Midlife Meditation

If I wanted to be cynical, I'd say it was the washout that made the difference. I've been camping all my life. Summer vacations for my family always meant finding a campground and locating there for a week or two. As a Scout, the frequency went up to monthly campouts whenever weather permitted. In Oregon, weather permitting meant anything but snow--and as rare as snow is in the Willamette Valley, we camped a lot. At the end of every Scout campout, we rolled up our sleeping bags and tents, loaded them in whatever vehicles we'd come in, then policed the area. This meant criss-crossing our campsite, search-and-rescue style, eyes to the ground, picking up every bit of litter we saw, whether or not it came from one of us. This could be a nasty activity, especially in early 1970s Idaho, where the national forest campgrounds we favored were often carpeted with cigarette butts. I'd gather handfuls of the loathsome things, as well as pull tabs from beer cans and occasional...

  Lo, how the mighty has fallen. My uninterrupted streak of New York Times online crossword completions had been in the top ten for close to a year when we left for Washington nine days ago. In fact, I completed the Sunday puzzle in the car (relax, Amy was driving) as we left I-5 and headed northwest to the Olympic Peninsula. That gave me, I believe, 988 consecutive puzzles. I was still solidly in seventh place. I had high hopes of maintaining my streak as we hiked: when I made reservations at the Elk Meadows B&B, Joy Baisch assured me AT&T had coverage at least in the high places throughout the national park, and we were planning to hike up to passes on both Monday and Tuesday. That might put me a few hours behind my usual completion time--I almost always submit puzzles within a couple of hours of their release, at 7 p.m. Pacific time the night before they appear in the Times--but I'd stay on track, and Wednesday we'd be out of the park, enjoying an early dinner...

Here's the most spectacular thing I saw in the Olympic National Park last week:    "What?" you say, "One of those ubiquitous logs that have been cut away from blocking the trail, and the sawdust left by the chainsaw? You call that spectacular?" Look more closely (and I apologize for the blurriness of this, but it's on full zoom, and the light's not very good under the canopy): The blob in the middle of this picture is a carpenter ant with a tiny load of sawdust in its mandibles. Here's what makes this spectacular: The intricate pattern in the log was made by these ants. That means the heap of sawdust, which is at least two feet deep, was made by these ants, too. The color of the log's face shows that it's not a recent cut; it was probably made at least a year or two ago. We stopped to take a closer look because the design was so interesting that we thought it might be of human origin, and we wondered what it meant. Then we r...

Brace yourselves for another descent into the world of Star Trek, specifically, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. (And if you're wondering what this has to do with Our Olympian Adventure and the huge photograph above, please be patient. I promise it'll all come together nicely in the end.) Among all the hit-and-miss chapters in the franchise, V stands out for a lot of reasons: the special effects (especially the rear-projection viewscreens) are laughably inept; the dialogue is overtly jokey; the plot is yet another retread of an original series episode, and not even one of the better ones; first- (and only-) time director William Shatner gives himself entirely too many actions scenes that come off at times like self-parodies--and you begin to get the picture. For all that, there is a philosophical center to this campy B-movie that has left a deeper mark on me than many an Oscar winner. The story is simple: Spock's long-lost half-brother Sybok, a Vulcan heretic who ha...

I grew up a short drive from God's country, and I never knew it. I've had more moves in my 52 years than I can count. Last night at ComedySportz, I was doing a quick calculation in my head about how many addresses I've had because I need a new trivia item for the pre-show slides (due to AT&T's lack of coverage in the Olympic wilderness, my New York Times daily crossword streak ended Monday at 987), and I came up with 30. That's just addresses, by the way: it doesn't include how many times I moved everything I had from one location to another while keeping the same post office box. By the time I entered college, I'd lived in seven houses and, very briefly, one apartment, located in five different states. Family vacations took me to and through some of the most spectacular scenery in the United States and Canada. We drove through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, up the coast of Nova Scotia, through the Badlands of the Dakotas, the Grand Tetons of ...

  Their names are Joe and Joy Baisch, and together they own and operate the Elk Meadows Bed and Breakfast in Brinnon, Washington. Like many B&B hosts I have met over the years, both Joy and Joe are gregarious and eager to please, offering advice, sharing wisdom, doing all they can to make their guests' stay as comfortable and rewarding as they can.   Amy and I stayed at Elk Meadows at the beginning and end of our latest outdoor adventure, a three-night backpacking trip into the Olympic National Park. Elk Meadows is located on Dosewallips Road, which follows the Dosewallips River up into the Olympic National Forest, ending abruptly five and a half miles from the head of the Dosewallips Trail due to a ten-year-old washout. The graveled hillside in the picture above used to be the road.   The night before our adventure, we spread our trail map on the dining room table at Elk Meadows. Joe looked it over, speculating with us about what we might accom...