Thoughts from an early autumn evening

What a beautiful, soft, early autumn evening.  It is cloudy and dead calm.  The brighter parts of the sky have faded with the setting sun and there are some darker areas that make you think that it just might rain.  A few leaves are just beginning to change into that beautiful dull metallic color between the summer green and the autumn reds and yellows.  A few crickets and other unnamed insects start to call.  Soon there are many.  Then the evening is interrupted.  First by the sound of a helicopter from the Akron-Canton Air National Guard base flying over and circling town a few miles west of here for what seems like forever.  Then there is the traffic out on the state highway, muffled but always present.  Then the occasional car down our township road and the uncommon sound of an Amish buggy on our road.  Then an airplane flying over, preparing to land at the county airport.  Then a jet preparing to land at Akron-Canton or perhaps at Cleveland.  Now the sound of distant thunder. 

Finally it is quiet again.  The insects take over and return me again to this beautiful, soft, early autumn evening…

Ubuntu

I have installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux on our new computer to dual boot as an alternative to Windows Vista.  Vista is story that will not appear on this blog…I’m trying to keep things positive here.

Ubuntu works.  It installed so easily.  It installed a host of standard applications including an Office suite, graphics manipulation software, photo manager, email and web browser.  It found my printer and network.  It has some problems associated with the dialup internet connection that I will try to learn how to overcome…I think there will be a very long steep learning curve for someone with twenty five years experience with MS-DOS and Windows.  At least there is a path to overcome the problems.  But the subject of this post is not the software but the idea…Ubuntu.

Ubuntu.  Ubuntu is a concept from South Africa associated with humanity towards others, with a sharing that connects all of humanity.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu is quoted in The Official Ubuntu Book by B. Mako Hill, J. Bacon, et.al. Second Edition, (Prentice Hall) 2007, p.10:

“A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

Ubuntu, the software, is one of the fastest growing operating systems in the world with millions of users adopting it since its introduction in 2004.  Ubuntu, the concept, is being distributed with it.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if each of the millions of users would adopt the concept too?

Respect.  Helpfulness.  Sharing.  Community.  Caring.  Trust.  Unselfishness.  Ubuntu.

Open Windows — Iowa

When we visited my wife’s sister in Iowa last week, we slept with the windows open as is our custom.  The gentle night breeze was cool and refreshing.  But the environment there is different.  The land is much flatter and, although there are a few trees around, there are no wooded areas nearby.  And a new sound was present in the nighttime soundscape…the sound of distant freight trains. 

The first evening we were there, I heard it just after I went to bed…not so loud as to be annoying but a very neat sound that is foreign to us back on our farm.  You really don’t notice the sounds of the engines or the wheels until the whistle blows at the crossing a couple of miles north of the house…that long, forlorn sound of the whistle.  Then the low, deep, Doppler shifted sounds of the engines as they pass, a little higher pitch approaching, a little lower as they pull away.  Finally, the clickety, clack of the wheels on the track, constant for a while but then fading away into the Iowa night…

Water Rights (and wrongs)

The dry and dusty desert of the Great Basin belies the existence of water under it.  That water supports the life that clings to the surface.  Some of the plants send down deep tap roots while others get by on what dampness reaches the surface; men drill wells for their plants, their animals, and for themselves.  There is enough.

Economic interests in Las Vegas want the rights to the Great Basin water to support more lavish development.  They will never have enough.

Hospitality

US Rt 50 is called “The Loneliest Road” where it runs through the high desert country in Nevada.  The road twists and climbs through the mountain ranges and runs straight and true for twenty-five miles or more across the basins.  The land is stark and isolated. 

On the Nevada/Utah state line a little oasis called the Border Inn provides for the needs of travelers on “The Loneliest Road”…twenty-nine simple rooms, a small café serving good simple food, 24 hour fuel, an ATM, an RV park, and alcohol and gambling if you need those.  It is located midway across the Snake Valley basin.

The owner overheard my wife and me talking about the vegetation we had seen along the road, came over to our table, and talked to us for ten minutes about the plants in the desert.  Then she told us how beautiful the sunsets were in the valley and that we should walk down the road behind the Inn that evening.  So we did…she was right, it was beautiful.  The next morning her son took our order and served us breakfast. 

These quiet people gave us the simple gift of hospitality in an otherwise inhospitable land.  Just as they do to others passing along “The Loneliest Road”.

Sacred Places

It is easy to understand why the Western Native People hold places on the landscape to be sacred.  We do our best to isolate ourselves from the land, with our highways and 75 mile per hour speed limits, our cities, our homes.  They lived on the land, were part of it and maybe understood it at a different level than we do.

There are special places on this earth…

Basin and Range

Out here the land and the sky dominate everything, at least until the weather takes over.  I love this “middle land” between the populated coasts…the part of the country most people are content to fly over.  And of the “middle land”, the part between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada intrigues me most.  This is the basin and range province of the intermountain west.

For hundreds of miles you face a stark alternating landscape of mountain ranges and desert basins.  The basins are covered with greasewood as far as the eye can see…always the same but subtly different from one to the next.  And always terminated to the east and west by mountain ranges.  Every so often there is a little area of productive ranching…some cattle, some wheat, some hay, maybe potatoes.

Always beautiful…

Open Windows

We sleep with our windows open.  As soon as the temperature rises above 50 degrees overnight in the spring, we open the windows.  We look forward to hearing the night sounds…birds, bugs, frogs, and the occasional squabbling raccoons.  We hear it if it starts to rain.  We hear the sound of distant thunder.  We feel the cool night breeze waft over us…usually.

A couple of weeks ago the weather was so hot and humid that we closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning.  But we couldn’t stand to be cooped up.  At two thirty in the morning I heard my wife open the window.  Soon after that we both heard a screech owl call.

We have barred owls on our farm.  We hear them often, including the hissing sound the young ones make in the spring after they leave the nest to keep track of each other.  Every now and then we will hear a Great Horned owl far off in the distance, perhaps once a year, usually in winter.  But we rarely hear screech owls at our place.  I only remember hearing them two or three times in the seventeen years we have been here.  We were so glad we opened the window that night, so we could hear that little owl.

Black Gold

Oil causes so many problems in this world.  Pollution and contaminated land and water.  Wars and constant turmoil in the Middle East.  Refinery explosions and global warming. 

Having said that, oil production is pretty interesting.  They are drilling a shallow well just west of the township road that we walk on each evening.  The rig is sitting down in a little swale in the middle of a corn field.  They moved it in Monday and started to drill Tuesday.  The drilling was done by Friday evening.  Each layer of sandstone or limestone is named and known to oil people.  The Clinton sand that holds the pay for this new well is down about a half mile.  It always intrigues me to think about that rig, sitting up on the surface with a half mile of drill string below it…the rig is so small compared to the length of that pipe.  In our area almost any well you drill into the Clinton will produce some oil so if it wanders off a little, no harm is done.  Some of the deeper formations are more difficult with the oil being localized in pockets.  They drilled into the Rose Run formation fifteen years ago on our farm and hit pay at about 6000 feet.  It takes a lot of skill to hit that little pocket of ancient hydrocarbon that is over a mile down through rock of varying hardness and with all manner of cracks and holes in it.  It is always exciting for me to see a rig at dusk, sitting out on a hill or in a valley, all lit up and drilling…the noise, the smoke, the heavy equipment, the smell of diesel fuel and exhaust, the around the clock activity… 

Even in spite of all of the problems that will flow out of that pipe later.

Late Summer Evening

The sound of lids sealing on newly canned tomatoes above the din of katydids and crickets.  The sealed assurance of warm chili soup on cold winter days.