Notes From A Bear's Journey

   Green table, for those of you wondering what was the origin of Mesa Verde, it being the name given by the early Spanish explorers some ages ago upon discovering this part of the land in the Southwest; how could they have known that this wasn't a flat table at all but rather a sloping piece of land that had been carved away as diligently by water as had the nearby Grand Canyon, and thus is more properly defined as a "cuesta" by geologists?  It all sounds so simple, especially as one views the "mesa" from afar; but as one continues to climb the tight road up to the top, a two-lane road often made even smaller by the car-sized chunks of rocks that have fallen off the upper ledges and line the side, rocks which easily outweigh even the heaviest buses and could easily send them careening over the sheer drop to the side, one begins to try and comprehend the time scale that the Mancos River must be on.  To our side were the steep drops, those stomach-churning edges ...

  One of the first sights one sees upon entering Arches National Park     So here I was, back in Arches some 40 ýears later and still awed by the cliffs and red hilltops that had ignored the many scratches and markings that humans had tried to carve in the forms of roads and bridges.  It had taken us over five hours to get here, mainly because we thought we would stay to the larger roadways, ones which still shrank down to a single lane in each direction as if builders eventually came to think that the hard scrabble was simply not worth the effort; that thought became something that made the existing rail line that paralleled us all that more impressive.  How did those early builders (mostly Chinese illegal immigrants and treated as little more than slaves, as it turns out) haul in all that gravel bedding and railroad ties (themselves rather heavy if you've ever tried to lift one) and of course, those steel sections of track.  As our car veered passive...

The Windows section of Arches National Park    For those of you who have never visited Arches National Park in the southern end of Utah, just picture an area that you love, a place which you feel that everyone should see at some point in their lives.  It could be something of a natural earthly feature, say Victoria Falls or a herd of wild elephants; or it could be something constructed by humans such as the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids.  It could even be somewhere as simple as the bakery down the street.  But likely your friends live far away, or are entirely different from you in their tastes.  They want to camp and you want to stay in a hotel, or they want to visit a city and you want to head out to the wild, or they want to stay right where they are and you want to explore.  Everyone is different and that's what makes the world go around.  But it's difficult to ignore your passion, whatever that may be.  For Moab, the sleepy gate...

   News came out recently (again) that a possible vaccine had been developed to prevent or at least delay the onset of Alzheimer's, a study which would be a boon to the 43 million people now facing the slow loss of oneself and a story so bravely told by David Milch in The New Yorker (also linked in my earlier post ).  It'd be difficult to be that person, a witness really, observing yourself as if in a dream, parts of you just ebbing away like a sand castle that you've spent a lifetime building now being lapped at by an oncoming tide.  Mentally you're there but along with that comes the realization that soon even that will disappear; physical movements, decisions, even recognizing people and things will likely leave you wondering what world you may be entering, a black hole pulling you in but keeping you alive.  I've written about dementia many times (Alzheimer's disease is a sub-category of the broader field of dementia) but recently there have been more and m...

   Quite often those simple word plays are the stuff of children's jokes such as the one that went, "What did the grape say when it got stepped on?...Nothing, it just let out a little wine."  It was one of the most memorable jokes I had heard but I heard it when I was a tiny lad of about 8 and one who didn't grasp what it meant, only that all the adults seemed to laugh at it and so somehow it stuck in my head decade after decade.  Little has changed of course, as noted by one of the tee shirts at Northern Sun which features in bright and bold letters: Chicken Pot Pie...my three favorite things.  So it was a bit of a surprise to hear about what has changed in Los Angeles, a city which one would view as cosmopolitan, congested, changed and...Cambodian?  Turns out that that segment of the Asian population has blossomed in LA, and has helped earn LA yet another distinctive title, the Donut Capital.  With over 1500 donut shops, many of them small family-ru...

   When a friend is overly agitated or angry, we tend to scream out loud (in a joking manner), "Hey man, you're losing it."  But more often when you first hear the term "losing it" you might think of that occasional moment when you misplace your keys or a folder or a bill; less frequently do you consider the loss as being a body part or a true decline in mental capacity, at least not while you still feels that there is so much life ahead, regardless of your age.  Certainly there is the soldier hitting the mine or the odd accident that takes a few fingers or worse, a leg or an eye.  And judging by the number of "memory" centers and studies on Alzheimer's disease there is a substantial number of people encountering a slow or perhaps a rapid cognitive decline.  But I've found that as one grows older the term takes on a bit more of a serious tone.  Flexibility diminishes, as does muscle strength.  That 50-pound bag of salt I used to lift out of the...