The more one uses their imagination, the more compelling history becomes. Use no imagination and you are just looking at the physical pages of a textbook. Use a little imagination and you may be able to see beneath the yellow tint of photographs at the turn of the 20th century. Muster all of the imagination you can, and you will be seeing events from centuries past in beautiful color. You may go so far astray that you never want to return.

Imagine: The vivid hues of the African landscape on the eve of the Berlin Conference in 1885, which officialized the scramble for Africa.
-When lions were ten times more exotic to Europeans because Europeans’ transportation was ten times as slow.
-Four billion years of time on this planet. That is four thousand thousand thousand.
-Millions of years when life was only microscopic.
-An abyss of time when giant lizards ruled a sweltering planet.
-Cavemen boating for miles out to Australia 50,000 years ago. What did they do when they first hit land?
-Plato teaching in a Roman school.
-When the “New World’ was still a new world.
-How much bigger the world got when the microscope was invented.
-The personal life of a 16th century king.
-What Indians saw when they laid eyes on the first Europeans over the Atlantic.
-How high-tech the first steamship coming up the Hudson River must have looked to local farmers.
-When Manhattan was still a forest with scattered villages.
-How modern the subway system looked when it was brand new.
-A social hierarchy based on skin hues and shades.

Familiarity Breakdown

We are numbed by our familiarity of the world around us. What would happen if it broke down? What if we suddenly discovered a time on earth when fungus ruled, when mushrooms were the size of the Empire State building? Or what if we found that at one point, insects could weigh up to 500 pounds? Surely these facts would seem more fantastic than dinosaurs roaming the earth. But would either of them really be any more odd?

The human story is quite familiar at this point, which robs us all of its intrigue. Small mammals crawled out of their holes after a comet hit the earth to ruin the dinosaurs. A branch of these mammals, primates, grew huge brains in order to manipulate their environment. Some primates then evolved into killer apes, roaming the landscape with spear in hand and canine teeth; a real pack animal.

From there, clothing, domestication and war on horseback were but small steps to making us undeniably human. As this is such a familiar story, the details of anthropology bore most people to death. Few fully realize how truly bizarre our species’ whole masquerade down here on earth, really was. Objectively, would it be anymore peculiar if after our extinction by nuclear annihilation, elephants evolved to shrink down to the size of rodents and create a network of burrows under the earth with their trunks?

Perspective

It sends goose bumps up the spine to try to think about historical happenings from different perspectives. To us, the inventions of the industrial revolution are anything but mysterious. But how did they appear to farmers of the day migrating to the cities to operate them, these machines that would do the labor for humanity? Some of the machines must have looked like monsters. Blueprints for the Spinning Jenny were smuggled from England into America. It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie.

If a 17th century American Indian could come back from the dead and have a glimpse at our society today, he would exclaim that the aliens on the backs of even bigger, four-legged aliens, took over everything! Would he be any further from an objective truth than a fifteen year-old who is questioned about the nature of our society today? Where are we today, anyway; and really, how did we get here?

One thing is for sure, all perspectives considered, we are very, very far into the future. Machines do a large bulk of our work for us. We teleport our voices and practically anything else including ourselves. Travel is lightning fast. We fly, for crying out loud!

The moon landing is ancient history to teens of our day. By Enlightenment standards, we now all perform magic, everyday, just to get by. The ultra modern styles of the 50s and 60s are now so antique looking that our sense of fashion has regressed back to that time period. We are currently in a bitter argument with the rest of our species about the final major energy reserves of the planet.

However, is it not strange that at some point, this present day will be ancient history? Is our idea of ancient history not itself far, far into the future? Were the Romans not a pinnacle of civilization? Without the barbarian attacks, some say the Romans would have developed a society as advanced as our own by the end of the first millennium. By this time we would have colonized distant solar systems. Talk about an alternate universe.

Defying All the Odds

The most stupefying oddity of history is the fact that every single one of your ancestors managed to reproduce. This includes humans and nonhumans. Just think of all the things that could have gone differently in the lives of your parents or grandparents that would have erased your existence. The chances were startlingly against us all four billion years ago. Yet, here we all are, on a lush green and blue ball, floating in a black nothingness.

To quote the Talking Heads:

“You may ask yourself… How did I get here… How do I work this?
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.
Water flowing underground.”

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Indecision

Indecisiveness is a killer. Before one begins they are done. A state of indecisiveness is a lose/lose situation.

When I cannot make a decision I am stuck in limbo. While some decisions can affect me negatively, unless the negativity is foreseen, such as acting in a way that is morally wrong and choosing to accept the consequences, the true outcome of my decisions are steeped in mystery. Decisions set off chain reactions of more consequences and more decisions.

The technical term for this phenomenon is chaos theory or the butterfly effect. Rather than get into science, math, or marginal movies starring Ashton Kutcher, we’ll let this train of thought halt.

Onto the Next Train

As I write, a subway is speeding me under Manhattan. Instead of making a solid decision this evening as to whether I was going to purchase tickets and attend a concert in advance, I let the decision float around like a dust particle in my mind. Being that my mind is dark and that I have a lot of other stuff floating around in there, the entire idea settled somewhere, got lost, or blew away. I forgot.

Instead of making a decision and developing a succinct plan and sticking to it, I am now being rocketed forward into an unknown future. I may show up to the venue and the show may be sold out. Or it may not. While I do want to attend the concert, if I can’t it may not be the worse outcome, as I will still be in Manhattan. And something is bound to be happening in Manhattan.

Anxiety

Indecisiveness has the power to add excitement to one’s life. But it is an uncertain, anxious excitement. There is a certain amount of poor planning associated with being unable to make a decision; such is the life of the indecisive. I live on the edge of a chasm of unpredictable outcomes, teeter tottering forever over a canyon of endless black.

But doesn’t everyone? Herein lies the trick to defeating indecision: Even when decisions are made, there is no telling what will really come of them. We know what we want to come of them and we hope what will come of them will be for the best, but in the end, there’s no telling what could happen.

It became a lot easier for me to make decisions once I realized this and since I get the impression that I may not be explaining it right, I’ll liken it to a metaphor: Once I realized the vastness of the place where I existed, I found it easier to bend with the wind then stand up tall against it, to get taken out to sea by the current then to swim against it.

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When The Morning Comes

At some point or another, everybody has to make decisions. The amount of decisions a single person makes in a day is incalculable; many are made within each minute that we don’t seem to notice.

The day starts out with a decision from the previous evening – what time to wake up. If one does not have an alarm clock, then they wake at their whim and in waking at their whim, they have made the decision of not making a decision.

I’m sure if you consider your morning routine, you will come up with all sorts of instances where your morning takes twists and turns in relation to your decisions. For the sake of brevity I will not detail them here, only list a few conscious and unconscious decisions:

- Shampoo in the shower – how much?
- Stay under the warm water for an extra five minutes or seize the day?
- Go to work / don’t go to work
- Make lunch for later / buy lunch later
- Stay in bed
- What to where (transportation) / What to wear (clothing)
- Toothbrush strokes

As you can see, the list is endless and can be broken down into almost every instance of one’s life; we must decide where to step and when, when to rise to the occasion and when to move on to the next thing.

If you decide to read about Big Decisions, click here.
If you decide to skip it, go here.

What is to be done with free time around the house?  This is actually a big decision; so let’s discuss the heavy weight contenders.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling frustrated, I tend to create dichotomies that may not really exist and make statements like this one:  There are two kinds of people in this world.  Both types are roaming the streets in disguise… until of course they get a bit of free time.  Then, the groups distinguish themselves like the businessmen and party animals of downtown Manhattan.  I am referring to those among us who read and those who watch television.  I’m not talking about people who read signs on the road; I’m talking about people who can’t wait to get home and start flipping pages.

The watchers seem content living in a deterministic universe. They hold three to five controllers, but are they really controlling anything?  What is on is what they must watch.  Readers seem to have a similar restriction; what is printed is what they must read albeit readers manage to rightfully claim freewill with the magnitude of their choices.  Numbers of books alone have been skyrocketing for centuries.  Readers chuckle at the fact that a TV watcher’s channels are summed up in the hundreds at best.  There is virtually no limit to the amount of material a reader can get his or her hands on.

The ocean of books allows one to find anything imaginable that they would want to read.  With so many books and so little time, though, a reader has to make sure that every individual pick is right for them. This can cause complications for the unwary but often leads to a productive search for meaning.  The search for books is an art form in itself with no possibility of perfection. Often, those who fail to realize the magnificent potential of the search also fail to see the beauty in reading.

One of the most incredible aspects of the book is the lack of technology involved.  No matter how much Amazon.com tries, they are fighting an uphill battle in attempting to out-date the book.  The cultural phenomenon of reading started to gain a foothold around 5,000 B.C. as a tool for keeping political records.  Today, it survives as one of the best sources of entertainment and knowledge known to man; it is the power of symbols harnessed.

The printing press was altering world history in the 16th century, yet it is still a fascinating quirk that something so powerful and so old did not gain popularity among the masses until the 20th century.  This is because reading does not come naturally. Instead, diligent effort is required to reap its rewards.

Through out the majority of the Common Era, the onus has been on the state to put forth the effort to get people reading.  States slouched to the occasion due to a lack of ability or a lack of desire for equity.  Today, people (many supposed educators as well), do not read themselves because it is not as convenient as the alternatives.

Anyhow, is it not extraordinary that we can read books from different time periods?  This is actually a relatively new option.  You can actually sit in nature with a book from the 19th century and have a similar train of complex thought as a person from that time period.  What could be even more startling would be reading a book from the 2nd century, if we could only fully open ourselves up to the experience, if we could only let the ocean take us out.

It is often claimed that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the television begs us to reconsider this statement.  In one minute of television watching, it is routine to see 1,800 pictures. Are all these pictures really worth more than a brilliant 500-word essay or a gripping short story?  Would it help matters if we made the test fairer by muting the television?  What if we really did take one frame from a television and pitted it against 1,000 words?  I have read 20 word descriptions of scenes in fiction books that have put images into my mind with a vividness that no camera could ever match.  All it takes is some imagination, which every human just so happens to have an inspiring amount of.

You may claim that I have not been fair, after all, are there not terrible books out there?  Am I being an idealist by pitting brilliant or gripping passages from books against random television shows?  What if we compare the best television show to the best book?  Well then, wouldn’t the convenience factor suddenly flip?

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Dangers Of Driving

Every year in the U.S., over 40,000 people die in driving related accidents. That’s about 120 people per day. If somebody told you that over a lifetime of driving your chances of being one of these people was 1 in 100, would you be all right with that?  Is it morally acceptable to allow people to drive as much as they want with the known fact that a certain amount of people are going to die?  Are you all right with the chances?

Down The Street

Only for the past one hundred years have people really been driving.  Like with other shared cultural behavior, it is interesting to wonder how much driving has changed people.  For instance, has driving made life more stressful?

Our lives today must be very different from those of our great-great-great grandparents.  We are much more mobile and have the ability to travel long distances and arguably are able to do more because we can drive.  Our culture has evolved as cars and driving has evolved, and the development of roads, as discussed yesterday, is a visible artifact of the change.

On a cross country trip in an automobile, one quickly notices how the entire landscape and highway system revolves around refueling, eating and sleeping at each leg of the drive.  Trucks transport goods, especially food, across the country, and if it weren’t for driving we would not have as many choices at the supermarkets and department stores.  It is actually quite dumbfounding how much our lives have been benefited from the ability to drive materials around.

The Act Itself

Driving is a complex operation disguised as a simple one.  From the way that a car is built, we are able to manipulate the machine easily; it really does not take any special skill to drive other than practice.  Some people are worse at it than others, and these are the people you have to watch out for, but nearly anyone who is not afraid of the road can perform the task with a fairly high success rate.

It’s all about coordination.  Some people are so coordinated, (or believe themselves to be), that they can operate all sorts of other devices and perform additional functions while driving, such as text messaging, listening to music, talking to others, talking on the phone, eating, drinking, and some people even do all of these things while intoxicated.  We’ve become a society of multi-taskers.

On the road, my mantra goes something like this: I could be the best driver in the world, but if the guy next to me isn’t, I can still get into an accident.  It is not so much myself that I have to worry about, but everybody else.  If you get a few multi-taskers together who misperform one of their tasks, there could be trouble.

Sometimes I make stupid moves while driving.  Sometimes people around me do. Sometimes I am able to cover for those people and sometimes those people are able to cover for me.  People can react in a fashion that averts disaster; if somebody makes a left turn and an oncoming vehicle slows, crisis solved.  But accidents seem to occur the most with two drivers who are both stubborn or who both misjudge or who both make a poor call.  But this isn’t to say that one person can’t cause a problem as well.

Road Rage

I have personally never been nor witnessed other drivers possessed by the phenomenon known as road rage.  But judging by the amount of stories I’ve heard, about people pulling guns on others or people following other people back to their homes to scream at them, road rage must be a frightening experience.

The speed at which we travel could potentially be speeding up something in our minds or bodies.  At certain points when driving down the road, I’ll get an adrenaline boost if it looks like someone is about to careen into me or cut me off.  Can this be considered a natural reaction?

This is an example of how something humans have created has effects on the human mind and body that could not be foreseen at the time of its creation.  If those moments of near collision induce an adrenaline response, it is possible that eventually, only moments that are equally as intense will garner the same response, making humans less sensitive to other situations where adrenaline is also required.

While road rage may not have to do with an adrenaline reaction, it is something that some people, who I imagine are already prone to madness and bad tempers, are more susceptible to.  Again, the speed at which these people are “called to arms” over what they perceive to be offensive traffic maneuvers seems to correlate with the speed of today’s world.

Phantom Drivers

A car seems to give people a license to do all sorts of things that they would never do elsewhere or in public.  Most people are not as aggressive when face to face with others, but put them inside a car and watch a new personality develop.  Cars and driving become an extension of people.  We are the souls of cars.  Driving is an experience we share with a car: Imagine all the cars at rest parked on all the city streets at night; they have no ability alone.

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Here In My Car

If there is one thing that America revolves around it is cars. Look at the infrastructure of any major city or suburb or country town. Roads lead up to everything because most people use a car as their main means of getting places. It is as if the landscape were a gigantic rubber band ball, with each rubber band representing a road, intersecting any number of other roads and covering the roads of old.

The car is a relatively recent invention. The idea of a car has been toyed with since the late 1600’s, but Henry Ford popularized its production for sale to the public in the early 20th century. Today, capable of reaching speeds in excess of 200 mph, the car is the fastest means of land travel known to man. All one has to do is push on a pedal and off they go.

Stand on an overpass of a highway some time and imagine just the people inside all of the cars. In your mind, make the cars invisible and just picture how the people are moving through space. Their bodies are in a sitting position and hovering in midair while simultaneously flying forward. Ah, the ease of modern car travel!

A Bit About Roads

Which came first, the car or the road? Roads in some from predate cars easily; when people walked from place to place, trails formed (I’ve heard a discernible trail is impressed upon the earth when just one person creates a new path) and horse drawn carriages and wagons, etc. have always needed roads to amble down. It is interesting to note that many roads got there start as footpaths meant for walking. Today, simply crossing the street can be dangerous.

Cars and roads exist together in a positive feedback cycle. As cars became more and more prevalent in our culture and society, more roads were needed to accommodate car travel. Along with electricity and the computer, cars are a landmark invention that changed everything.

Cars changed the way humans interacted with and altered their natural environments as well as how they thought about time and space in terms of travel. Instead of taking a leisurely five-minute drive to the park, one might have to take a half hour walk. A likely question that follows then is: Have cars actually spread people further apart, from resources, from places, from each other?

Isolation Chamber

Unless you’re traveling with others, driving a car is a solitary experience. The noise that the engine creates effectively cuts out the noise of the outside world, and so does the metal and plastic frame of your cockpit. Everyone driving down a road is driving down it in their own separate world, a neat little moving package transporting them from place to place.

For Love of Cars

Some people love their cars. Some people pour entire paychecks into excessively outfitting their automobiles and wonder what happened to all their cash. Some people sit in the road washing and cleaning their cars and from the looks of it, take better care of their cars than they do of themselves.

There is too much of a preoccupation in today’s world about stuff. Cars are a crowning example. Nothing lasts forever, especially machines, so why stress over a few scratches, why stress cosmetics over function, why live a life in pursuit of perfection?

Where We’re Going, We Need Roads

Will we ever move past automobiles? Will there ever come a day when the streets are filled in with grass or homes or benches or playgrounds, when we reclaim the air from the incessant humming of combustion engines? What would a world without cars look like? What would it sound like? Can you even imagine a world as strange as that?

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On Redux

After re-reading On Camping, I get the feeling that much of it feels rushed and I glossed over important aspects of camping that I would have rather not. Not my best work. My roommate confirmed these assumptions, and since today is his birthday, this special redux edition of On Lives goes out to you, Greg.

Survival Camping: The New Frontier

On a recent trip, we ran into a very Elfish-looking creature, a young human man on the cusp of his twentieth year. He greeted us with a cheery smile each time we passed him on the trail, and everyone in our group was drawn to him in some way. He had very little on his person but looked extremely refreshed and comfortable, and on his feet he wore moccasins! Actual shoes made of leather, shoes that one would imagine a Native American to have fashioned.

He showed us how to eat some of the local flora and told us why mushrooms are the hardest items to forage. The basic idea of his camping trip, him sans a large overnight bag like the ones that were weighing our group down, was to bring as little as possible into the wilderness and see how many days he could live on the trail and off the land for. We broke bread with him in the form of pine nuts from pine cones as well as over-ripened hobble berries from the surrounding bushes. And then, as quickly as he had swept into our lives, he blew away like the evening wind.

With so little, how did he survive? He slept under the stars at night, with nothing around him or under him except the grass and a long sleeve shirt. Were his foraging skills enough to get him through the days? What if he ate something poisonous? And this was his idea of fun? To emulate the life of frontiersman and settlers of centuries past?

Foraging and Mushrooms

One of the most abundant sources of food and death on the trail are mushrooms. Mushrooms grow everywhere, especially in the damp and cool climates that many mountainous areas provide. All one has to do is pay attention.

Foraging mushrooms is the same way some varieties appear at the store; there are even hikers who hit the hills to bring back mushroom supplies for local restaurants at a hefty price. It’s funny how all of those plastic and Styrofoam packed mushrooms lining the shelves of supermarkets everywhere are much more appealing than the ones seen on the forest floor while many are exactly the same.

Mushrooms live in a strange world and are strange entities in themselves. Everywhere, earthen colors prevail: The green of trees and foliage, the gray of rocks and stones, the brown of the dirt and earth itself. Popping out from this landscape are the orange, blues, whites, and purples of many mushroom families, and just the colors of these decomposers alone scream, “Don’t eat me!”

But with the proper knowledge, it is possible to collect mushrooms on the trail and once the sun goes down, to flick on the stove, and fry them with a little olive oil, (salt to taste), and one has all the food they need to get through night.

How were these books on foraging were written? Experimentation, perhaps? How many people have died as a result of eating poisonous mushrooms? Are the authors people who have been poisoned themselves and lived to write about the experience?

Gender Wars

If you have a few males and a few females on a camping trip, chances are you’re going to run into drama. Males tend to want to travel further and explore more treacherous terrain, live life closer to the edge during their few days of escape. How close can you really get to the edge, though, when in any fifteen to forty-five minute interval, there are groups of other hikers pouring down the trail and smiling and greeting you as they pass? It’s not like we’re crossing a desert while hiking or always on the lookout for thieves.

(As an aside, one thing that should be mentioned is that a feeling of amiability prevails the wilderness atmosphere. The woods seem to give all who roam there a license to smile at anyone they see; maybe it’s because everyone shares the common interest and love for the outdoors. It seems only natural when walking in the middle of the woods alone, to greet and act gregarious toward another person walking on the same trail.)

Also with different genders on trips, jobs and activities some times revert back to the old style stereotypes. The male pitches the tent, the male gathers the kindling, the female cooks the food, the female keeps the campsite organized. It is important to note that this is not necessarily the norm; I love to cook on a camping trip and love it when a girl takes the initiative and sets up the tent and builds the fire. Whatever the difference or perceived difference between males and females, camping can bring these matters to the forefront.

A Final Note On Modern Amenities

No matter how far from civilization, no matter how much we rely on modern amenities and supermarkets to provide us with comfort and food, the freshest eats and water can be found out there, out in the wild. On our last trip, spring water was gushing from the side of the mountain like so much blood flowing from the heart of the wilderness. It was an oasis in the middle of the forest, the water of which could be drunk without any sort of treatment or filtration. Cold and crisp, the water rolled into my chest, and it felt as if I were taking a drink from the very essence of life itself.

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Real Campers

To camp is to escape. There’s no real reason that anyone needs to camp anymore, unless of course one enjoys camping. Wilderness adventurers and thrill seekers camp quite often but who I’m talking about is the everyday person.

Explorers used to camp for a large portion of their lives because camping was a necessary part of their job. When you’re sailing half way around the world and you’re thousands of miles from home, what choice do you have other than to set up shop in a foreign land for the night? Or Lewis and Clark who charted the great western wilderness of the U. S.; those guys were campers.

Today, camping is a hobby at best. It is fun to subject oneself to the elements and live in the woods foregoing modern amenities and comforts. But when you get tired of such a lifestyle or just want a ‘real’ hot meal, it’s as easy as taking a hike back to the car, (or for car campers, jumping in the car), and heading for home.

The people that really amaze me when I think about them are the first European settlers here in America, who literally left their homes to create a new one. In a sense, they were, and still are, the eternal campers.

Camping in for a Landing

Here would probably be a good place to clarify what the word ‘camping’ means. Camping is sleeping outside under the stars or in a tent or other similarly fashioned shelter, in a place that is wild or secluded and away from civilization, in natural areas that are somewhat ‘untouched.’

Camping outside of an electronics store on Black Friday so you can get a deal on a plasma TV while also accidentally trampling and killing an employee would not be considered camping: That would be considered murder. Car camping, where you just pull up to a campsite and throw some wieners on a grill and pitch a tent even pushes the limits of what I would traditionally consider camping. It’s definitely in the vicinity of camping, but come on. It’s car camping.

Affordable Housing

Often, my friend John and I have discussed the possibility of camping indefinitely in a state park. (I guess this probably isn’t the best place to be writing this in case it could ever be used to indict me), but if I suddenly couldn’t afford to pay rent in another few months, I would try it out. Don’t get me wrong; I’m actually considering this as a viable living option.

In On Homeless, I talked about the prospect of homelessness actually being an indefinite hike in a city, in this case, in New York. While New York cannot be considered a wilderness area, it is often referred to as the ‘big jungle,’ so in that right, it can be covered in my previous blanket definition of camping. If public property in the wild can be used for camping, why not public property in the city?

The only argument against pitching a tent in Central Park on Sheep Meadow is probably sanitation. Where are you going to go to the bathroom? When you’re camping, the world is your bathroom. But when you’re in a city, things get complicated.

In All Campiness

While much of what I have said has been in jest, camping is an activity everyone should try. In a way, we’re all campers; we’ve set up camp in the houses we call home. But living the nomadic life and making a home in the wild, for even just a few days, makes one appreciate what they have and reconsider what they want. When all is said and done, is it better to live a life of comfort and convenience, or to strike out against the world, and strike your fire under truly starry skies?

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