"The Story of US"

What is independence?

In dependence with the universe, inner body (brain, tissue, heart, DNA), time, physics, chemistry, biology, poetry, mathematics, cause-and-effect, society, commerce, harmony, communication, language, light, water, food, life and love.

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The BART has been on strike for three days now.  The first day I began my new commute, I walked to the station for 12 minutes to find out what the deal was.  So I walked back, e-mailed work, and then drove across the bridge, which, on a good day, takes 25 minutes.  The first day it took seventy.  Yesterday was eighty.  Today was sixty.  The buses were completely full the first day, so I decided to take a rare break from my dependence on transportation provided by others.  I had music though, and I’d driven through much worse and been a passenger in much worse, and I had a rough idea of when I would arrive, so I just did my best to enjoy the ride, still have fun turning and changing lanes and squeezing into spots and speeding past others who don’t realize they’re in the wrong line, and eventually walking into work.

On the way I saw an advertisement for the new Lone Ranger movie.  That was one of my first favorite television shows as a child.  It was black and white, and it began with this one guy getting separated from his ambushed crew, and he barely survives because he's saved by this Native American called Tonto, who helps him just because he's a good guy.

About a year ago, next week sometime, I was in Utah.  I woke up at a rest area and watched the beautiful desert sunrise over the canyons.

Then I drove to Arches National Park.  I recommend it.  I met these two girls from Oakland who liked my canoe, so we exchanged numbers.  A week later they texted me from Zion telling me to come to Yellowstone, and I was going to anyway, but that's another story.

Then I drove through a canyon outside the park to camp along a river for two nights.  The second day there were all of these people with walkie talkies at every camping entrance.  I eventually figured out that they were filming the new Lone Ranger movie in the canyon that day.  You had to wait a while to drive anywhere because they were doing some special scene.

After that I drove an hour nearby to Canyonlands.  I found a great place to hike near the canyon edge and camp for two nights.  I made a lot of trips back to civilization, and once a rainstorm began as I hiked in with one of my bags.  The rain was horizontal, and I had to run from bush to bush to make it to my destination, but it was really hot outside in the desert so the rain was actually welcome.  I think that was my first desert rainstorm too.  Once I got in my tent that thunderstorm continued, but it was beautiful to watch from my perch.

It was truly a gift to be so free and surrounded by so much beauty, but it wasn't about me.  It was about the entire universe's history evolving itself into people who can use the universe by living it and loving it and making it aware of its glorious beauty and praising it and sharing it and spreading it and experiencing it at higher quality, whoever they may be...
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I work in a classroom where I am being paid to teach the English language to a room full of humans--who are not official citizens of America--so they can enjoy their stay here and improve their economic and communicative opportunities pretty much wherever they go.

I like being around people.  I prefer it over being a lone ranger, but everyone needs to know how to be a lone ranger.  If you were the only person alive anywhere, that might be a cruel fate, but otherwise there are ways of dealing with loneliness.  The world is still there inside you and all around you.  If anything, loneliness can be transformed to contented solitude and independence by meditating on the physical or psychotic ailments you are not suffering from, or perhaps by remembering how annoying and harmful humans can be.  Perhaps you're alone on the range temporarily, but at least no one is enslaving you or massacring you and your family.  And once you've found that peace on the range, and gotten in tune with that glow inside and out, you'll see it in the eyes of every person you are in dependence with.  After a while you'll feel less dependent on being independent.  And if you've been too comfortable with dependence for too long, then you can always be alone on the range of human experience and get back in touch with the true joy you find in the world.

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We’ve been watching this History Channel production called “The History of US” in class since I got there.  The previous teacher recommended it, and due to the turnover in the class, it was all new to most of the students.   On Monday we watched the story of the post-war economic and baby boom in America.  The highway system was built, and it looked so open, wide and free.  We saw dishwashers and washing machines and refrigerators spreading smiles across the kitchens of the universe.  “Innovation.”  “Hard Work.”  “Resilience.”  “American.”  They said that final word a lot throughout every film.  That is, they had a very American habit of relating universal adjectives to the American story and then hinting that they were descriptions of humanity that were exclusive to those who were born into citizenship, or took a test proving they knew enough about it to live there.

I tell the stories of "us," although they're almost always from my point of view, because that's how I experienced them.  I tell what happened to me, and how excited it made me to experience the world's beauty and ecstasy.  Or how it challenged me and improved me through adversity, how relative that word may be for different manifestations of the universal reality.  I say what I know, and I use my imagination and knowledge of what the world has shown me so that it transforms the world into an intriguing story.  Just another possibility of experiencing quality, whatever it may be for whoever you may be.

For example, in the universe as I experienced it today, I was in this classroom full of various human beings from completely different backgrounds.  They all had smiles and laughs and bored stares, and displays of intelligence and ignorance and bravery and fear, and creativity and humor.  Some worked harder than others, and some cared less than others.  Every one had a different reason for being in the class, but they were there together.

That reminds me of America's story.  We watched the “Millennium” story, the last one on the DVD: Television, Woodstock, Vietnam, Reagan, Space Shuttles, Credit Cards, Personal Computers, Internet, World Wide Web, Terrorism, and the promise of the future.  In some respects I enjoyed the film series because it was pretty astonishing to see this history acted out with modern visual effects.  In other respects I thought it was too dependent on suspenseful loud effects and obviously a little snooty and jingoistic.  It kept interviewing these mostly irrelevant people about things they really knew nothing about.  Let me rephrase that: anyone's viewpoint on anything is worthwhile as long as it is informed, articulate and revelatory.  If you fill your audience with honest truth that is somehow uniquely expressed by you, then that's fine.  If you simply repeat the same old catch phrases and platitudes about a people, especially with a nationalistic slant, you're wasting everyone's time.  What do I care what that man who inherited a lot of money and became some strange sort of celebrity by telling people "you're fired" on TV has to say about the settlers who fought starvation when they arrived in the colonies?  Or a three second clip from some current pop star or previously disgraced politician about how millions of people they never met reacted to something they never experienced: “Americans… are a... strong people.  They are... determined,” change scene.

All of that being said, it made me very happy that any country exists and participated in the world with a style that brought the world all of the modern joyful conveniences I have mostly become dependent upon to enjoy life.  Or should I say “we”?  This is the time of year we get all about the American “we” instead of the most of the time “me” or “my family”.
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I am writing this on a laptop computer.  The first personal computer was created by tinkerer Steve Wozniak in his garage on June 29, 1975.  It was the first time someone typed a letter on a keyboard and it appeared on a screen in front of them.  He and Steve Jobs transformed this invention into an enormous company that changed computers, the way we experience music, and the way we multitask with gadgets, cornering as much of the communication market as they can.  Innovation from within the American nation, which exists and is experienced by humans whose DNA comes from other nations.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel around the world and explore many of these other nations, and I couldn’t do that without airplanes and cars and phones, and it’s made easier by computers, the spread of the English language through American foreign/commercial policy, and the fact that we don’t live in a Nazi dystopia.

Even so, the film was really going over the top with the “America” cheer leading rally.  They were good at showing the facts of how everything happened and admitting the horrible things Americans did.  But they didn’t dedicate much attention to them.

Then again, slavery was covered in a lot of detail, depicted as absolutely terrible and credited for America’s economic successes of which you and I are somehow the beneficiaries.  If you’re reading this on a computer, then you have profited from slavery somehow.  Just like you profited from everything else that happened in the universe to stack the cards so that you could come around and be in dependence with this world.  Just like we still do, and always will, because we’re here.

The same goes for the genocide of the American Indians.  Even though the vast majority of natives died when the conquistadors from Europe first arrived because germs traveled faster than people, the Europeans and then Americans did the best they could to finish the job and destroy those they naturally perceived as “other,” “unknown,” and “enemies.”  I can understand that the universe didn’t want America to be lived in a state of static peace for all of its existence, and the outside world was going to collide with it eventually, but the way it happened was beyond words.  I can’t convey the mass murder, deceit and destruction of a race of people with a few words on a blog.  Especially when it happened to a race of people renowned for its harmonic relationship with the world it depended upon. 

The Iroquois Nation “Thanksgiving Address” is about thanking all of the different parts of nature that we depend upon: the sun, the Earth, the trees, the waters, the plants, the animals, the medicine herbs, the wind, the thunderstorms, the moon, the enlightened teachers and the Creator.  Then they ended each thanks with “now our minds are one.”

When we Europeans started in this country, the Powhattan saved the brave adventurous and ambitious English settlers from starvation.  Then we pushed them out and got rid of them.

Every year we celebrate “giving thanks,” taught to us by the Native Americans, by eating until we can’t eat anymore and then watching either people tackling each other while wearing padding or sentimental movies about holidays like that one.

I wanted to write about Mt. Rushmore on Friday, but I got into a strange argument with someone who was half Native American and found its placement on sacred Sioux land to be an absolute disgrace and merely a representation of the white man's success at lying and murdering.  It came up because I’d excitedly mentioned that the year before I had finally visited that national monument, and I was really pumped because I’d read about their adventures in creating the nation and all of the difficult decisions they had to make on behalf of the evolution of the United States of America.  You know, USA.  For anyone in the world to have rock and roll, jazz, hip-hop, all sorts of dance music, televisions, computers, the internet, the world wide web, cell phones, credit cards, major highway systems, airplanes and on and on, people had to be enslaved and or murdered for the dream to be real.

Did they?  Do they?  Is good in dependence with bad for us to be here at all?  Is such a question ridiculous to be posed by someone so small within the universe of it all?  Should I just smile and be happy that I’m living at all?
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When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe.  -  William James

Perhaps "U God Love" is peaking from behind the curtains, telling US not to worry at all, and to continue to be reasonably open to, enthusiastic toward and willing to learn from all the life vibrating around us and inside us, in lovely dependence through infinity.

Wind Cave Wilderness, Surprising Large Animals, Escaping Arbitrary Authority and Prairie Wild Fires

I woke up with the wheel in front of me, and then coasted several hours south over the wide plains of southwest South Dakota to Wind Cave National Park.  It's one of the few national parks where wilderness camping (away from the campgrounds with bathrooms and electric hook-ups and cars and other people) is free, although barely anyone does it compared to other parks.  Most people just go down into the cave on the guided tours.  I didn't feel like it and didn't want to spend the money, especially because I was alone and that seemed more like a group activity.  I just wanted to keep up my camping streak and see the great plains and hills and whatever was running around freely through them.

I got a permit to hike to one area a couple miles in from the road, nothing too crazy, and then went to the picnic area to cook lunch.  I had just turned on my gas burner to cook a stir fry when a park ranger pulled in and immediately began asking me if I was aware of the fire regulations because there was an extremely high alert for fires in the area.  I knew that, because the man who gave me the permit made a big deal about not having any fires and only cooking in the designated rings in the picnic areas, which was exactly what I was doing.  The guy gave me some strange postured stance for a while with a slight smile behind his aviators and asked me all of these questions about what I was doing and then walked away and let me cook.

Later I arrived at the trail head leading over this hilly field but realized I would have to wait to hike until the large herd of bison which was currently blocking the trail decided to move.

As I waited in my car, one bison ran by, within twenty feet of my car.  I'd been passing them and avoiding them and checking out herds of them since I entered the park system in North Dakota, but now I was about to camp in their territory.  Or at least have to go through it.

They didn't appear to be going anywhere any time soon, so I rode around a while, saw a dark thunderstorm approaching, drove away, and then went to the head of the road to take pictures because this amazing rainbow had formed over the pathway to the wild.

Eventually the bison cleared out and I was able to hike in to a camping spot.  I walked across the field, down a hill, past some sort of small agricultural complex without any noticeable humans around, and then across a small stream and up a hill where I found myself in a large field with a few small trees and a wide expanse of grasslands stretched out before me.  I set up my tent quickly and within five minutes about four dozen deer ran within one hundred feet of me, all paused, and then ran away in unison.  Then this cacophony of horrific screeches started filling the air, coming from all directions from all sorts of angry mammals and birds, whatever they were.  I got into my tent, took off my hiking boots, and enjoyed a peace pipe.  Then I stood up under the full moon and gazed in awe...when I heard the loud snort.

I turned and saw an enormous bison about fifteen feet away from me.  They have been known to charge and sometimes even gore or at least toss and flip park visitors and send them to the hospital.  We had this strange stare down moment that seemed to last about an hour but which was really only a minute, and then I slowly backed away barefoot in the dark, having also set my headlamp down for a moment because of the full moon.  Then again, at least it was a full moon and I could see.  But it was officially night now, and the more I backed away, the harder it was to tell if the bison was still there or if it was a tree in the shadows.  I waited about ten minutes before I slowly approached and saw the bison was gone and had clearly continued marching beyond the hill, probably to join the herd from earlier.  I went to sleep around midnight.

Three hours later I was woken up by earth-shaking thunder and very humbling lightning.  It wasn't raining hard, just the occasional drops here and there, but the wind was tremendous.  In fact, it was so tremendous that my tent had blown down over me because once again my stubbornness over poetry had prevented me from staking the tent down.  You rarely need to unless it's an insane amount of wind and you don't have many things with you to weigh the tent down, and this just happened to be that situation.  I thought about it for half an hour, and as the animal screeches continued I decided it was time to go back to my car and be safe from lightning and bison and screaming psychotic animals.  I'd been doing that more than I'd liked at that point, but I'd had my share of wilderness experiences and had more than enough ahead of me, and you have to pick your battles.  So when there was a lull in the thunder and I could see it had moved far enough away, I packed up my tent quickly, put on my headlamp and headed back to my car.  I walked down through the field and forest easily enough, and back over the stream, and through the open field to the farm.

That's when things got tricky.  It was a pretty simple path to the car.  I hadn't hiked more than twenty minutes to get in, and as long as I found the farm I would be fine.  But I wandered off through the fields a little to the left, and that angle was all it took to wander up over the enormous hills with downed trees and stumps and broken branches and loose footing everywhere.  Before I knew it I was climbing a huge hill, which wasn't the way I came in, although I recognized them from the road.  I had simply gone too far to the left, so all I had to do was go right.  I had no idea just how far left I'd gone.  So I walked and walked and walked and stepped over tree after tree and cut up my knees until they began to bleed pretty steadily, and the lightning flashed in the distance and the thunder boomed, sometimes softly, sometimes swiftly approaching, the rain going back and forth.  This went on for an hour and a half, until I finally cleared the hill and saw the road.  I just had to walk down the road about ten minutes to see my car.  When I climbed into the driver's seat I saw it was almost 5 am.  I also saw how bloody my legs were.  So I cleaned them up a little and put on some antiseptic and then pulled on a sheet and went to sleep.

An hour later a park ranger's knocking on my window woke me up.  She wanted to know what I was doing sleeping in my car at the trail head.  I got my permit out and told her I'd been camping but decided to leave during a lull in a huge lightning storm, and then showed her my knees, and explained I just needed to get some rest before another day of riding.  She said that was good enough for her and let me sleep.

An hour later she knocked on my window and told me I had to leave.  If I was camping it would be fine to stay that long, but not at the trail head.  I tried to make a case for my being in dire need of rest before I got on the road, and that technically it would be fine to pull over here and nap during the day if I was driving, so what's wrong with napping in the morning?  I didn't win that battle.

So I drove out of the park and saw many sites in the hills again, monuments and trees and strange rocks and winding roads and tourists and license plates and gas stations and convenience stores and hotels and families and couples on vacation.

I'd decided to spend the night in a federal grassland near the border of Nebraska, since they're free and not even parks.  But first I wanted to get some more water and clean out my cooler.  Entrance to and using the picnic area at Wind Cave is free, so I went back there, even though it was a little after dark, and dumped my garbage, rinsed out my cooler and filled up my water cooler.  I was just about to leave when a park ranger pulled in with his flashing lights and started asking me questions.  He said he'd recognized the vehicle from before, asked where I was going, what I was doing there, etc.  For some reason he asked for my license and ran it through a computer as "standard procedure" even though I had already confirmed that it was free for me to be using those facilities.  We got along fine though.  I pretended he was a fellow adventurer and appreciator of beauty.  I imagined I was talking to my grandfather.  I asked this man where he was from and how he ended up working at the park.  It turned out he had worked at several parks in the Dakota area.  I made a special point to continually remark on how awe-inspiring and beautiful the place was to me, and quickly mentioned my adventure the previous night.  You could tell he felt friendly, but was also clearly profiling me.  Even so, he had nothing on me and I was free.  He kept asking where I was staying that night and if I was staying at their campground.  I think they really suspected I was just driving around and sleeping at the trail heads in my car.  That's something that happened more than a few times over the course of my 100 day journey, but overall it was a small minority, and I was in a tent on the ground much more often than not.

I escaped wind cave and headed south to the border with Nebraska to find the federal grasslands.  You can just go off road and sleep where you want.  The problem was that they're just an area of the map, and you need an actual road to get on them from the highway, and many of the entrances were fenced off.  The other problem was that there was this open fire burning in one of the fields in the distance.  Because of the flat plains I couldn't tell how far away.  It wasn't spreading fast, but it was decently sized.  Maybe a few hundred feet in diameter.  So I was looking for spots on the other side of the highway and out of site of the fire.  Someone in a gas station had mentioned there being a lot of fires going on, so I figured somebody knew about it already.  I think I did see headlights near it.  Anyway, sometime around 1 am I found an open section of gate and drove through.  I learned very quickly that the area was meant more for 4 x 4 off-road vehicles, and that the clumps of grass came very close to my bumper, so I would be best off just finding a spot and staying there.

Unfortunately the fire was still burning in the distance so I just went to sleep in my car again.  One more day and I'd be in Denver meeting old friends from NYC and couch surfing in El Paso.  In two more days I would be camping in the Rocky Mountains with two of my greatest friends, who were flying out from New York to visit for Independence Day.

Jewel Eye One

I will be visiting New York thirty days from now.  If all flows with the dates on the tickets, I will be seeing all the familiar places for seventeen days.  

I hope to see you