Family Reunion Duck Creek 2012 - Part III Hiking

 Hiking to Mirror Lake on a lovely July day

The crusty green, gray and orange coatings on these rocks are lichens. Lichens are actually composed of two tiny organisms from the fungi and algae groups.

One of the jillions of fallen trees.

Mirror Lake at last.

I wonder why its called "Mirror" Lake.

A beaver's work.

 Cedar Breaks on Friday

 We ran into Mark, Des and family at a lookout.

 Wildflower Festival indeed!

 The oldest bristlecone pine at Cedar Breaks is at least 1650 years old.

It was over 1100 years old when Columbus sailed.

In the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains

these magnificent trees are only found at high elevations.

 Nature, a patient artist, has taken millions of years

to sculpt and paint the scenery at Cedar Breaks.

The freezing and thawing of water breaks up the rock,

pounding rain and wind blown grit sand off the sharp edges,

and water and wind carry away bits of rock.

Calcite, the mineral that makes up limestone, is colorless.

Color in the rocks comes from minerals that are present in small amounts.

Iron oxide, the chemical forming rust, contributes most of the colors here.

Various forms of iron oxide create reds, yellows and oranges.

Purple tints are caused by manganese oxide.

 Amy says there's always bugs on Columbine.  Check it out.

 Dew is charming.

 Surrounded by meadows and forests,

Alpine Pond is an active area.

Because it is a source of water,

and has lush vegetation,

the pond is a focal point of activity for wildlife.

Water enters Alpine Pond from a spring.

 The weather abruptly changed

as it is prone to do on Cedar Mountain

as we left Alpine Pond.

THUNDER, LIGHTNING AND SUDDENLY WE ARE DRENCHED.

What a wonderful day!

Family Reunion Duck Creek 2012 Part II

     Even in America with our hallowed inalienable rights, every city, large or small, has class distinction. Certain parts of town are more desirable, property values are higher; homes are larger; yards better kept. One would assume that a campground would more or less level the playing field. No one knows what size of home each occupant left or his or her professional status.
      Yet as Ed and I ride our trikes around the campground at Duck Creek, we notice the wide range of camping accommodations; the larger rigs clustered together and on down the line—class distinction is alive and well in campground USA.

It took a semi-truck to pull this Fifth Wheeler

Definitely the ritzy part of town.

Upper Class

Middle Class.

 DeRay & Jeanette

Karen & Norm

Even the portable Johns they brought in when they lost power
because of the fire were fancier in some parts of town.

Lower Middle Class

Bill & Margo

Lower Class

Slums or Protesters.

These were actually Indian runners from Arizona.

They pitched their tents so close to Amy, she moved into the van.

Amy's Pup Tent - about the lowest in the camping chain.

No class at all.
WAIT . . .
Is that a TV antenna on the roof?  A dish on the back?

Family Reunion Duck Creek 2012 Part 1

It would have broken your heart to see the old, infirm, and handicapped hobbling to the restrooms from the Round Up at Duck Creek this year.  There is a well-established level straight-arrow trail from the Roundup to the restrooms but a party of about five haughty couples rented two sites and even though the trail goes between the two sites, they decided that whole area was theirs and we couldn’t walk through it.  Nevermind that we had to walk through another camp in much more difficult terrain to get to the restrooms.  They first set chairs on the trail; then they pitched a tent right on the trail.  They went to the campground host and complained so he came and told us we couldn’t walk through there.  He didn’t care that it was a well-established path that we had been using for 75 years.  We couldn’t use it anymore. 

There are signs at the Visitor’s Center that read “Smoking is prohibited except in cars,” so we told him maybe he should enforce that.  He came back and told us that the forest service rules are that you have to have 3-feet clearance to smoke outside.  That’s not Duck Creek rules or they wouldn’t have posted signs but he let them smoke.  Fires and briquettes were totally banned even in fire pits or on grills; yet smoking is OK? 

The Forest Service should have been concerned that they drove their truck and trailer past all the barriers while they unloaded their gear.  They hung a life-size prostitute doll from the tree because they were going to play a mystery game in the evening.  They screamed at and terrorized our children and were extremely rude to the adults. 

I wish I had taken a picture of Lucille with her two canes, twisted body, and platform corrective shoes hobbling to the restroom; or quivering bent-over 76-year-old Sherrill, a stroke victim, cautiously and slowly creaking over; or Marilyn with a hip-replacement gone awry, trying not to fall as she leaned on her cane; or elderly Frank recently released from the hospital with internal problems.  Ed couldn’t make it and wouldn’t drink water so he wouldn’t have to go.  It was truly a pathetic migration of the feeble.

One girl, the one who tattled to the gutless Campground Host (Jerry), did tell Lucille and Judi, who was helping her, they could walk back along the level trail.  They moved their tent.  But as far as I was concerned, it was too little, too late, too cruel, too arrogant, too stupid to absolve.  The forest belongs to everyone.  They should have stayed home if they didn’t want anyone else around.

For me, it was the saddest experience of all my years camping at Duck Creek, first as a toddler when my Daddy ran his sheep on the Mountain, then as a 4-H Club camper with skits, crafts, and softball games; and finally for 57 years at DeRay’s family reunion.

Epilogue:  On Monday when everyone had left except Clare, Marilyn, Sherrill, DeRay & Ed, the Camp Host came over to arrange the rocks so the trail would be blocked to the restroom.  Clare bravely went over to talk to him, explaining that the trail goes between the two camps and we have at least 10 people who have trouble walking on uneven terrain.  She also pointed out that we pay $60/night and deserve tent space all around the Round-Up.  In a total turnabout, he agreed on all counts and rearranged the rocks to make that campsite the size it was originally intended to be and lined a trail straight to the restrooms from the Round-Up Circle.  He wasn’t a jerk after all; he only lost his sanity temporarily, bowing to malevolent pressure.  Too bad the pompous couples will never know.  They are probably terrorizing and bullying children, the elderly and handicapped somewhere else this weekend.

This Moment

I lie on my bed

With the fan

Cooling me

And check in.

Nothing hurts at this moment.

Euphoria.

A small smile emerges

Soon my whole body is smiling.

Savoring this intensely alive state

That is free of time,

Free of problems,

Free of thinking,

This present moment is all that counts--
the only place we have any power.

Gently withdrawing my mind from memory of the past;

Abandoning thoughts and plans for the future.

Allowing my mind to be absorbed

In this moment of stillness
 Free of all identification and all illusions;

All pain and sorrow

Perfect bliss.

My niece, Melissa, posted on Facebook:  I’ve come to the conclusion that the greatest thing running is bringing into my life is this. . .stay in the moment.  When I think about how far I’ve run or how far I have to go, my breathing falls apart and I get tired, but if I just run, I’m good.  Lessons for life in a running shoe. . .

Yes!

 For us, this whole year has been stressful, medically speaking.  How much can you stress out and worry?  How many sleepless nights can you endure?  At this moment how do I feel?  Not what happened in the past or what may happen in the future; how do I feel right now?

Seize the good moments. 

C. S. Lewis said it best in The Screwtape Letters, a satirical Christian apologetic novel, first published in book form in February 1942. The story takes the form of a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape,to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter. The uncle's mentorship pertains to the nephew's responsibility for securing the damnation of a British man known only as "the Patient".  C.S. Lewis provides a series of lessons in the importance of taking a deliberate role in living out Christian faith by portraying a typical human life, with all its temptations and failings, as seen from devils' viewpoints. Screwtape holds an administrative post in the bureaucracy ("Lowerarchy") of Hell, and acts as a mentor to Wormwood, the inexperienced tempter. In the body of the thirty-one letters which make up the book, Screwtape gives Wormwood detailed advice on various methods of undermining faith and promoting sin in the Patient, interspersed with observations on human nature and Christian doctrine..

   (I know it’s a bit long and takes concentration but it's so good.)

Letter # 15

“The Challenge of Living in the Present”

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

(0) I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European war—what they naïvely call "The War"!(This would be World War II)—and am not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patient's anxieties. Do we want to encourage this, or to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them raises important questions.

(1) The humans live in time but our Enemy (that would be God—an enemy of the devil) destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

(2) Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future.

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our

contribution, looked forward.

(3) To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we (the devil and his cronies) want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

(4) It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase "living in the present" is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquility, his tranquility will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done good work; try the word "complacency" on him. But, of course, it is most likely that he is "living in the Present" for none of these reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favor. And anyway, why should the creature be happy?

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

A footnote on C. S. Lewis:

Lewis was raised in a church-going family in the Church of Ireland. He became an atheist at 15, though he later described his young self as being paradoxically

"very angry with God for not existing".

He slowly re-embraced Christianity, influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien.  He fought greatly up to the moment of his conversion, noting that he was brought into Christianity like a prodigal, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape."

Fourth of July 2012

Firework Display

in Smalltown USA

a warm summer evening
a slight breeze
patriotic music
dramatic blasts of color, design, light, and sound
blankets or chairs covering
virtually every square inch

of spacious gently sloping grass

peaceful feeling of safety
amazingly subdued and awed crowd
small children’s muted voices
softly sharing
this happy feeling
of responsible freedom for all

Photos by Amy Hugh