“I piss on you all, from a considerable height.” (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
The photo to the left is of one of the hardest walks we ever did, somewhere in Italy. It is not that it is a great distance or steep climb – most of us could accomplish this and recover quickly. The problem was this: I placed an orange arrow at the very top of the mountain we had to ascend. Though hard to see, it is Rifugio Lagazuoi, seen above. It is a mountain hotel, where we would be staying in that night. We could see it, and over the entire walk that followed, it never left our sight. It also never seemed to get bigger. This is what made the hike so difficult, a psychological sense that we were not making any progress.
As the photo to the right indicates, we did eventually make it to our destination.
I wish at the outset here to separate myself from men and women who climb mountains. Maybe in another life I will deal with ropes and gadgets designed to suspend people at high altitude, as from the Half Dome or North Face. I have climbed, that is, jumped from rock to rock on minor hills and mountains, pulling myself up, losing fingernails, and I must say it was invigorating. Now, at age 71, I stay on trails. I have never used a rope, helmet, harness in any “mountain climbing” sense, and a carabiner only to suspend a water bottle from my belt or bird feeder from a wire on our property. You magnificent people who do that, go away. This is not written for you, who might echo Monseur Celine above about our efforts.
7/4/2021 – We are in Yellowstone National Park with our two grandsons, having a very good time. We did not know what to expect, where we would be. In the past we would stay at Pebble Creek Campground, maybe eight miles into the park from the Silvergate entrance. All of the 27 sites were FCFS, that is, first come, first serve. We would look over the board and see what sites were coming available, and arrive at 5:00 AM the following morning to be first in line.
One of my childhood memories is being taken to an outdoor movie theater, Motor View, by an aunt and uncle, to watch the movie “Giant,” starring Rock Hudson, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor. I was probably seven years old, and had no business watching that movie. It was incredibly boring, but I think aunt and uncle were charged with taking care of me for some reason, and they wanted to see the movie. I was just assigned back seat duties.
First, let me address an annoying topic in this (hopefully) short post: If you are a believer in warming and climate change and all of that, how can you be so dense? Look around, look at statistics (that have not been altered by EPA), and see that yes, while a little warming has been going on since the bottom of the Little Ice Age in the late 1600s, it only benefits us. We tend to thrive in warmth, perish in cold. Warming periods such as the Minoan, Roman, Medieval and now Modern eras saw great advances in civilization. Greenland ice cores show that there is no correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. But my real question for you is this: How can you stick your head out the window, see that nothing is changing, and still think everything is changing? You make no sense! You are purely a product of the power of suggestion. Every doom and gloom prediction coming out of junk science produced by climate alarmists is just that: A prediction. According to noted climatologist and all around really smart dude Prince Charles, it was all to be over for us in 2017. When that didn’t happen, the cretin merely changed the Doomsday date. If you think Climate Change is real, I want your photo to place aside Chuck’s in the hall of deceit and stupidity. (I deliberately searched for goofy pictures of Chuck. I was offered a wide selection.)
