and it stays with you."  Pancake's stories and poems reflect the danger he felt from the hills and people of his home mixed with an unaccountable, aching love for those same things. In essence, his words beautifully capture the discord and incongruity of life. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, after escaping the dissonance by a bullet through the brain in 1979. Author and University of Virginia professor John Casey (Spartina), Pancake's teacher and mentor received a letter from Kurt Vonnegut (another of my favorite authors - Slaughterhouse Five, The Piano Player) after Pancake's death.  Vonnegut wrote of Pancake: "I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read.  What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun to be that good. You and I will never know."

Poison Tree

One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.

I have not yet outgrown the molten, juvenile desire to see my foe outstretched.

A Poison Tree
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.