Exploration

If as John Muir said, "Of all the paths we take, make one dirt," does sand count? See The Oregon Coast in the next issue.

Many moons ago—moons?--that is moons times 12 ago,  I walked into freshman Biology class plunked myself down beside a kid that didn’t take notes but got A’s anyway (Don’t you hate those people? No, envy.), I set a notebook on my desk, and wrote on the top of my page the words the professor shouted: “THIS IS THE STUDY OF LIFE!”

Cool!

I want to know about life.

You know how an enthusiastic teacher can motivate you.

This man loved his subject, and I loved it too.

The trouble was that after studying, Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus, species, oh, biologists like to name things—I found that while physical life was spread out before me, there was not much about ethereal life.

The big questions couldn’t be categorized, labeled, pigeonholed, or even addressed in a satisfactory manner. I suppose it is rather like the question put to Alfred Kinsey, the sex study doctor, who, when asked why he didn’t include love into his equation answered, “Because it is not measurable.”

To me, the really interesting questions are ones not measurable.

Apologies to my biology professor, but life is not something in which we can achieve a degree. Life is something we all have, all think about, and all have trouble understanding.

That puts us all on an equal playing field.

Which brings me to my question of why we are so separate from each other?

Why do we fear strangers? Why do we demonize certain segments of our population?

Yes, they look different, act different, have different beliefs. There must be something wrong with them.

Well now, we can explain that evolutionarily.

Think of zebras, deer and other preyed upon animals; all look alike. The odd one gets singled out of the herd. He catches the eye of the predator. Whoops, old Ralph—the Zebra with brown stripes instead of black ones--is gone.

We are like that too. Different is singled out.

Remember when the TV show Star Trek burst upon the scene?

It was the first multiracial show. And on it was the first bi-racial kiss.

The Enterprise was populated with all manner of multiracial and multi-species humanoids. Spock, the hybrid Vulcan with pointie ears and little emotion, was loved. There was an Asian, a Black, a Scotsman, and on top of that all manner of aliens with faces that looked like they had been mashed into a mold.

I wondered at the time how that would change attitudes toward different races.

It took a while.

Think of the wild horse. To be ostracized from the herd is a death sentence. He would be free game for a mountain lion.

A horse will practically break his neck to get back into the herd--the safest place.

We, too, fear being ostracized, and thus we behave in a manner acceptable to the group.

For some native tribes being ostracized was the worst punishment, for alone in the wild, an alone person would surely die.

Thinking back to StarTrek, initially, it ran only for one year, and the network canceled it due to poor ratings.

Talk about an evolutionary come back. That was partly due to a writing campaign from the viewers and encouraged by the promoters.

Oh yeah, think of the flip-open communicator.

 I have one of those sitting on my desk.

It doesn’t beam me up though—not yet.

Science imitating art.

And Nasa named one of the Space Shuttles Enterprise.

Isn’t that phenomenal?

We have come to a place where we are instrumental in our own evolution.

(Oh, and don’t give me any flack for using the word evolution—it means change  over time.)

Evolution is an emotion packed word, for to Creationists it means we came from monkeys.  You can believe we evolved from monkeys, God created us, or the Universe is a perpetual motion machine. It's all up for grabs. However, the idea of beating each other up over an ideology is ludicrous.

A wise man once told me this story: Have I told you this?

We are all princesses or princes under a frog suit. The frog suit has tears showing the princess beneath, and we try to cover up those holes, yet if we ripped off the frog suit it would reveal the true princess.

P.S. Oprah motivated me to begin another blog--not personally, of course, but in leafing through her magazine, I noticed how it was laid out on a page, many pictures, bold headings, change of fonts, ads of course. I have heard that large blocks of type scare people. There are articles in her magazine, but you really have to decide to read them. In that vein, I began another blog, one I could maneuver better than the ones I have. 

When you have the time I would appreciate it if you would check in and tell me what you think of 

travelwithjoyce.com

Thank you ever so much.

I Had a Change of Heart Today

Good Morning,

I cleaned the refrigerator a couple of days ago. Imagine that! As I scrubbed it, with my head inside that huge cold machine and my butt in the air, I had this thought:

What idiot said, “If it ain’t fun don’t’ do it?”

If that were true I would never get my refrigerator cleaned.

You know, you are at the cleaning-the-refrigerator stage where all those half-used bottles that are not good enough to keep, but too good to throw away lay like fallen soldiers on the counter top. The produce fainted a few days ago and is still out cold, and opening that cottage cheese container? I was afraid to do it.

Please say you've done that for I don't want to be the only one.

And then I had a second thought.

I love this refrigerator.

Remember, Joyce, when you lived in Hawaii and used an ice chest, because you had no refrigerator?  And then the mortgage loan came through, and you bought a refrigerator, but didn’t have enough solar power to run it?
Remember the Hawaiian woman at The Pond’s Restaurant who said, “Living like you are will make you appreciate everything?”

I appreciate my refrigerator.

It came with the house, a perfect fit in the space created for it, and it matches the stove and the dishwasher. Oh yes, I didn’t have a dishwasher in Hawaii either, or an oven.

I am blessed!

I thought of the saying, “You can’t be depressed and in gratitude at the same time.”

I am grateful for my refrigerator.

And now it is clean, and all the labels on the bottles face forward, and it is beautiful. I would stare at it except that having the door open pours out energy. (I once saw a commercial that demonstrated energy loss by filling a refrigerator with ping-pong balls, You can guess what happened when someone opened the door.)

Ah well, I could end my ode to the refrigerator, but I have to say that, after having none, we now have three.

There’s the dear refrigerator in the house, and two in “The Wayback,” our auxiliary building. The owners left their earlier refrigerator there, and we house ours from our previous house.

Ta Da!

The universe is laughing.

I finally took a break from “Blogging” for some house cleaning.

Not many are finding me on www.travelswithjo.com, but that will change and I am happy for whoever shows up. No, I can't say that, I'm getting spammed by porn, and to keep it off I would have to pay a fee. (Gripe. Why do people do that?!) My parent blog is this one www.wishonwhitehorses.org.

Sorry about the .org as I lost my .com--$100.00 would get it back, but that seems a tad steep. I'm waiting for its redemption period to end. I hope then I can catch my .com and get it again.  

Most travel bloggers are young people, singles, newly married, or young families with children. Maybe I ought to let my hair go gray and tout myself as “Gray Fox at Large,” for I haven’t seen one of those, but I’m not going to do it.  I won’t admit that there are any gray hairs under my blond.

I’ll admit I sleep with a Grandpa, but that’s all.

Last weekend, before the blogging and the cleaning frenzy, we took another day trip.

We drove to McMinnville, OR  about a two-hour drive from where we live to see the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. The Hercules, known as the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ famous “flying boat” is housed there.
Upon approaching tour destination this is what we saw.

  "A plane on the roof."

It is a full-blown commercial jet sitting atop a water park next to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum.

The hangar/Museum where The Spruce Goose lives next door where it sits like a cake with flowers around it. Only the cake, the Goose, is wood, and the flowers are airplanes polished to a sheen. 

Everything was spotless, the planes, the white floor—no wonder I had to come home and clean my house.







  

The Spruce Goose with hubby.

We climbed inside that ginormous airplane and ascended a narrow spiral staircase to the cockpit--the service man gave me a peek inside before it closed entrance to it.

Darn, Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor who played Howard Hughes in the movie The Aviator, wasn't sitting there.

A duplicate of the Wright Brothers’ plane was there, and private planes, and military planes, trainers, and jets.

The Wright Brother's aeroplane.

How long did it take man to build a contraption that would fly? Now they can throw up a boat the size of a football field, and it will fly.

Next door the Space Museum housed rockets and space capsules, and spacesuits that you wonder how a man could ever maneuver. Those suits alone were an engineering feat, let alone that someone landed on the moon.



“The Wright Brothers flew through a smoke screen of impossibility.” –“Dorthea Brande

Look there, a 400,000 pound airplane made of wood can fly.

"Of all the paths you take, make some dirt."*

Wish on white horses flatlined for a few days, lost its dot com, and in the process didn't even see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we are back fresh with a new address. It is a dot org. The address now is wishonwhitehorses.org. Remember the originator of this blog is from Oregon, org, good ending.

And so we begin;

For 63 of his 87 years, Buckminster Fuller noted for the geodesic dome, kept a scrapbook/diary that documented every day of his life. It reflected his correspondence, drawings, newspaper clipping, grocery lists and other evidence of his unique story.

This information came to my attention on my “Free Will Astrology” by Rob Brezsny—in my opinion, the best column to read in The Eugene Weekly.

.

His point to Aquarians was that he would love to see us express ourselves with as much disciplined ferocity as Buckminster Fuller did for the next two weeks of our lives.

I had to laugh, but don’t worry folks I won’t publish every detail of my existence, not that you would have to read it if I did, I just thought it was funny that he threw that challenge in my direction.

Once I heard Buckminster Fuller speak in San Diego. Of that speech I remember two things, well three, the first was the long line before getting into the auditorium where the girl in front of me who kept obsessing that we wouldn’t get in. (We did.)

Of his speech, I remember this: He held up a model of the square. It was about four inches on a side built of something like four plastic rods held together at the corners with rubber bands. Press on one corner and the square collapses. But as demonstrated next, a triangle is solid and firm. If you press on a corner and it doesn’t collapse. That concept led to his idea of building with triangles.

The only trouble is I like squares—sorry Bucky, but a cube is quite stable and makes a nice house. Probably not as strong as a pyramidal shape though. Guess those ancients knew something.

The second point I remember is that he said he made $300,000 a year and spent every penny of it. He knew that the following year he would make another $300,000—now that’s my kind of guy.

His earlier years weren’t so positive. After the death of his daughter at 4 years of age, and with family financial difficulties, Fuller contemplated suicide as a means of giving his family money from a life insurance policy.

Instead, he had an epiphany, and heard this voice:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.” ^-- From Wikipedia

He ultimately chose to embark on "an experiment," to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”

And, as a part of that experiment, he began chronicling his own life.

The military recognized the geodesic dome as useful. It could be small, lightweight, inexpensive and can withstand heavy loads. 

To quote “Bucky’: “I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the Universe designs itself.”

And now a little inclusion from Joyce:

*The title is a quote by John Muir seen in a window in Sisters Oregon. 

On Social media you can find many people who travel the globe as a way of life, so I thought, I don’t want to travel full-time, but what sort of day-trip can my husband and I take?

A weekend ago it was Cannon Beach Oregon, two days ago it was Sisters, a small tourist catered-to town in the high desert of Oregon. We hadn’t been there for about ten years. (Our pleasant memories of that town was the chicken and dumplings the Sisters Saloon used to serve on Sunday nights. Long ago it was a large bowl with enough to take home. Alas, that went the way of the dodo birds.)

The shortest route from here to Sisters was still closed due to snow.  Snow? It was 90 degrees that day, probably the highway clean-up hadn’t removed any brush collected on the highway over the winter,  so, we took the over-the-mountain trip.

We have always loved the McKenzie River and long ago The Log Cabin Inn was a stopping off place where they served great Marian Berry Cobbler, but the log Inn, too, is gone. I heard it burned down when we were out of Oregon. It is replaced with homes and cabins now. It is still pretty for the cabin-style structures are integrated into the old-growth forest that surrounds the area. Yes, we do have some old-growth left. The McKenzie River was so high and swift that I took Sweetpea away from the bank and beat feet out of there.

We drove through the Cascade Mountain Range where the forests were spectacular, and white frosted peaks gave evidence of long-ago volcanic eruptions.

A Douglas fir forest is sometimes so dense you wouldn't believe a deer could wiggle its way through, but animal paths snake through.

Soon the firs give way to Pine forests where you could actually ride a horse between the trees--my mouth watered-- the forest floor was green and sprouted flowers, and the trees were spaced about ten feet apart.

There was some sage brush around Sisters, but it was still in the Pine Forest. I know, however, that if you continue driving east the Pines will give way to Juniper trees and further on there will be sage brush, and no trees.

We are lucky to have that Cascade Mountain Range that creates abundant forests. It also creates a rain shadow. The land east of the range gets little rain, while we to the west get gobs, and get green that I love.

In Sisters, we ate superb Mexican Food on a little outside deck with our traveling dog, Sweetpea, under the table getting bites of chili verde.

Too bad this path wasn't dirt, I would have gladly trod it, but someone threw asphalt on it. 

Beyond this path is a full sized river, the Metolius. It sprouts straight out of a mountainside. It was so overgrown I couldn't get a good picture of it, and I had to stay behind a fence. The water comes from springs that have been fault lifted to near the surface.  The right most picture is my view of the Metolius River from the view deck--a full-sized river only a few hundred yards from where it was born.

   A Douglas Fir Forest                                                                   A Pine Forest

Evidence of long ago big booms..

I do believe this last picture is of two of Three Sisters. If an Oregonian reads this perhaps they can identify these mountains.

There were snow capped peaks all over the place, Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington, The Three Sisters, Three Fingered Jack, Mt. Bachelor. Whew. In high school they told us those volcanos were dead, and then Mt. St. Helens woke up.