Stalking the Cooperative Vulture.

I've been enjoying a lot of outdoor activities lately. My son and I head to the high country often to go hiking. My wife and I have been doing a good deal of kayaking locally. And of course when no one else has the leisure time to go with me, I go off by myself. I take advantage of most of those days to go hiking, generally within a drive of anywhere from half an hour to as much as three hours.

Today I fell back on the old standby activity, hiking at Crowders Mountain State Park. My main purpose was to hike to the summit of Crowders to see if I would have the opportunity to photograph Turkey vultures. They're one of the most common large birds around, and they use the cliffs and thermals around the summit to launch themselves into the sky to scan for the scent of carrion.On a sunny day it's hard to miss them at either of the two peaks in the park, Crowders and Kings Pinnacle.

I have to say, it was a hot day for hiking. I arrived at the trailhead at about 10:00 am. The lot was about 2/3 full, and it's a vast parking area. There is very good reason that local hikers refer to it as "Crowded Mountain". On some days you can encounter as many as 100 people arriving at the summit every hour or so. Today wasn't quite that busy, but nearly so.

After reaching the top and toweling all of the sweat off of me, I staked out a shady spot at the edge of a cliff and began to take landscape photos and to scan the area for signs of vultures. One of my friends, writer/photographer Michael Hodges had suggested a lens to me: a Canon 24mm pancake lens. He told me that photographs taken with it would "pop", and he wasn't kidding. It captures crisp, colorful, brilliant images. This was the first time I'd used it other than to take a couple of test photos. Michael was spot on.

I stayed on the summit for about three hours taking photos, drinking lots of water, and enjoying the views. The people arrived and left at a steady pace. Sometimes it got quite noisy, then the voices and music would subside as the numbers of people dwindled. (I never have figured out why anyone would bring music with them on a hike. I find the idea pathetic.)

Over the course of my time there I took well over 200 photographs of the crew of Turkey vultures who passed in front of and above my patch of rocky cliffside. I think I'll salvage about a dozen images good enough for me to add to my online portfolio of photos that I sell through some online purveyors of stock photos.  Every month I make a little more than I did the month before. It has become my part-time job. A job, for once, that's fun (aside from writing).

Say what you will, they're actually quite the majestic bird in flight.

I don't know if this bird is just old, in the midst of molting, or the victim of a tussle. It seems healthy and flew and cruised the thermals as well as the others. But it looked rough.

Aside from the Great blue heron, the Turkey vulture is my favorite bird to photograph.

Michael was right. That lens makes the image really stand out.

Messages Both Intended and Subconscious.

I was thinking of my writing output recently and what it's about. I recall a couple of writers I spoke to over the years mentioning that even if you don't actively want to engage in delivering a message, you still often do. That is, even if what you intend is to deliver pure pulp fiction, or just an entertaining yarn with no undercurrent of philosophical or political content, your subconscious dictates that you will do exactly the opposite.

What struck me in thinking specifically of my novels and stories was of how many of them deal with racism. Sometimes with intent, but often just a product of ideas percolating out of the subconscious and ending up on the pages.

The only time I actively wrote a book with an intentional undercurrent of commentary on racism in the USA is my book THE EMISSARY. I wanted to write about the subject in a way that I could treat with it over the course of a story in a horror novel. What I wanted to do was actively write a book with an overt delivery of the problem of racism in the US.

But many of my other books have dealt with some aspect of racism, which I think is far and away the most awful part of our national history. It's always there, and won't go away, existing persistently decade after decade since the times before our nation even existed.

Years ago I was writing zombie novels. And while on the Internet to promote one of those novels I went from bulletin board to bulletin board to make connections and see how I should go about promoting my books there. What I thought I would find I did not, and what I did discover horrified me. Pretty much every public bulletin board devoted to zombie fiction onto which I logged was weighted heavily with racists, many of them neo-Nazis. These guys would post links and you'd find yourself looking at boards promoting hatred and white-race "superiority". I saw vile imagery and threats of violence and extermination spelled out in plain terms.

Frankly, after that, I didn't want to write anymore zombie novels and decided not to engage in promotions of my work on any of those boards. When one of my publishers asked me to write them another one I at first refused. But then I recalled a short story that I'd written that had later been produced as a comic story. The idea of turning it into a novel had occurred to me for years but I had never followed through. I agreed to an advance and set about writing it.

Thus was born the expansion into novel of my short story THE NEW ECOLOGY DEATH. I thought about what I wanted to do with it. I never once mentioned racism or anything directly related to it. I set about burying any mention of anything attached to the subject in an atmosphere both cold and hopeful, and also cautionary.

But two things that I actively did was make all of the principle characters Jews. And I took guns and gun-play totally out of the picture so that I would rob the reader of what I have come to think of as gun-porn. There is the reference to distant gunfire once in the book, and an actual scene with a firearm is played out near the very end with unintended consequences. I specifically set out to create a zombie novel with almost none of the plot elements that most racists lust for in their zombie novels. I made it so that the tables are turned and the setting is one in which zombies are all but defeated and are only a marginal and fading threat. The main characters are a Jewish family. There are almost no guns, and none of the jargon that gives gun-loving racists a specific thrill (which I am convinced is sexual).

It was the worst-selling book I ever wrote. I don't know how many copies it sold, but not many. It never came anywhere near to earning back its advance. The only feedback I ever got on it was from a couple of racists raging about how there were no guns in the book.

Someday I'd like to get it back into print. Of all of the books I've written, I can think of nothing in it that I'd want to rewrite. It was pretty much everything I wanted it to be and which I set out to do. So getting it back into print would be easy on a technical basis (no rewrites). I'd just need to figure out how to get it into the hands of the right audience.

We'll see.

THE EMISSARY. A horror novel wherein racial and sexual hatred manifests itself as lycanthropy.

DEADLOCKED, a novel with major elements of race, philosophy, struggle, and hope.

My out-of-print THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH. Returning to print one of these days. Maybe this year. (But maybe not.)

A Retiring Fellow

Some years back I got a friend request on Facebook that surprised me. It was from a well known movie producer. Now, this had nothing whatsoever to do with my movie deal with Warner Brothers at that time (for my novel, THE FLOCK). At least I don't think it did. It was never mentioned.

I enjoyed corresponding with him from time to time, and I always got a kick out of his posts about has fascinating career and how he ended up producing movies. And he had great stories about famous writers, directors, and actors who had created the movies he produced. He was the kind of interesting and famous friend you never think you are going to make on Facebook.

After a couple of years, though, he began to complain that he had too many Facebook friends and that he was going to start paring down the list. I seem to recall he had a couple of thousand at the time which actually isn't all that many in the scheme of things. What he said he wanted was a few hundred people that he felt made his experience on Facebook fun, and with whom he could actually exchange ideas and stories.

He was one of the very few people on the platform that I worried about not seeing anymore. But he would text me from time to time to assure me that I'd made the cut. This went on for about a year as he shed friends.

One day he started up a conversation about work. Retirement came up. I was still several years away from retirement. Close enough that I could taste it and wanted the day to come so that I wouldn't have to punch a clock and stress myself out by keeping myself from punching managers or supervisors. I mentioned to him that I thought everyone should be given the opportunity and pension to retire by age 50. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time to toil away for the capitalist system and then kick back and enjoy twenty to thirty-something years of fun.

This idea upset him. I mean...he actually got angry. I never would have figured it, coming as he did from the counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s. But it did piss him off.

A few days later I noticed that I was no longer on his friends list. I suppose at that point he must have been actively looking for reasons to shed anyone and everyone to get down to his magic number of Facebook friends of 400 or so. In the end, I didn't make the cut, as he had put it. I must admit that I missed his stories. He was pretty cool.

I finally did retire. Being retired is glorious. Fuck working. If you don't have to work you shouldn't do it if it's making you miserable and you have the means to give up your job. I worked from my teens until I was 62 years old. That was freaking long enough. I know lazy bastards who do things like leech off of their parents and make their wives support them. I've always worked. For the past ten years that I did work all I could think of was making sure that I could retire at 62. I was freaking finished.

And I think of my old Facebook friend and I wonder what it was about the idea of people being able to retire on a government pension at 50 that pissed him off so much. Maybe he was just a right wing curmudgeon with the aura of the counterculture about him that was totally false. I'll never know. Not only did he cease to be friendly with me via Facebook, he subsequently died.

No, don't ask who he was. It doesn't matter, now, and I'm not going to mention it. If his name wouldn't be familiar to you, the films that he produced almost certainly would have.

As for me, I freaking love being retired. I have time to have fun. I don't stress out over getting up before light unless Carole and I are going on a trip, or I'm going to drive to a park to go hiking or camping or kayaking. I can stay up half the night working on a new novel. I can plan out an ad campaign for my novels. For years I talked about planting a garden and never did. Now I have and we harvest vegetables from it almost every day.

Fuck it. That famous producer was wrong. I was right. Retirement is amazing. You don't have to sit on your ass and wither away or become stupid in front of the television.

In fact, I wish I'd been able to do this at 50 instead of 62. Or earlier.

Fuck working. I hiked ten miles, saw three waterfalls, a mountaintop, deer, a wild turkey hen with eight chicks, and rhododendron in full bloom everywhere along the waterways. I didn't punch a clock. It was a weekday. There was no schedule. I did whatever the heck I wanted to do at the pace I wanted to take.

My favorite view of Stone Mountain while being on Stone Mountain.

Seven of the eight wild turkey chicks I saw.

The mother hen.

One of thousands of rhododendron blossoms today.

A small cascade above a larger waterfall.

What a Weird Freaking Year.

In late 2019 Carole and I were busy making all kinds of plans for 2020. I was already retired, Carole had plenty of vacation leave built up, money was not an issue, our travel trailer was in good shape and I had just paid cash for the best motor vehicle we have ever owned.

We had planned out a number of vacations starting with our Springtime journey to Florida to seek out the giant freshwater springs there and to kayak and snorkel the clear spring runs and deep headsprings where millions of gallons of fresh water come rushing to the surface from limestone aquifers. We had reserved all of our campsites, paid for each spot, and had toted up and bought everything we were going to need and use.

Then, a month before the trip...coronavirus shut down the nation.

And this was only the most bothersome bit of the strangeness of this year. A President who seems to be loathed by anyone with the capacity to think. A hatred that goes far beyond even the rage I used to see aimed at Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush. This is something that seethes and boils and threatens to turn into revolution. Yeah, laugh if you will, but if things get much worse...well, then think again.

I've lost track of the numbers of people filing for unemployment benefits. Almost every working person I know has either lost their job, or has seen their hours cut to the bone. No benefits remaining. No insurance left. Nothing in the saving account but dust and despair.

2020 was supposed to have been the fist big breakout year of my retirement. Alas, no. I am reminded of the cautionary quote often credited to John Lennon: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Yes, Johnny, my sad, murdered friend, that is indeed a reasonable definition. This year has proven it out.

We all spent weeks and months locked down. I made do with trips to the grocery store, the hardware shop, and many walks around my rural neighborhood. There was no traffic on the streets. We even stopped hearing motor and tire noise on the Interstate two miles away. The skies ceased to buzz with the scrape of jets against the clouds. Sometimes it was so silent that when I sat in our two-acre yard I thought I was off in one of my wilderness areas.

During all of this Carole and I planted a garden. I did a lot of yard work. The one-mile jaunts around our giant rural block became routine. My hair grew into a great, gray, bushy mess. I longed for a trip to the barber.

Now, things have loosened up. Five or six jets a day now growl across the heavens. We can hear traffic from I-485 again, but still not as heavy. Fortunately my son and I can jump in that new truck and head to the mountains for hikes to see landscapes and forests and wildlife. And, thus, the eye-candy for the photographs I present now. I just bought a few new lenses for my also-new camera. Buying a new camera and lenses does not mean you suddenly produce finer photographs. There's a learning curve with new equipment just like there is with anything else. I'm still trying to fine tune how to use them effectively. I'm getting there, but I'm not totally happy with the results.

And so, here are some photos from my third trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since the lockdown was partially relaxed. It's beginning to look as if they may be forced to reenact that lockdown. Infections are soaring. Death rates from Covid-19 are pushing higher. Our plans were to fly to Italy next year to visit Florence so that I could knock that visit to see Brunelleschi's Dome off the old bucket list. But the EU distrusts us so much that they don't even want infected US citizens coming over there.

Damn.

2020 keeps delivering unfortunate surprises. What nightmares is it holding in reserve?

I don't know why beautiful butterflies are attracted to fresh horse poop, but they are. I also don't know how this ant climbed aboard this butterfly's wing, but she did.

These turkeys were in the Oconaluftee section of the Park.

Westerners don't see a big deal when it comes to witnessing an elk in a National Park. But the ecosystems here in the east haven't had them for hundreds of years. They've reintroduced them in North Carolina. They started with 40 or so elk in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since reintroduction I've heard varying accounts of the numbers there now, but 250 or so seems to be what I hear most often. They're obviously spreading out. I used to see them only in Cataloochee, but these were photographed in Oconaluftee at roughly 2000 feet above sea level in the fields there. We ended up seeing almost twenty elk on Tuesday.

This elk we saw on Balsam Mountain at roughly 5000 feet above seal level. This was in a heavily forested area with only a few patches of grass and no fields, at all. The elk are obviously filling up all ecological niches they once inhabited.

The habitat is obviously good at Oconaluftee and the Qualla.