Junior Officers

Lately I've read a couple of books about Imperial Japanese forces during World War II. And one thing that struck me from both of these sources is that the command never knew exactly if the junior officers would obey direct orders when they were issued. Apparently the lowest echelons of officers were moderately unreliable and tended to do what they wanted, even when issued direct, detailed orders. They may follow the orders to the letter; or they might alter them a bit; or they could just as easily ignore the orders and take what they thought was the best course of action. Supreme Command could only give the orders and hope for the best.

So far, neither source has mentioned why this strange order of conduct was in effect. So I'll have to read more material to see if the first sources are wrong. If it was an accurate recording of how things were done on the Japanese side, I want to read more about why it was so.

Kwantung Army surrendered en masse to the Soviet Red Army.

Eight Years

"Eight Years"

By James Robert Smith

I need to say a few things up front, before I even start this story.

My mom was what she liked to call 'half Jewish'. Yeah, I know. Some people say that there’s no such thing. You either are a Jew, or you are a gentile. There is no half-measure to being a Jew. That said, it’s a common term and that’s what she said about herself and that’s good enough for me.

She was proud of that part of her heritage, even if it was mainly denied to her. She was raised around her Jewish aunts, uncles, and cousins and took things in through osmosis and not through being a member of the tribe. Her father had been raised in a very observant home, what some people refer to as an Orthodox Jew. But he lost a great deal of that identity when he married my gentile grandmother and his parents sat shiva on him. (He never saw them again. They were as serious as death on that point.)

Still and all, it was important to my mother and she loved her Jewish relatives and I always felt as if she was a person who really wanted to be Jewish. She seemed to be what I’ve heard some rabbis refer to as “a person with a Jewish soul”.

My dad was a white working class man from the Deep South. Born and raised in Georgia, mainly of Scots-Irish extraction. He was also an atheist since the age of twelve and very early in his life was attracted to left-wing ideology. He came of age around 1930 and rode the rails out of the state and to points north, searching for the impending revolution which, somehow, never came. Because of his brand of politics he befriended many Jews. His favorite writers and political thinkers were all Jews.

Frankly, if I had to venture a guess, I think he ended up in New York City in a search to find a Jewish wife. Instead, he discovered my mom and ended up with a half-Jewish wife. Eh.

So, now, forward many years. It was 1967. The FBI had come down like a ton of Bibles on the nascent American Leftist Revolution and my dad was a bookseller in Atlanta, Georgia. My mom was his business partner and a mother to their eight kids. By then, half of the children were gone, adults. So were almost all of my dad’s leftist thinker Jewish pals. They’d given up on the revolutionary movement and had turned their sights elsewhere—mainly to the State of Israel.

This bugged the shit out of my dad. I mean, it grated on his every last nerve. Why had they all abandoned the struggle so that they could instead focus their thoughts and efforts and donations on a country across the ocean in the Middle East? What kind of an American does that? He stewed.

My dad always enjoyed talking to any of his customers who wanted to discuss politics. Since the store was in a largely Jewish neighborhood, well, he conversed with a lot of Jews. He supported Palestine and those Jewish customers supported Israel. The slow simmer that had been heating at my dad’s passion began to boil.

There were two particular customers—a couple of young Jewish engineering students from Georgia Tech--who enjoyed coming into my dad’s store to bait him. They liked plucking at this old Georgia man who was exceedingly well read, but who didn’t even have a sixth-grade education, having left school before he was ten years old. They would come by to aggravate him and my dad would argue, but he never lost his temper. He just debated with the two assholes who I’d watch as they would team up on my old man and laugh at him.

Then: the Six Days War. The two kids—I saw them a few times and they couldn’t have been more than twenty years old—came in right after this event. They were brimming with confidence and contempt for my dad and decided to drop in on him and rub it in. I’m not sure what they said to him, but he snapped. He didn’t beat them senseless or anything, but they never came to his shop again. That was it. They’d skated a tad too close to the edge and knew well enough to back off.

But it was that moment, I truly feel, that my dad became a Jew-hater.

I’m talking full-bore hatred. As in they all need to go. That kind of hatred. He brought that stuff home.

To that point my parents never argued. Never. In fact, in my admittedly brief eight years of life I had never seen them argue. Not once. But one night after closing the bookshop my dad came in and one thing led to another and he announced that he’d arrived at the logical conclusion that all Jews were inherently evil. All of them. Without exception.

I had been listening to them debate from my bedroom where I had been dozing off for the night. But the debate had turned into an argument. Their voices had risen to yells.

It was raining outside. I recall that vividly and I could hear the rain coming down against my bedroom window as their argument became louder and louder. It was just muffled blasts of voices through the twin barriers of my door and theirs.

And then—BAM!—they were screaming at one another. I had never heard my mom yell that way, her voice filled with complete and unrelenting rage. My dad was, of course, implying that her uncles were evil. That her aunts and cousins were vile. That her father was inherently a monster. And that all of the millions of Jews remaining on Earth that Hitler had not killed were bad news for everyone else. She could not sit there and take that. I then had the impression that something smashed against the floor or against the walls. But it wasn’t like that. It was just my impression of violence between my parents who had never had a cross word in my presence.

In short order, however, I did hear the front door slam. And then silence.

I got up and went out of my bedroom into the hall and entered the dining room where the lights were on. My dad was standing there.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked.

My dad was a big man. Six-foot-two. With a huge beer gut, solid black hair. He looked down at me.

“She went out.”

“But it’s raining,” I said. I had already started crying.

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “She just went out for a walk.”

Who walks in the rain? That made no damned sense whatsoever.

“Why would she do that? Why were you yelling at each other?”

“We were arguing. That’s all. We were just arguing.”

I could think of nothing they could argue about. I knew their store was doing well and that they were making good money. We had nice things and lived in a nice house and they drove a new car and they paid cash for that stuff. I didn’t know any other kids whose parents paid cash for a car, but my parents did. I would tag along when my mom would go in to bargain for a car. It was brutal. Sometimes I would end up feeling sorry for the car salesmen, she drove such a hard bargain.

I was, of course, distressed. Here was my dad standing like an idiot in the dining room doing nothing. My mom was out in the rain walking around. It was very dark. Of course I began to cry even harder.

My dad told me not to cry and that she would come back soon. That she just went for a walk to think. I was worried sick. How could he stand there while my mother was out in the rain? I headed toward the door and he told me not to go out and insisted that she would return very soon. He told me to go back to bed, and I did. Of course I could not sleep. I lay there and waited, listening.

In a while—I don’t know how long, but it seemed like hours--I heard the front door open and I leaped out of bed and ran into the dining room. There was my mom. Soaked to the skin. Her hair—which had been white since before she was thirty—was plastered to her skull. She looked horrible.

“Mama!” I yelled, relieved that she was home. I wanted to hug her but she told me to go back to bed. Again, I did as I was told.

The rest of the night was silent. I don’t think my parents spoke to one another. If they did, it was after I fell asleep. They certainly did not argue.

It was a few days later before I found out what this was all about. My dad hated all Jews? This made no sense to me. My dad hated no one over their race or nationality. How could this be: my father who was for civil rights, human rights; against all racism? Why would he suddenly hate Jews? My mother’s father had been a Jew. This made no sense to me whatsoever and I could only conclude that my dad had gone completely bats.

I’m not sure how they dealt with this development, but my parents never argued about it again. For years it was something that was there, sometimes unspoken, but also bubbling up through a Jew-hating rant from my dad (when my mom was not around).

The years passed. We moved and my parents opened more bookstores as they went elsewhere looking for capitalist wealth. Sometimes they did well, sometimes not so good. Macon. Columbus. Athens. Chattanooga. Finally, Brunswick. It was 1975. I had recently graduated high school. While my mom was disassembling our household to move our furnishings from the mountains of Ellijay to the flatlands of Brunswick, I helped my dad transport his shelves and books from one end of the state to the other. We worked and slept in the store—the building which my parents owned--while we hammered the wood and stocked the shelves. For a while I was my dad’s closest friend and confidant. Nearing the end of his life he had to make do with a 17-year-old son to talk to and to exchange ideas. My mom was several hundred miles away packing the household for the move. His friends were all gone. The bright book buyers whom he counted upon for intellectual inspiration were elsewhere.

As far as I knew—although we never spoke about it much—he still hated Jews. I figured he must, since I’d never heard him renounce it.

One day we were talking. The store had taken shape and was a day or two away from opening. Brunswick was not the kind of town I figured as a successful location for a bookstore. All of the other towns where he’d found profits had been larger population centers. I was worried things would completely fall apart and my parents would end up broke. But through all of this worry on my part we would sit and talk when we weren’t hammering shelves together or alphabetizing books by author.

That day, for some reason, my dad had been talking about Oscar Levant. He really liked that guy. I recall interrupting him.

“Oscar Levant? You like Oscar Levant?”

My dad nodded. “Yes.”

“Wait…he’s Jewish.” Other than the name being a giveaway my mom was obsessed with informing me if a successful person was a Jew. It was her secret way of countering my father’s propaganda, I have always assumed.

My dad shrugged.

“Why would you like him if he’s a Jew?”

“The guy was funny. And smart. And witty. And talented.”

“And a Jew,” I added. “How can you like him if he was a Jew?”

“I just told you why.”

The puzzle of my dad never ceased to confuse me. “You were talking about Edward G. Robinson yesterday. You told me you liked him, too. And I know he was a Jew, also. Why do you like him”

I’ll never forget my dad smiling, then. He didn’t smile a lot. “I figure any guy that ugly who can become a major movie star has to be worth admiring.”

I laughed. “Okay.”

We talked about other things and that was that.

A couple of weeks later, though, the subject came up again. The store was open. It was producing income. We had been eating some lunch in the shop and my dad had begun to tell me of living in New York City when he had met my mom.

“Tell me something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Mama’s father was a Jew. Was he inherently evil, too?” Charles Kurtz, I knew, had been a performer as a young man. In Vaudeville at one time, I was led to understand. He was an acrobat and worked with a partner. But he wasn’t just an acrobat—he was a singing acrobat. They would work their tumbling act and these two muscle-bound Jews would end the performance by singing to the audience. After that, he’d opened a small grocery store that he’d run before dying of cancer while still a relatively young man, leaving behind a wife and seven kids. “How could an acrobat who became a grocer be evil?”

My dad's back stiffened. I’d been sitting behind him on a stool when I had said this. He was in a chair and he half turned toward me, the sandwich in his right hand. “Your mother’s father was a good man. He was very sweet. Don’t ever, ever say anything bad about your grandfather.”

My dad didn’t live a lot longer after that. He neglected his health terribly, having grown up in a time and place where you didn’t go to see a doctor unless you were about to die. And he was about to die, but he didn’t get a chance to see a doctor before it happened. Hearts tend to fail like that, sometimes.

But one day we were there again, in the store, our heads together conversing like two old pals. My dad had been telling me of a book he’d just finished about Charlie Chaplin and some of the good things Chaplin had done in his life.

“I thought you didn’t like Chaplin,” I said. Chaplin apparently would often tell people he was a Jew, even though he wasn’t. Or the public would think it for some reason or another, my dad included.

“I didn’t like him for the past eight years because I thought he was a Jew,” my dad told me. “But he wasn’t a Jew, and I wasted eight years hating him because of that.”

I just stared at him. He sat there stoically looking down the long rows of his bookstore—the last bookstore he would ever own.

“So,  you don't think Jews aren’t evil,” I said.

“No.” The silence of the store around us, the dust, the smell of old pulp. “No, I do not.”

My mom's parents. From what I understand, around this time my grandfather was a performing--apparently a singing!--acrobat. Wish I knew more about that act.

Since our last move this is the only photo of my mom that is not packed away.

Same thing here. Photos of my mom's sisters are all packed up except for these two sent to me via Internet some months ago from a wedding many decades ago (1930s?). Here, my mom's sisters Florris, and Verna.

If You Build It...

I will tear it down.

I hike to see Mother Nature. Not your stinking rock "art".

Under the Dripping Cliffs.

When I got to the park I took a look at the various trails. I have hiked most of them in the past, but not for a number of years. After taking a look I decided on the Pinnacle Trail which would take me from the park nature center to the summit of Pinnacle Mountain and back down.

Originally I had planned to hike a side trail to see a major waterfall on the mountain, but it was closed due to damage from a severe forest fire. So I had to forego that part of the hike and just hit the summit and come back down.

As I stated in my previous blog post, it has been quite some time since I have been on anything approaching a serious hike. This is because I took a job last year that put me working full time and which has kept me from hitting the trails as much as I'd like. In addition, every time I have planned a hiking or backpacking trip to coincide with a day or two off I have been faced with heavy rains. I have hiked and backpacked in rain before, but it's not my favorite thing to do (to put it mildly) so I cancelled all of those hiking trips.

Thus, my legs especially are in bad shape. Walking around the neighborhood just doesn't give me the kind of exercise to keep my muscles and tendons in good condition. So, the almost nine-mile hike I took to the top of the mountain and back to the cabin put a lot of stress on those mushy muscles and tendons. Ouch.

But it had to be done. Weather for my next day off (Monday) calls for sun and cool temperatures so I have a hike planned. Hopefully I'll be able to do more mountain hikes and keep my legs in better shape.

Here then is a brief video concentrating on the bands of low cliffs I passed under on my way to the top of the mountain. Because of all of the rainfall this year, the overhangs had become drizzling waterfalls and the route sent me under the overhangs to avoid getting soaked.

Enjoy.

This is normally just a dry wash. Saturday it was a waterfall.

One of the first extensive bands of cliffs you see on the climb.

The trail takes you under some of these rocky overhangs.

I had to edge in close to the mountain here to avoid getting soaked by this ephemeral waterfall.

You are there.

Hike!

I actually got to hike this past weekend. I say this because this has been the rainiest year in my memory. Every time I get a day or two off and plan to go hiking or backpacking a weather system moves through and hammers us with rain. I will sometimes hike in the rain, but I have my limitations. And not in the kind of downpours we have suffered this year on a regular basis.

At any rate, we went to spend two nights at Table Rock State Park near Pickens, South Carolina and I finally got in some serious hiking. However, I am so out of shape that I paid for the almost nine miles I put in on the first day. By the time I got back to the cabin my thighs and hamstrings were all cramping and I was in total agony off and on for about four hours.

But...it was worth it just to be able to hike in my southern Appalachian mountains. With any luck the weather will cooperate on my next day off and I can get in some more hiking then.

We'll see.

Just after we arrived at the park to stay in Cabin #7.

The view from the side yard of the cabin. YOW!

At Bald Knob just after hitting the summit of Pinnacle Mountain.

Table Rock and The Stool (right) from Bald Knob.

More, later.

Contrast

I like this old photo because of the contrasts I saw and heard here at this spot. This was taken from near the summit of Sams Knob, one of North Carolina's 6000-foot peaks. I took this image on the way back from an overnight backpacking trip into the Middle Prong Wilderness. The day I passed through headed to my campsite, the large empty meadow below had been packed with dozens of loud hippies walking around, banging on leather drums, blowing on flutes, and generally making a complete nuisance of themselves while camped all over the field and in the verges of the forest. None of them, I was happy to note, were on the top of the mountain where I went to take in the views. I intentionally did not take any photos of the meadow packed with humans, but later I wished that I had, just for the contrast.

On the way back to my truck (parked on the ridge along the road you can see), I returned to the top to take in the view. I can never resist the hike to the top of that mountain. Looking down I could spot no one else (it was a Monday and the multitudes who had filled the meadow on the weekend were gone back to Asheville). Best of all, the place was silent. Completely quiet. I couldn't hear a single human voice, no flutes piping away, and no damned annoying drums. Just the wind and some bird song.

At any rate, I always think of the contrast when I look at this old photo. What a huge difference a couple of days can make.

The meadow devoid of humans and noise.

Superhero Trilogy

I tend not to like most movies that I see. I keep watching them, hoping for a good one. Because now and again I will watch a movie that pleases me. Yes, I do admit that I am sometimes very critical of the form, but there's nothing wrong with that. When I do see a decent film I celebrate it.

One filmmaker whose work I generally despise is M. Night Shyamalan. His movies are--to put it mildly--mostly stupid. I was first talked into going to see his movie "The Sixth Sense". I concluded that it was insipid and predictable. It wasn't without a good performance from Bruce Willis, and that was the only thing that kept me from walking out on it.

In addition, I have seen (or tried to watch) a host of his other films. Either out of boredom or at the request of friends who actually do enjoy his movies. They were pretty much all complete failures for me, except for one movie.

"Unbreakable". That was the only movie from Shyamalan that I have seen which I quite enjoyed. Yes, it is a silly superhero movie. But he plucked out most of the goofy ideas of the superhero theme and--as much as was possible--turned it all into something almost realistic. For the first time in my life I watched a filmmaker actually create a superhuman project that really was (to quote the silly meme from the 1980s) "not just for children anymore".

He removed the idea of spandex costumes. He dispensed with secret identities, headquarters, allies, and other such fantasies. One of the things I rather did like about the film is that the superhero in the movie doesn't even realize that he is such until someone tweaks it out of him. And then it becomes an inner conflict of whether the protagonist is, in fact, superhuman, or just mentally disturbed. In addition, the powers that the hero has are almost believable. Not quite, but just enough for me to be able to enjoy the movie as something approaching logic--tremendous strength, a high level of immunity from physical damage, and a measure of telepathy that is so vague it even confuses the hero. Yeah, I could dig it.

Also, it didn't hurt that it starred Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, two actors whose work I sometimes enjoy. Both of them tend to deliver questionable performances from time to time, but now and again they will also surprise me with particularly convincing portrayals.

It was because of "Unbreakable" that I relented and tried to watch a string of his other movies which were absolutely awful and made me wonder if the writer/director is a moron (and also how anyone would continue to give him the vast amounts of cash it requires to make a major film these days). These later movies were so awful that the very mention of his name ended up filling me with a sense of disgust.

I never did see "Split", his movie about a man who is besieged by multiple personalities. Because I had already seen or tried to watch "Signs", "The Village", "The Happening", and "After Earth". I turned all of those off because they were so horrid in every way I could mention. The man was, I had to admit, a manufacturer of shit.

Except for that one movie, "Unbreakable".

Later I read that he is doing a sequel to "Unbreakable", and that his previous movie "Split" is actually part of his superhero trilogy. Therefore, I will go to see "Glass", his new movie, the final film in his trilogy. I'll also rent "Split" to see if it's his usual awful material. Maybe he'll surprise me.

Or maybe I'll have been suckered again. I'll let you know.

Bruce Willis as the unbreakable superhero, here trying to use his confusing ability of extra-sensory powers.

James McAvoy as the monstrous "Beast". (I wonder what kind of a deal they had to work with Marvel Comics/Disney for the use of that hame.)

Samuel L. Jackson as the dapper evil genius, Mr. Glass.

Brief Review of Standing Indian Campground.

Standing Indian is among our favorite National Forest campgrounds. It's a Nantahala National Forest facility located near Franklin, North Carolina. It's located near the NC/GA/SC border. Within a short drive is the Highlands area (packed with more waterfalls than you can imagine), the Blue Wall plunging down into the South Carolina Piedmont, and the spine of high mountains leading up from Georgia toward the Great Smoky Mountains.

For natural beauty the area is very hard to match. The mountain slopes are clothed in dense hardwood forests. There are many summits that crack the 5,000-foot mark. Streams and waterfalls can be found very close to the campground, and the Appalachian Trail winds its way over Standing Indian Mountain which looms over the vicinity and lends its name to the campground.

Oh. And there are normally lots and lots of bears here. The bear population in this area is about as dense as it gets.

The campground itself is very large and consists of four loops. Our favorite loop (#1) hugs the main creek and offers a number of creekside campsites. Our favorite site (#13) was unavailable so we stayed at site #16. This proved to be a bit of a mistake when a front moved through (the remnants of a Gulf hurricane) and dumped extremely heavy rain on us ceaselessly for more than 48 hours. The creek swelled beyond its banks and part of our campsite was inundated with water.

This was after the rains let up a bit and the lake that formed beside our campsite (flooding the picnic table) subsided .

Much as with our last camping trip, this one had us sidelined due to the inclement weather. My favorite pastime when I go camping is to hike to mountain summits and to hidden waterfalls. This was denied me on this trip because of the storm. Well, the next time we go we know to avoid campsite #16 if heavy rain is in the forecast.

Each loop at Standing Indian provides a bathhouse with flush toilets, sinks, and separate hot showers. The bath facilities are quite nice and there seem to be enough of them to avoid having to stand in line to use the showers. Of course we weren't there in high season, so this might not be the case when every site is occupied by a family.

The creek just across from our campsite. Its rushing waters would have lulled us to sleep if the pounding rain on the roof of our trailer hadn't done the same. The day after I took this photo the creek (Kimsey Creek?) was a good four feet deeper than in this photo and the banks were underwater.

There are no water or electric hookups at the campsites, but this isn't a problem due to the campground bath facilities. And if you have a travel trailer (as we do), then you generally don't actually need water and electric at the site. We carried our generator along and ran that when we needed, and our onboard water tank was full.

Since I couldn't hike as I wished, we ended up taking some long drives to see nearby sites that didn't require clear skies. One day we drove the Wayah Road which is lined with waterfalls and cascades. We skipped the drive to the shoulder of Standing Indian Mountain where we could have had a short hike to the summit. There is also a road to the top of Wayah Bald (another nearby mile-high peak), but we passed that one up because of the pea soup we knew would greet us at the end of the road and the top of the mountain.

An impressive cascade along Wayah Road.

Another day we took the hour-long drive over to Cataloochee Valley in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While there we saw the restored elk herds and took advantage of that to take over one hundred photos of the enormous deer, returned to the South after about two hundred years absence.

Our trip was dampened a bit by the terrible weather, but as I like to say, even in crappy weather the forest beats the city any time. We relaxed a lot, sat and observed the trees, did some reading, and generally took it easy. Which is what a vacation is for.

Yay! The elk have returned to the Smokies!

The Elk

When I was a kid back in the 70s learning how to backpack and venturing into the forests on multi-day trips I would read of the animals who used to inhabit the Great Smoky Mountains before the arrival of the European colonizers. All sorts of animals who survived the Pleistocene extinction event were still present there, many of them through the 1700s and into the 1800s.

And I used to wonder what it would be like to hike through the Smokies and encounter things like timber wolves and fishers, bison and elk, mountain lions and beaver. From time to time I would hear some people talk of reintroducing some of these creatures into the Park, but I never heard any concrete plans to do so.

However, eventually, the Park Service did create and implement an action that resulted in the reintroduction of elk. They chose Cataloochee Valley to be the initial site for this and began to bring in and acclimatize the big deer. I will never forget the first time I drove into Cataloochee hoping to spot some elk and doing exactly that, seeing a couple of big bulls at the edge of the forest and the field, standing there on the verge where I was able to snap a few grainy photos with my first digital camera back in 2005.

I still enjoy going to Cataloochee to spot the elk. It remains the best place to see them, as the core of the burgeoning herds still call it home. I speak to people who encounter them in other parts of the Park, so they are spreading out. Eventually, I hope they begin to move out in all directions as the population increases and that they will spread into other parts of the southern Appalachians--perhaps even to my home state of Georgia. That would be something to see.

In meantime, it would be nice to see the return of some of the other great animals missing from the ecological web of the southern Appalachians. The fisher has been successfully reintroduced to West Virginia. Maybe they could naturally return to the Smokies.  Perhaps mountain lions could come back to the southeast. While it would be great to see bison also come back, the facts on the ground there would make it difficult. The Park is surrounded by suburban sprawl and I doubt that local people would agree with having to deal with such a large animal parading through neighborhoods and onto streets and lawns. But it would be grand.

This guy was in charge. He had a couple of scars on his right flank, probably from past duels.

A couple of cows.

Whenever I see elk herds or whitetail deer herds in the Park, I also see flocks of wild turkey.

On the move.

The bull was concentrating on courting this particular cow. I suppose she was the one most open to mating.

The herd here was large. Dozens of elk, mainly cows.

The big bull tolerated a couple of young spike bucks in the field. Not sure why, unless he didn't look upon them as anything approaching a threat.

Sweet Story

I have said it before, but to me it always bears repeating--many animals feel compassion. In fact, I am convinced that lots of animals have the same depth and range of emotions that humans feel.

This past week Carole and I camped at Standing Indian Campground. We both really enjoy that place and were keen on returning since the last time we tried it was closed and gated due to a government shutdown. So we reserved site #16 and commenced to setting up camp.

One thing that we had purchased for our camping trips is a picnic shelter called Clam Quick-Set Shelter. We'd heard lots of good things about these contraptions and all of the positive commentary are true, as far as we're concerned.

Our Quick-Set Clam Shelter 

So, we set it up and within about half an hour we noticed that a small bird (a junco?) had come in through the door and was trapped inside. We tried to get it to fly out by having Carole hold the net door open and with me trying to coax the tiny bird out that way. But she was having none of that and insisted on trying to fly through the netting at the back of the shelter.

The little trapped bird.

When I realized that the little bird wasn't going to go out the way it came in I decided to try to catch it in my hands and carry it out. This was surprisingly easy to do since she (he?) was exhausted. I carefully cupped the little critter in my paws and carried her out.

Now, here's the cool part. As I opened my hands to free the bird I noticed that a small flock was waiting on the other side of the shelter, lingering there in the hope that their panicked companion/family member would somehow escape. As she took wing, so did the assembled flock; and they all flew off together.

Fragile cargo.

Addressing the Pipe Dream

No. We can't terraform Mars. We can't even keep our own planet livable. Why the hell do idiots think we can make a hostile environment accepting of our limitations? It's bullcrap. Total bullcrap. Mars is utterly inimical to life. It is cold almost beyond comprehension. It is magnitudes more arid than the most inhospitable desert on Earth. The soil is toxic. That's right--the freaking soil is poisonous. Mars also has only 1% of our atmospheric pressure, and it has no magnetic field to protect life from solar and cosmic radiation. The idea of creating a comfortable and inviting environment on a cold, arid, dead, poisonous, inhospitable chunk of barren rock is fantasy. Not science-fiction, but fantasy.

Hell...we can't even get there. The nations who could try are so impoverished from feeding their wealth to the privileged elite that there are no funds to even develop and initiate a system by which we could send humans to Mars.

The whole scheme is worse than a drug-induced hallucination.

Mars. Where it's so cold that CO2 freezes into a solid. Yeah...people are going to live there.

Opportunity Missed

When I was a younger man I went out of my way three times to meet Ray Bradbury. I won't belabor the obvious again, but it was Bradbury's magic touch of poetic emotion that took me on journeys to hear him speak and to share a few words with him.

But, on one of those occasions (in 1986) I was surprised to find that another guest at the writers gathering was L. Sprague deCamp. As with Bradbury's fiction, I had grown up reading the stories of deCamp. In fact, his stories probably influenced me more than those of Bradbury. He was--to my way of thinking, these days--a finer and more accomplished author than Bradbury.

But, although I had many a chance that long weekend, I never once talked with deCamp and only went to hear him speak a single time, and that one on a panel with Bradbury in attendance. And, of course, the fans showered the lovable Ray with questions and attention, and barely paid deCamp any mind whatsoever. So he had only a slice of opportunity to speak and to impart his accumulated years of authorial wisdom.

One thing that I remember about him in that panel is that he was dressed like some kind of European out to explore Africa (this was in super-hot and humid Atlanta, after all). He was wearing khaki shorts and shirt and even had (at least this is how I remember it) a pith helmet. In my now forty-year-old memories, deCamp was a small man, and his wife accompanied him everywhere. Whenever I saw him, there she was. Catherine Crook was an amazing woman and writer herself. I later found out that he only survived her by six months in the year 2000 when they both died at the age of 92.

There are many stories by Bradbury that entranced me as a kid. But I can say the same of deCamp, even if only a few of his yarns come to the fore of my aging brain. It was mainly his greater body of work that left a stamp on the gray matter, rather than many individual tales.

But two of his short works that I read as a child are foremost in my mind and I think of them often, even when I'm not writing. They are "The Gnarly Man", and "Living Fossil". The first deals with the immortality of a Neanderthal and the deceit of modern humans; and the latter with human extinction and the rise of a species of South American monkey that rules the planet. I cannot stress to people how important these stories have been to me over the years. They are both based on themes that have always fascinated me and which influence my thinking practically, scientifically, politically, and philosophically. And neither of them seems to have any overt reason for existing on any of those points, except peripherally. And therein lies the mark of a truly talented author.

I have replayed my near-encounter with deCamp for decades. Of course I wish that I had spoken to him, if only to tell him that his stories and novels meant a great deal to me. That would have been enough. But, of course, I did not do that. I was there to meet the treacly Ray Bradbury, and that is what I did.

One thing that remains stuck in my mind is that during the panel--after the fans had ignored him for long minutes--deCamp finally got a chance to get a word in and he referred to Bradbury as his "competitor". At the time I thought that was a poor choice of term and that he probably meant "colleague". These days, I know better. He meant what he said. And these days I am sad because in just straight terms of drooling, vacuous puppy love, Bradbury won that sad competition.

Of course I also realize that deCamp wasn't a contestant in that kind of race. All he wanted to do was produce fine work. Let the gawkers have their hero-worship. I'll just stand aside and admire L. Sprague deCamp.

L. Sprague deCamp and Catherine Crook.

Idiocy Beyond Description

I joined and was visiting a National Park fan site. After a short while a large percentage of the members began advocating for the privatization of our National Parks. I left and erased the board from my computer. You can't argue with that kind of stupidity. And I am just weary of even seeing such insanity.

I descend Mount LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. March, 2005 just after a heavy snowfall.

One morning on Pray Lake in Glacier National Park, August 2015.

OZARK

One thing that I do like about modern television is the diversity of material available via cable and satellite. There are all kinds of crazy things that one could only dream about in the days when a few networks controlled the medium and social norms limited what could be created.

A series I watched last year and am currently enjoying is OZARK. A project of Jason Bateman, it's pretty darned good. It stars Bateman as Marty Byrde, an accountant who got mixed up with a Mexican drug cartel and who was plunged into a seat-of-the-pants scheme so that he could save himself and his family from execution by that same cartel. Laura Linney co-stars as his wife. I generally have not liked her performances in the past, no matter the project. But someone realized that her often false and wooden portrayals would work perfectly as Marty Byrde's wife, Wendy. And they were right--it does work. It's the first time I've actually appreciated her acting.

Bateman and Linney as the Byrdes.

But the supporting cast is what stands out to me, even shining through a largely contrived plot that often pulls tricks out of its ass (such as a minor character having the key to dealing with the Kansas City mob). It's hard to pick out which supporting cast member is turning in the finest job, and I find that I cannot play favorites on that point, so I won't even try, and will instead just go down the list.

Julia Garner is an actress of whom I had never heard. She portrays a white trash youngster who is directionless until she falls into the web spun by Marty Byrde. Under his wing she discovers that she has scheming talents she didn't realize. Uglied up beyond belief, there was something about her that I found beautiful, and when I finally saw photos of her without the horrible makeup, clothing, and hair--I have to admit that I was not surprised to discover that she is, indeed, quite beautiful. I don't know where she learned to do her southern accent, but it is spot-on perfect. Stunning, actually. Because I figured her for a born southerner.

Julia Garner as Ruth Langhorne. What a great performance!

Lisa Emery portrays Darlene Snell, a kind of monster and the co-owner of a heroin-producing outfit that she runs with her husband. Again, she comes off as a truly hideous person, both physically and (often) personally. And once more I was a bit surprised to find that underneath that bare, horrid character is another beautiful woman. She nails the creature so artfully that it has risen to the surface to hide her true self.

Lisa Emery as Darlene Snell. Don't worry, she looks at everyone that way. Whether she's marked them for death, or not.

Jason Butler Harner plays the sadistic FBI agent Roy Petty who is completely and utterly obsessed with nailing Marty Byrde as the laundry man for the drug cartel profits. I had previously seen his work in two films--The Changeling (directed by Clint Eastwood), and Kill the Irishman. In the former he was, as here, an obsessed and irredeemable monster, and turned in an unappreciated job as that vile creature. His turn as agent Petty is as a gay but totally psychotic bastard who can, and does, break all of the rules to catch his target. As in The Changeling wherein he played a pedophile serial killer, he is completely easy to hate.

Jason Butler Harner as douchebag FBI agent Petty.

Peter Mullan is an actor I must have seen previously because I have watched some of the movies in which he appeared. But in none of these was he so prominent. In Ozark he is Jacob Snell, the head man in the heroin outfit that he operates from his land holding in the wilderness on his property. A gruff, bearded, good old boy with a soul-killing gaze and the temperament to slaughter anyone who gets in his way, he is the voice and face of the wolf running point at the head of the pack. 

Peter Mullan as Jacob Snell

Pretty much all of the acting in this series is far beyond average. The scripts are excellent ,with the exceptions of reliance on fantastic chance from time to time. Still, it's classic pulp fiction, so you have to expect that kind of thing. What I did not expect was a series to be so uniformly excellent. But I find that I'm often being surprised by such developments from cable and satellite offerings these days.

Oh, yeah. You can watch this on Netflix.