Sometimes, when I'm feeling useless and hopeless I need to remember that I've been places and done things. Maybe nothing great but at least I haven't simply sat and stared at walls. I've watched grass grow. I've watched other things grow too. I've grown my own herbs and tomatoes, I've grown corn and California poppies, tulips and hibiscus, lilies and peppers. Ok, I grew one ear of corn, the row didn't cross pollenate and I only had room for one row beside the house. I wouldn't call myself a gardener but I enjoyed myself.

I've always felt that I was oriented oddly, a rural-urbanite or perhaps an urban-ruralite. I've always felt pulled in opposite directions. When I've lived in the city, I longed for the country and vice versa. Maybe it's because I lived on a ranch between the ages of 18 months and four and a half. When I lived in London, I lost much of my American accent. When I lived in Australia, I lost more of it. Nevertheless, I wore an American flag on the left shoulder of my Belstaff motorcycle jacket. When I came back to the U. S. I put an Australian flag over it. I had to smirk at myself while I was doing that but I never wanted to forget that I'd been there for six years.

As a teen, I used to hike the Sierra Nevada with my grandfather. For days. We called it going back packing. We would walk from Lake Utica near Hwy. 49 down to Hwy. 108 then hitchhike down to the Family cabin in Pinecrest. Usually it was rented out so we'd camp in the public campground. I spent a good part of a lot of summers at Pinecrest. I've also hiked the Grand Canyon from the north rim to the south rim. I believe I've mentioned that here in an earlier post.

Camping was always a big part of my life. My first camping trip, again with my grandfather, happened when I was eleven. Somehow, he managed to convince the ranger in Berkeley's Tilden Park to let him camp in a eucalyptus grove that was basically only accessible by foot. It was along the road to a Nike missile base in the park which was closed to the public. If I remember rightly, it was a three mile walk from the ranger station to the campsite. Or maybe it just seemed three miles to my eleven year old legs. I never actually measured it. Over the years, as I used and visited that campsite, the walk just kept seeming to get shorter.

I've camped in the Australian outback. "Out the back of Bourke" is an expression that means in the middle of nowhere. I had to go to Bourke and "out the back." A friend of mine, Bill, and I drove out there for a long weekend jaunt. We had a good map and found reasonably good roads. at one point we found a spot, pulled off the road and just camped. No preparations at all, we just threw our sleeping bags on the ground and slept. The next day we continued up the road to a spot on the map that was marked "bore." I guess it was an artesian bore as what we found was a pipe maybe eight feet tall that curved around like a cane. On one side of the pipe was a faucet. When we turned it on, water gushed out. Except for a very small settlement we came to that day, we didn't see another person or vehicle along the fifty or sixty miles we covered "out the back of Bourke." At one point, the pasture land we were driving through turned into desert with very red sandy soil. I'd hear of the "red desert" but had no idea how red it was until I saw it for myself. Even then, I understood that this was only the fringe of desert that stretched three thousand miles across the continent. At one point we came to a fork in the road with a tree in the middle. A dead tree with gnarled branches reaching arthritically to the sky as if begging for rain. We were transfixed by the desolation. The sheer emptiness is devastating. I've experienced what I would call desert hypnosis quite a few times but that was the first. We kept saying that we had to go but kept finding reasons not to get started. I suspect that was the day I first fell in love with deserts.

I've done a lot of camping in my life. When I worked the Southern California Renaissance Faire there was Pig's Gulch, the campground for all the actors. I stayed there for several years or otherwise pitched a tent in various places around the fair site but that wasn't camping, that was sleeping in tents. I've stayed in a lot of public campgrounds where that was more like camping with campfires to cook on and so forth. I used to take my daughter camping when she was small. We would camp out at least one night over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then go for a longer trip into the desert during Christmas vacation. The nights were cold but the days were usually up into the eighties. It took more than a few trips for her to learn that it was smarter for her to stay in her sleeping bag where it was warm until I could get a fire going in the morning. "I know you're cold but I can't hug you and build a fire and make coffee at the same time."

My favorite camping was outside of National Forests and Parks, mostly on BLM land where the NPS restrictions didn't apply. Pull my jeep off the road, set up my tent, drag some stones together for a fire ring, find a dead shrub or two, some wood from a fallen joshua tree and build a fire. I always carried a camp stove of some sort, usually a backpacking sized one but I preferred to cook over the coals of a camp fire. Even with the jeep and a huge carrying capacity, it took me years to make the transition from "light" camping to "heavy" camping where I could carry a two burner Coleman stove, a Coleman lantern, a cast iron dutch oven and a comfy six man tent. The Coleman stove was perfect for making my morning espresso while I built the morning fire. Among other things, I used to bake soda bread in the dutch oven. The other thing about camping in the Bureau of Land Management wilderness is the lack of amenities. There are no toilets, and usually no water. You have to bring enough water for your needs and a shovel or trowel for digging toilet holes. Just outside of Joshua Tree National Forest, I was camping with a couple friends. When I was setting up my tent, I saw a spider come crawling out and thought that was trouble. next morning, there was a small bump on my foot with a red ring around it. Apparently it was a brown recluse and its bite wound up taking eleven weeks and a visit to the emergency room to heal.

One of my favorite places to camp was in Saline Valley. There are several hot springs there. There are privies there, just outhouses over holes in the ground with a coffee can filled with ashes by the door.  Over the years, regular visitors brought concrete,building supplies and other useful things to "improve" the springs and make them more amenable. The effect is similar to Aboriginal camps which were often set up like houses but without walls or roofs. The lower spring is very popular in the winter season while the upper spring is far less populous. In the summer, the lower spring is virtually uninhabited with the exception of Rich who lived there year round. The BLM limited a person's stay on BLM land to six months. For some reason they made an exception for Rich, eventually they made him the caretaker of the hot springs. Rich was quite a guy. Over the years I used to go to Saline Valley, he never forgot me and even remembered my name. One summer, I was in the spring with several other campers when there was a little rain shower. A wind blew up from the valley floor bringing a huge cloud of sand with it. we all ducked as low as we could in the water with our faces away from the wind. When it was over, Rich was chuckling but didn't say anything. About ten minutes later the wind reversed bringing all that sand back down toward the valley. That's when Rich told us why he'd chuckled.

I recently looked at a map of Death Valley which is now called a National Park and seems to have expanded to include Saline Valley. I guess that's a good idea, for the preservation of the area but I also mourn the loss of the freedom of the wilderness in the same way it makes me sad that if you want to hike in the National Forests in the Sierra Nevada you have to make a reservation and book in advance with the nearest ranger station.

I had intended to write about other things today but I got side tracked. That's why these are musings. Somewhere I have a to-do list of topics I plan to write about but somehow I can't seem to get to them. I guess they seem kind of like school assignments and I was ever a procrastinator when it came to writing papers for school. I have no idea if anyone reads these things or what they think about them. I kind of wish folks would leave a comment even if they think this is all drivel.

Synchronicity . . .

This morning, I found a link to this on FaceBook: The oldest footprints found in Europe. I'm not sure it supports or refutes my last post but it certainly is interesting. Ultimately it points out that we just don't know enough about how we came to be and, sadly, that we may never.

CARRY OKIE

This morning, before coffee, I did a New York Crossword by Joe Krozel, a tabula rasa to me. After doing crosswords for years and years, I still don't pay a whole lot of attention to the constructors, but I'm learning. I know the names and characteristics of a few but this guy is totally unfamiliar to me. But I thought this puzzle was really clever, its theme was punny phrases that sounded like American pronunciations of Japanese words that are familiar to Americans. The solutions were:
WASSOBY-wasabi
How thankful a Greek shipping magnate was when his car broke down: ARIGOTTOW-arigato
A really puzzling imaginary take-over: PSEUDOCOUP-Sudoku
How does one give a dust bowl migrant a ride? CARRYOKIE-Karaoke
I thought the last clue/solution was brilliant. I'll bet it's totally serendipitous though. I doubt the constructor is familiar with this usage as I wasn't when I first encountered it.

Twenty years ago, among other courses, I took a course in introductory linguistics. I don't think that qualifies me for much but I do have a little insight. The hardest lesson to accept and adapt to was that linguistics is descriptive and that the best lexicons are descriptive too. Even the best grammar texts are descriptive. Approaches to language that are prescriptive are moribund. They don't accept the facts about the evolution that has made English what it is and how it grows. Indeed, that is true of every language on our planet.

So, when I first came to Georgia, Atlanta, not Tblisi, I stayed with a family who were apparently not of urban origin. Sad fact: most likely due to television and migration, the southern accent is vanishing and this is most apparent in urban areas of the south where the "southern accent" is rarely heard. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal declared Clarice's accent "pure West Virginia." I was in West Virginia over a year before I heard anything that approached that and I was in a town of 40,000 people. The matriarch of this Georgian family had some very odd linguistic quirks, for example, she would refer to the various pieces of matching furniture for a particular room as a bedroom suit or a living room suit rather than as a suite.

She had another quirk which sticks in my mind too. She might say something to her son something like, "I need to go shopping, will you carry me to the mall?" Or she might say, "I need to mail this letter, will you carry it to the post office?" This quirk of usage bothered me for the longest time but I eventually realized the possible source. Prior to the end of the last decade of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century, vehicles were pulled by horses, dogs, oxen, etc which were driven. Anything that was conveyed in those vehicles was carried. To someone in 1910, saying, "Drive me to the store," would probably mean something more like "Hitch me to your wagon and crack your whip behind me." So, CARRYOKIE seemed, in retrospect, very apt. Ain't it fun how language changes. It's gr8. Dunno bout U but 2 me, it sux. Still, I'm a realist and if this is the way we go, so be it. I'm not in charge and neither are U.

In the comments on the Rex Parker does the New York Ties Crossword Puzzle blog, it was pointed out that some words in Japanese were adopted from the Portuguese, to whit, arigato and tempura. I won't discuss the latter but the former bears some discussion. I looked up Japanese words that came for Portuguese in Wikipedia and found that while obirgado, and arigato, are similar, there may be written usages of that word or similar words with the same meaning ultimately that vastly predate the contact with Portuguese. Ok, big deal. But that lead to a discussion of "false cognates," words that sound similar from different languages but share a similar meaning. That lead me to a discussion of "false friends," words from different languages that sound similar but have different or even opposing meanings. All easily understood.

Somehow, my attention was attracted by a link to Nostratic Language. A notion of some kind of proto-language that predates Indo-European and a bunch of other language families. Reading in that Wiki entry lead me to an article on the Natufian culture. Those folks lived in the Fertile Crescent, the Middle East to us, 15,000 years later. They apparently had a sedentary life style, meaning they didn't move around as much as other hunter-gatherers because they had what they needed at hand all year round. All the vegetable and animal foods on which to survive. The California aborigines had that too and given no major climactic changes, they would never have developed agriculture. The Natufians, however, had major climactic changes and were the big jumpers from foraging to agriculture. They apparently utilized wild grains until droughts made that difficult, so they figured out how to cultivate the grains on which they'd become dependent.

What makes us "US"? We are still an agrarian economy more than ten thousand years later. Without farming, we won't survive. We think we've progressed to something, but have we? We still need seeds, dirt and rain to eat. Atomic bombs won't feed us. Electric power won't fed us. Astronauts to the moon still needed agricultural products to survive their journey.

But what made "US"? Somewhere in the long ago, Cro Magnon arose. Wide-spread flukes or a localized phenomenon? Whatever, they got together and produced more like them. But what did they inherit? Apparently some very important stuff. To start with, because it was imperative to survival, they inherited years and years and years of botanical knowledge. Their parents were probably hunters too and their prey was often vastly bigger than any one of them. Hunting big animals required cooperation. Cooperation required communication and conceptualization.

"Let's go get a mastodon for lunch!"

That needs a plan and an explanation. Thinking and language. Adam and Eve Sapiens and all their brothers and sisters inherited at least that. And they spread their seed and knowledge, their ability to plan and explain. I think it's cute to imagine an Adam and Eve Sapiens setting off from their old fashioned families to create the new order of humanity but I don't believe that's even possible. I don't think anyone has come up with a scenario that reasonably explains that or gives a locus for the origin.  But something occurred and "modern man" began somewhere and somehow spread his seed to create our genus and spread his ability to communicate to create what we know as language.

Sticking with the notion of Adam and Eve, it seems likely that there is a proto-language, one set of utterances that are at the very basis of human language. Not that Adam and Eve created them, they got them from their parents in some sort of basic form but they spread them to neighbors and the folks they visited on their pilgrimage to dominate the world. One set of utterances spread from mind to mind, mouth to mouth in the very beginning of human history. Ok, so maybe not just one but one dominated in the end. It seems, lately, that Homo Sapiens managed to mate with Homo Neanderthalensis and the discovery of Neanderthhal hyoid bones indicates they may have had language too. So there may have been two proto-languages but Sapiens seems to have largely blotted out Neanderthal culture.

This is all wild speculation from someone who is not a scholar on any of these subjects, possibly proving that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Still, and I doubt it could possibly be proved, it fascinates me to think that there was one original set of utterances that spread to become the first language heard on this planet.

I was once told by a linguistics professor that should a "martian" come to this planet to study our languages, that alien would conclude that we all speak variations of a single language. If that were true, it only serves to point out that we all share one thing, a common heritage.