Into the Pamirs

January is the month when I look back over the prior year's travel -- gazing longingly at my photographs -- and, pulling myself together, resolutely turn my thoughts to the year ahead.

About a year ago, I advised you, my readers, that I was planning a trip to Xinjiang -- a northwestern province of China, home of the Uighurs, and the scene of some on-going separatist unrest.  It was to be a somewhat relaxed, non-strenuous tour of cities and villages throughout the region.  But, the press carried word of several terrorist events and -- to my chagrin -- I turned out to be the only person to sign up.  The trip was canceled.  I traveled elsewhere.

Once again, I'm looking at that part of the world.  But this time, a bit farther to the west, into the lower Pamir ranges bordering Tajikistan (where I hiked in 2013) and Kyrgyzstan.  We would be mixing with both the Uighurs, especially down on the plateau before and after the actual trek, and, in the mountains, with Tajiks, Kyrgyz, and other ethnic groups of Central Asia. 

We would be engaged in actual trekking for about seven days, with our highest overnight stay being at 16,700 feet elevation.  We would be sleeping some nights in our own tents, and other nights in village huts, hosted by the local people.  Unlike my trek to Tajikistan, our cargo transport on this trip would be by Bactrian camels, rather than by donkey. 

If we go, we will spend a couple of nights before and a couple after the trek in Kashgar -- an ancient market town (grown considerably, I understand, in recent years) on the old Silk Road.  A stay in Kashgar would have been a feature of last years aborted trip, as well.

I've been planning to do the trip with a seventeen-year-old niece -- the same young woman with whom I hiked England's Lake District in 2012 -- and I still hope to do so.  Unfortunately, she managed to fall from a climbing wall in November, and tear her ACL.  She is due for surgery on Tuesday.  Her surgeon feels that she will be fully capable of making this trip -- but I am awaiting his post-op evaluation before signing us up.

Maya, my niece, assures me that she is "a seasoned hiker/trekker," and that trekking will not subject her knee to the same kind of risks of re-injury that activities like soccer might.  Actually, assuming her doctor gives her the go-ahead, I'll be less concerned about her abilities than my own.  My muscle strength and wind below 10,000 feet are as good as ever (I keep checking up on myself!), but over the past few years, I've noticed myself slowing down at higher elevations.  As long as no one gets upset with my arriving at destinations five or ten minutes after the rest of the group, I should do fine.

The excellent news about this proposed hike is that the trekking company already had six customers signed up several weeks ago, and it needs only a minimum of four (maximum of 14).  So -- whether or not Maya and I are aboard -- this trip is a go.

So.  Get those camels rounded up.  I'm eager to head into the Pamirs, come July!

Shame

I grew up in a small town, up here in the Northwest Corner.  The fathers of most of my classmates worked at union labor in mills -- in mills producing lumber, paper, or aluminum. 

Many of my high school classmates -- especially those who remained in my home town -- have led lives that seem, to me, somewhat narrow and unadventurous.  And yet, as I read their own accounts every five years in reunion class books, I realize that they themselves find their lives to have been happy, satisfying, and warmly family-oriented.  Their self-respect is obvious.

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, arrived in high school nineteen years after me.  He also was born and reared in the Northwest Corner, in Yamhill, Oregon (only about 80 miles across the Columbia river from my own home town).  His column tomorrow is a tribute to one of his own classmates, Kevin Green, who died this month at the age of 54.

Nicholas served as his high school's student body president and newspaper editor, en route to a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa career, followed by a law degree from Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.  Kevin, like his dad, stayed in Yamhill, working at blue collar jobs. 

But, as is usually the case in small towns, the two boys knew each other well in high school.  They took vocational courses together.  They both belonged to Future Farmers of America.  And -- as shown in the photo -- they were teammates, running cross country together.

Unlike most of the guys from similar backgrounds who I knew in high school, things didn't go well for Kevin after graduation.  Those nineteen years had made a radical difference in small town life in the Northwest.  The union  labor jobs that ensured middle class lives for my classmates were drying up.  Kevin went from job to job, on a downward spiral, as one business after another closed, in and around Yamhill.  He became injured and was laid off.  His girl friend left him, taking their two sons with her.  His health deteriorated.

Some of his problems were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.  But most of us make our share of poor decisions.  Reading Kevin's story, it's obvious that the root cause was the changing economy of the  Northwest Corner -- and of the nation in general. 

It could have been worse.  Because of his physical disabilities, federal and state government provided various forms of financial assistance.  But government couldn't provide Kevin with self-respect.

Kristof's column essentially laments the lack of empathy by the well-off for the lives and problems faced by those left behind -- and that is a point well worth making, especially because it affects profoundly our nation's political decisions.  

But there's another problem I see, one that is systemic rather than personal.

Go to India.  Go to rural Africa.  Or South America.  You will find far more poverty, as we understand it, than you will in America.  And more poor health.  But -- and I don't mean to exaggerate --  among the poor who have at least enough to eat and a roof over their heads, you will find many people leading happier lives than you might, perhaps, find in Yamhill, Oregon.  And I think the reason is self-respect.

Because of our own history and, perhaps, our lingering Calvinist philosophy, Americans have done a wonderful job of making poverty a moral failing.  In our efforts to build an economy by laissez-faire economics, we have not been satisfied to reward "success" with money.  We have found it necessary also to punish those who can't, or won't, succeed financially by heaping scorn and shame upon them.  By denying them self-respect.  Maybe we don't even realize what we're doing, but we have countless little ways of humiliating those to whom we feel financially -- and thus morally -- superior.

And I don't know the answer.  Government programs can take the edge off poverty.  Jobs programs, if they worked as intended, would give back some self-respect to those who benefitted.  But I don't know how the government can help change the mindset of those of us who look down on fellow citizens -- and that's a change that needs somehow to be made.

Kevin died of various ailments, problems that stemmed back from his inability to work.  And his eventual inability to get even poor paying jobs stemmed from his various ailments.  And his sense of shame fed into both his inability to work and his failure to manage properly his own health.  He was caught up in a vicious circle, a vicious circle that is all too familiar to too many, in most parts of the country.

I have trouble diagnosing just what went wrong in that odyssey from sleek distance runner to his death at 54, but the lack of good jobs was central to it. Sure, Kevin made mistakes, but his dad had opportunities for good jobs that Kevin never had.

If Kevin's life were an isolated tragedy, it would be tragedy enough.  But it's not.  His life ended up as a life of desperation -- one that's repeated innumerable times across the face of one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.

Opinions from the La-Z-Boy Recliner

These people are not my heroes. They've done nothing but a feat of athleticism. What good does it do, ultimately? Can we not have any priorities?
--Letter to editor, New York Times

Caldwell and Jorgenson's climb of El Capitan's Dawn Wall has drawn gasps of admiration and hearty congratulations from around the world.  It has also drawn the predictable negativism.

At this point, the New York Times alone has published 343 reader comments on the accomplishment, comments presenting all possible points of view in a generally more literate manner than comments found on, say, Yahoo News.  I won't try to analyze the competing arguments.

Except to say that if "what good does it do?" is the decisive question, we toss away many of the more exciting moments of life, and sneer at many of our humanity's finest aspirational instincts -- our instincts as a species, if not necessarily those possessed by each individual. 

Why fly to the Moon or to Mars?  Why climb Everest?  Why run a marathon, or a 10k?  Why swim the Channel?  Why sail solo from America to Tahiti? 

Maybe the complaints are less about the activity itself than about the barrage of publicity given the climbers' success?  "Let them have their fun, but why should anyone else be expected to applaud?"

As one NYT correspondent commented, a funny argument to hear coming from a people so totally focused at present on the NFL play-offs.

Faux spring

Today is January 14.  Just two weeks ago we celebrated New Year's Eve.  More than half of January's normally dreary month still lies before us, threatening the Northwest Corner with snow storms, constant rain, days both dark and short, and that sense of general malaise that sends those with time and money south to brighter climes for the duration.

And yet, for the past three or four days, we've enjoyed beautiful, sunny days.  Not warm -- in the 40s during the day, the 30s at night -- but sunny.  The shade's been chilly, but the sun's felt warm and comforting.  The sky, deep blue.  The snowy mountains have shone sharp and crisp, both to the west and to the east.  Mount Rainier looms to the south, its ridges and couloirs sharpened by long shadows, as the sun rides low on the horizon.

It's January, and yet pleasure boats  pass back and forth between Lake Washington and the Sound.  Not sailboats, not yet, but power boats with warm, cozy cabins.  As I cross the University campus, I see varied sartorial approaches to the winter sun.  Most students are dressed like me -- a parka, or at least a warm fleece jacket or hoody.  But many others wear shorts.  Some -- probably not California transplants -- even sport cotton t-shirts.

I suspect those wearing shorts or t-shirts of magical thinking.  "If I dress as though it were spring, spring shall appear."  And yet Mother Nature does indeed offer hints that -- January or no -- spring does indeed lie dead ahead.  My secret flowering tree, just outside the Mechanical Engineering Building, serves annually as my own, private Climatic Oracle -- it's the first bloom I sight each year, the harbinger of Spring.  Yep, a tiny bud bursting into flower foretells the future, to my eyes, with less ambiguity than any sooth telling at Delphi.

And on Monday, two days ago, incredibly early, its first bud burst into bloom.

And so, I can't help it.  Ground Hog Day still lies almost three weeks in the future, and yet my thoughts already lightly turn to thoughts of Spring.  If this be Global Warming (I rejoice), let Los Angeles or Miami suffer its ravages.  In Seattle, I for one welcome Spring in mid-January.

Recklessly joyful, I turn to the weather report.  Oh.  Rain tomorrow!  Rain through the weekend!  Temperatures in the forties, day and night. 

Silly me.  Should have known better.

Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.  Proverbs 37:1.

The Hollow Land

Eight-year-old Bell Teesdale watches with wonder when a family of Londoners -- "talking South" -- arrive to rent his parents' farm house.  "There's not owt for 'em here.  What's use of a farm to them?  Just for sitting in.  Never a thing going on." 

The visitors get off to a rocky start with their summer landlords -- the older visitors do, that is, but not their 5 or 6-year-old son Harry.  When the Batemans are about to cancel their vacation because they find the sounds of haying too noisy, Bell watches the younger boy.

I sees this little lad, Harry, looking out of his bedroom window and I catches his eye.  And somehow I know he's all right, this one, London boy or not.  I know he understands how we have to make all this racket to see hay cut ahead of rain.

The boys become fast friends, the Batemans end up staying -- and returning year after year -- and the ensuing stories revolve about the boys' friendship and adventures, as they age year by year, into their early teens.

Diligent followers of my blog will recall that, in 2012, my niece and I hiked some 70 miles through England's Lake District.  We climbed fells, jumped over becks, walked beside tarns, crossed meadows, and enjoyed the rain.  We talked to other hikers; we exchanged pleasantries with innkeepers.  What we didn't do is talk to the folks who lived in the Lake District and who made their living from pursuits other than tourism.

Maybe in the Lake District, everyone makes his living from tourism?  I don't know. 

But I now know something of how folks live in Westmorland, the former county (now absorbed into Cumbria) immediately to the east of the Lake District.  After reading a laudatory review in the New York Times book section, I purchased and have just finished reading Jane Gardam's achingly beautiful collection of stories entitled The Hollow Land, published in 1981 in England and now published in America.

Most of the stories have the shadow of a plot -- being trapped in a mine (the title refers to how the village and the Teesdales' farmland, rising up into the fells to the east, are built over a honeycomb of abandoned silver mines); visiting a scary old woman who sells eggs (the "Egg-Witch"); listening with a combination of scepticism and fear to local ghost stories, while outside the English rains beat down without mercy; a long bike ride and hike through bitter cold, at Bell's urgent insistence, to behold a wondrous display of icicles, icicles that raise philosophical questions in the youngsters' minds; a run-in with gypsies, who prove scarier by reputation than they are in person. 

But these plotlines serve primarily as devices for the author to describe with intensity and in detail the awe-inspiring beauty and the eccentric characters of the inhabitants of this corner of Westmorland.  She shows, without editorializing, how city dwellers -- including the Batemans, until they become acclimated -- zoom through life in a daze, failing to observe the wonders about them that are so obvious to the shepherds and farmers of the countryside.  Not even professed lovers of nature -- trail hikers -- are exempt from Bell's boyish scorn:

They walk in clumps -- great fat orange folk with long red noses and maps in plastic cases flapping across their stomachs.  Transisters going sometimes too, and looking at nowt before them but their own two feet. 

I  think back over my own hikes in Britain.  I can only hope I seemed different!

But it's not just the beauty of nature that Londoners ignore, and it's not only how the land serves harmoniously to raise crops and graze sheep and cows.  What is equally important to the families who live here -- and whose ancestors have lived here from time immemorial -- is the history they have inherited.  And if the history at times includes questionable horrors and terrifying ghosts -- the combination of history and legend and folk tale is a force that binds them to the soil and to each other.  

Mrs. Teesdale and Mrs. Bateman set out for the antique shop about half past two.  It was only a few miles over Stainmore, over the wonderful old road the Greeks and Celts and Romans and Vikings, Angles, Saxons, and the odd Jute had used before them more adventurously.  Ghost upon ghost haunts this road from Greta Bridge, where a spirit got caught under a stone and twice they've had to put her back; to the blue ghost you can see sometimes on bright sunny afternoons near Bowes, the wife of a Saxon lord still wearing her Saxon dress, but without her head; to the white ghost near the old mines who walks quietly in her apron.

Londoners may have their transistors and their holidays on Spanish beaches; what they have lost is the richness of a life unself-consciously enmeshed in history and in nature.

The final chapter jumps ahead twenty years to 1999, when Bell and Harry have become adults, and when the flow of petroleum has for unstated reasons dried up.  Horses, railroads, and steam engines are again of critical importance.  But the paradise of the Teesdales' world is threatened by a figure who represents all that endangers the family's happiness and their orderly world  -- selfishness, rapacity, and an unthinking hunger for mineral wealth that gladly and willingly sacrifices both history and nature.

Decision by rationalization

Why in heaven's name would I need an iPhone?

As I'd often remarked to whomever would listen, watching eyes glaze over: --"I have a perfectly good clamshell cell phone.  At home, I have a good PC, with wide screen and printer.  I'm in the house most of the time, within steps of my PC.  I often forget to take my cell phone with me when I do step out, because I make so few calls and receive so few calls.  If I do receive any calls that aren't solicitations, they'll leave a voice mail and I'll call them back within a few hours of their call.  And if I can't be bothered to carry a small cell phone in my pocket, what am I going to do with a humongous iPhone?"

And I had watched relatives who had once scorned the idea of a smart phone become addicted as soon as they got their hands on one.  All conversations then became subject to immediate interruption the moment a new email or text message arrived.  That image itself was enough -- almost -- to settle the matter in my own mind.

How would an iPhone improve my life?  Especially when it would cost so much more? 

Then, on my trip to New York in November, I managed to lose my cell phone.  One piece of my carefully constructed argument was missing.  What now?  Should I replace my antique cell phone?  "Why not replace it with a crank phone and just ring up Central to place your calls?" an evil voice in my ear whispered?  Or should I, to use AT&T's honeyed phrase, "upgrade"?

I'm being rational, I told everyone.  I'm sticking with my good old Nokia.  I laughingly explained my situation to my vast audience of Facebook friends.  Am I not right, I asked rhetorically.  "No," they shouted back, non-rhetorically.  "Get the iPhone!"

I went back to the AT&T webpage (no way would I subject myself to a salesperson at a store).  I compared prices.  I'd be doubling my monthly phone charges.  But I'd get a huge discount on the purchase price of the phone itself if I committed myself to a two-year contract.  (As if I'd ever take the initiative to change phone plans within two years in any event!)

I caved in.  With one click on-line, I signed up.  Within three days, my iPhone arrived in the mail.

I activated it.  It's sleek, black, and devilishly handsome.  The images are amazingly sharp and the color is excellent.  While the quality of photos I take with it doesn't match those I take with my SLR camera, it works well enough for on-the-spot snapshots when I'm not carrying a camera. 

I haven't added any apps.  I can do nothing to date that I couldn't do before.  Was it worth the cost?  Maybe.  Spontaneous photos are cool, and I can upload them immediately to Facebook or email them.  Constant access to Facebook and emails is sort of a silly benefit, for a guy in my situation, but it's fun.  I can reply to texts quite easily; it was a painstaking process with my old phone.  These are all fairly marginal benefits, at a somewhat significant price.

But it does actually slip into my pocket just as easily as did my old cell phone.

Maybe the real justification is one that's embarrassing to admit.  I've evaded, for the moment, the quiet, unnerving suspicion that I wasn't "keeping up."  That new technology and its lingo were racing past me.  That I was becoming the old codger who crank-started his Model T after everyone else had automatic transmissions and power steering, shouting, "Why pay all that money for a new car when old Betsy works just fine?"

And now another little voice, the one named "Buyer's Remorse," whispers in my ear, now that it's too late, "Maybe that old codger was on to something!"

The trumpet sounded forth

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

--Battle Hymn of the Republic

On April 9, 1865,  General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia.  The North had won, and the Confederacy had been defeated.

Since then, the Confederacy has more or less taken over Abraham Lincoln's Republican party, forced its values on the federal government, and defined itself as the True Voice of Christianity.

And established its universities as bastions of football glory.  Its coaches bragged, and the media agreed, that Southern teams were different -- faster, stronger, more clever.  Invincible.  Until yesterday.

By defeating Alabama, Ohio State yesterday ended a series of nine straight years during which at least one Southeastern Conference (SEC) school played for the national championship.  Oregon destroyed and humiliated Florida State, a southern school from a different conference.  Michigan State beat Baylor, from Texas, with the MSU band, in the background, playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  And down in Tampa, Wisconsin defeated Auburn, Alabama's cross-state SEC rival.

On New Year's Day, 2015, Southern football fortresses fell one after another -- defeated by northern and western teams from the Big Ten and Pac-12.  It was glorious!  Hallelujah!

The South will rise again, of course.  It seemingly always does. But for one perfect day, its teams were forced to beat their swords into ploughshares, and surrender once again to those damn Yankees.