A Horse Thief Among Us

I have been violated.  And to make matters worse the crime occurred at my beloved mountain retreat.  A place where neighbors are supposed to look out for one another. Unlike the city where life is dog eat dog and your tenement mates are more likely to screw, than succor you.  In fact the locals here in the Catskills pride themselves on their neighborliness and esprit de corps.  And  for the most part I have found this to be true.  Except for my next door neighbor.  Allegedly.  For I have no proof.  Except for Tammy and my other neighbors who agree with my conclusion.  Granted, the alleged perpetrator is renting the house next door so he may not feel the same camaraderie as the rest of us.  He is the second renter to inhabit that house and the first one was very disorderly as well. So one may draw their own conclusions based on this small sampling size.  But I have come to the conclusion that rural America cannot lay claim to a virtue of harmonious living that they aver is not found among city dwellers.  People are people and there are good and bad found throughout all population densities.

It was a crime of opportunity.  A crime, I am convinced, that the culprit felt was victimless.  We were not around, and besides, we are just some rich yuppies with a second home in the mountains who won't know the difference.  Of course this is all speculation but the only way to cleanse oneself after such a trespass is to try and understand the mind of the miscreant.  What was taken from me is not some bauble I purchased at a craft fair.  A knickknack sitting on my front porch for the amusement of visitors to my cabin.  A stolen trinket would not have been so hellacious.  I would have assumed (for that is what I am doing) it was some crazy kids sowing their wild oats.  That I can forgive.  No, this stolen property is something I expended sweat and a great deal of energy on.  A utilitarian necessity of life in a mountain cabin.  Something that one hundred years ago could have meant the difference between life and death during a long, cold mountain winter.

Here is a photo of the crime scene.  When I left the cabin three weeks ago the rack was full.  It is now two- thirds empty:

That is correct.  I am totally bent out of shape because firewood was stolen from me.  A sizable amount of firewood. That I quartered and stacked.  And the only way this amount could have been stolen by a "visitor" to Woodland Valley is if they backed their car into my driveway and hauled the wood up the stairs.  Very doubtful.  Especially since the campground at the end of the road is closed and who else would have taken it?  My neighbor, who rents, that's who.  Casually strolled over during the week when we were not there and helped himself.  How can I be so sure?  My other neighbor (who came to the same conclusion as Tammy and I) noted smoke coming from his chimney during two unexpected evening frosts and he has NO wood pile whatsoever.  Huh.

In all fairness, this is pure conjecture and I have not yet decided how I will confront my neighbor.  But rather than solely stew in a blog post I must be eyeball to eyeball with him when I broach the subject of my missing wood.  In the meantime, Tammy has placed the following sign on the wood rack:

By way of explanation, the actual owner of the house lives in Finland. And the part about the chimney blowing up is because my other neighbor suggested I drill a hole in some of the wood and put black powder in it.  That way the thief will blow up his chimney.  An amusing, but ultimately unsatisfactory conclusion to this affair.  Stay tuned.

A Highpointer's Journey

Click here to view this photo book larger

Photo books are the perfect gift for any occasion.

Sorry about the plug for Shutterfly (though they do a nice job and make it easy)  but Tammy wanted to embed the journal we had made to share with everyone.

Apex to Zenith

Below is the essay I submitted to the "Apex to Zenith", the official newsletter of the Highpointers.org club.  They are the official record keepers of this pursuit.  I recently learned that there is no official record for a dentist having completed all 50 state highpoints (professions are tracked for the "50 state" completers) so I am holding out hope that I may be the first dentist to achieve 48 contiguous state highpoints.  I may never know but I will keep hope alive.  I am officially the 407th known person to complete the 48 states.  200 of those (none of whom are dentists) have also completed all 50 states so that rules out half my competition.  If you, or anyone you know, is aware of a highpointing dentist let me know.
Here is the essay:

48 Completion Statement of Richard N. Feuer

As the 407th known Highpointer to touch the highest geographic point of all 48 of the contiguous United States, I would like to thank the officers and volunteers of the Highpointers.org who make it officially possible for me to brag about the feat.

There have been a number of records claimed by various Highpointers on their way to achieving this goal. For example; the first person, the oldest person.  The youngest person and the first female person.  Someone prides himself on having accomplished the feat in a record amount of time (something like 55 days) and another is proud to say he did them all in winter.  I seem to remember that one nimble person has done a handstand at the top of each State and another is currently engaged in bringing a slinky to each summit.  One proud climber has claimed the record that he made it to the highest point of all the mountains and azimuths of the 48 states on his first attempt at each one.  I say azimuth in recognition of Delaware’s so called Ebright’s Azimuth.  This tiny state not only had the good sense to be the first to ratify the U.S. constitution (at a time when there would only be 13 highpoints)  but to also have the smarts to understand what a state highpoint really is; a coordinate within randomly placed geographic borders.

This brings me to the curious case of Connecticut’s highpoint.  It really isn’t anything at all except a waypoint on a hiking trail.  It lies along the path to a summit which is actually in Massachusetts.  Without a GPS, you wouldn’t even know that you have arrived at the highest point in CT, incongruously named Mount Frizell, because it isn’t higher than anything around it.  The same can be said of Nevada’s Boundary Peak.  While you and your climbing buddies are high fiving each other for making it to the highest rock pile in Nevada (in a state known for, well, being a rock pile), you are staring at a higher mountaintop only ½ mile away in California.  And it is not Mount Whitney.

There is a loosely guarded secret among Highpointer’s that, I must admit, allowed me a minor sigh of relief when I first became aware of it.  It may actually be the second highest peak in many of the western states that is harder to climb and requires more technical know-how to summit:  Washington, Wyoming, Oregon, California, Colorado and Montana.  All have a high point that one can gain via the so called “dog route” (Though Montana is more of a mountain goat route).   A pejorative term experienced mountaineers use to denigrate any route not technical enough to challenge their skills.  But as all of us know, our avocation is not strictly about the physical suffering of being cold, wet, tired, and out of breath.  It is about the mental process of perseverance and persistence.  Along the way I have compiled a list of a few of my own personal benchmarks:

1. Mountains attempted twice to summit: 3; due to weather, injury, and the guide from Hell (true story).
2. Mountains attempted thrice to summit: 1 (weather and injury)
3. Number of summits attempted by my wife:  46 (44 achieved)
4. Number of times I abandoned my wife at base camp:  2
5. Number of highpoints on which we almost got divorced: 2
6. Number of highpoints at night: 1
7. Number of speeding tickets while pursuing highpoints:  2
8. Number of injuries: 2 (ice axe mishap and twisted ankle)
9. Most number of highpoints in a 24 hour period: 3
10. Number of summits achieved before I became a highpointer: 2
11. Number of years to summit all 48:  16
12. Number of highpoints on which I stood near Don Holmes: 1 (at the NJ convention)
13. Reason for probably never attempting Mt McKinley:  see #5 above
14. Number of times I said, “This isn’t worth it”: countless
15. Total cost to summit 48 state highpoints:  priceless

Every highpointer, I am sure, has compiled a list of his or her own personal statistics.  The sport is really more of an inner journey than external travelogue.  There is no reason to go to some of the highpoints except to place a checkmark in a book.  White Butte N.D. comes to mind.  Many highpoints are very remotely located but at least you can make a fun road trip out of hitting maybe 5 or 6 in a week while taking in the local sights. Or perhaps you may enjoy some homemade hush puppies served by friendly blonde waitresses near Cheaha Mountain in Alabama.  Not so for White Butte.  It is a senseless trip all onto itself.  Although due to the long drive and then the gale force winds and tornado warning we encountered once there, North Dakota will be remembered as one of our more challenging trips.

White Butte, ND

White Butte, ND

But there are few things of which I am more proud.  While there is a considerable degree of physical ability needed to achieve this goal, completing the 48 states is a battle fought mostly in the mind.  Granted, a reasonable level of fitness is needed, but the challenge is ultimately more psychological than physiological and therefore more emotionally satisfying. So when they come to cart me away to the nursing home I will be forced to bring only a few precious possessions with me.  One of them will be my highpoint photo journal. 

Mini Bar Madness

The hotel mini bar has come out of the closet and it is gunning for your wallet in a way that would make Gordon Gekko blush.  No one even bats an eyelash anymore at the price tag on the can of cashews found in the cabinet under the flat screen.  Nor the fact that a can of Diet Coke found in the fridge in your room costs more than a six-pack found at your local Beer Barn.  But at least the tempting bags of M&M’s were hidden from view and you could ignore them.  That is until you started hearing their tiny little voices calling out to you while you lay awake at midnight hankering for a snack.  And the hotel counted on that little voice to get you to buy the $5.00 jar of Gummi Bears.

Well, the hotel is no longer taking any chances on keeping the fancifully priced noshes under wraps and in the credenza.  In the early days of the in-room offerings I am certain the management counted on the more gullible of us thinking these snacks were a gift.   A freebie like shampoo and the little shoe shine cloth.  And once they were eaten, ignorance was no excuse to have the charge cancelled.  This worked until most people caught on and they didn't dare even open the mini bar door lest their will power be tested to the max.  Sales of $6.00 Cheez-Its plummeted.  What to do.  What to do.

Taking its cue from the Department of Corrections the JW Marriott Hotel Chain has come up with a snack tracking device not unlike the infamous in home arrest ankle bracelet.  That's right.  A uniformed front desk clerk, one building wing away and four floors down, knows if you even pick up the can of Peanut M&M's to read the calorie count.  And if you aren't a fast reader, your room will be billed within 30 seconds if you don't put it back on the tracking device.  To amplify the entrapment, the snacks are in plain view on top of the dresser, next to the ice bucket, beside the TV.  You can't even hide them in a drawer.  So you are forced to stare at the Gummi Bears, cashews, M&M's, Snickers Bites, and bottles of Fiji Water for as long as you stay in the room.  I am not making this up.  I took a photo of the contraption and I have posted it here for your examination.   I also posted a copy of the bill, with which we were penalized for daring to hide the offensively over priced candy in a drawer.  As soon as we moved the stuff, the sensor ratted us out. 

The story gets more preposterous.  There was no sign explaining the fact that if you even so much as nudge the stuff, you WILL BE CHARGED.  No sign.  None.  Nada. In hindsight I guess I should have been suspicious of an electrical wire and phone cord coming out of a candy tray.  Even so, I probably would have assumed it was some kind of 1970's K-Tel  iced tea pouring/nut dispensing/automatic bottle opening/peanut shelling/service tray.

And no we did not have to pay the charges since the maid found the candy.... in the drawer next to the Gideon Bible.  But if you ever see a wire coming from the little tube of hand cream I wouldn't even open it up for a whiff if I were you.

In the Hall of Knowledge

There is a common misconception afoot in America that we, Homo sapiens, are descended from the apes.  We are not.  It is actually much worse than that.  We are, in fact, descended from the rats.  Any tenth grade biology student, and now me, could tell you that, while we share a common ancestor with the apes, we are not directly descended from the simian family.  We are, however, directly descended from the rat ancestor known as Megazostrodon, which was the first prehistoric mammal.  Our great civilization basically started out as a group of dinosaur egg stealing, bark chewing, nocturnal rodents.  I am sorry if this offends you.  But science is science, unless of course you are running for president of the United States on the Republican ticket.  In that case science is innuendo.  An inconvenience that gets in the way of our egos.

But the story gets worse.  It is even more shocking than you might imagine.  I learned of our primordial ancestor in the Hall of Mammals at the Smithsonian Institute Museum of Natural History.  In Washington DC.  And it didn’t cost me a dime!  (At the time of admission anyway).  That’s right.  Public money, aka your  tax dollars, paid for this bit of conjectural information.  It is not quite clear to me where the Smithsonian gets its endowment, but I smell a rat, pardon the pun.  For five hours I wandered around the halls of this great repository of American natural history and I never paid an admission price, nor was I solicited to make a voluntary contribution.  There was the Hall of Ocean Life.  The Hall of Precambrian Fossils and the Hall of Postcambrian Fossils.  The Hall of Mammals and the Hall of Reptiles.  And of course the Hall of Man, with its focus on hominid (us) evolution.  But no where, no where, was there a Hall of Intelligent Design!  At any moment in my wanderings I expected to enter an awesome hall where, instead of a giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling, there would be a giant bearded man pointing down to Earth. And before his outstretched index finger would stand a naked hominid with no resemblance what so ever to Alley Oop our prototypical cave man.  Walk a few steps further and there, behind the glass, would stand the apple tree with the snake himself in a jar of formaldehyde, forked tongue extended, mocking us for the stupid choices humans make.  

This being the Natural  History Museum, the centerpiece of the Hall of Intelligent Design would have to be a splinter of wood from Noah’s Ark.  Displayed prominently in a 360 degree glass case with little interactive buttons to press.  Push one and learn how the great diversity of life on Earth was preserved on a boat during the Great Flood.  Push another and see how the boat might possibly have been built with slave labor providing the necessary man power.  And finally, as a tie in to the Hall of Marine Mammals, you would actually walk thru the belly of a ginormous  latex whale, like Jonah, on your way to the museum gift shop.  It would only be fair.

To compound this imbalance in portraying our American culture, the American History Museum, across the way, had entire galleries devoted to the frivolities of television and Hollywood.  There, ensconced in his very own case, was the original Kermit the Frog.  He wasn’t green by the way.  More of a shit brindle brown.   And from the moment one entered the museum you were bombarded by signs crowing about the newly acquired ruby slippers that magically teleported Dorothy back to Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. There was even a purple Dumbo car from the Dumbo Whirl-a gig ride in Disneyland.  Thank Providence that our founding fathers knew the difference between fun and faith. 

Life in the Green Zone

It was during the last half of the eighteenth century when Ben Franklin first posited about the false economy in removing all the trees around one's property.  He mused about the as yet unknown oxygen cycle whereby trees replenish the bad air expelled by animals, with more refreshed air for us to breathe.  He came up with this idea because of an experiment conducted by Joesph Priestly which involved a candle, a mint sprig, a bell jar and a mouse. His postulate preceded ecosystem science by 200 years. True story.

The Priestly Experiment

So it is with the blessings of one of our greatest founding forefathers that Tammy and I always felt it necessary to live amongst the trees.  We never even considered living in a subdivision built on an old farm where one Bradford Pear per quarter acre is considered woodland living.  True, Kentucky Bluegrass conducts photosynthesis on a regular basis but due to our active lifestyle and the abundance of hot air I produce we need enough oxygen that only a forest of 200 year old oaks can generate.  And I always felt a few back breaking days of raking leaves every year is a small price to pay for all that recycled air. 

But a series of recent events have led me to rethink my position.    Actually a series of events over the course of the last 25 years.  No, a tree did not fall on our house, though the daily barrage of acorns raining down on our roof has led me to believe Chicken Little may have been on to something.  I did not think acorns hitting a roof could make such a racket.  It's as if the squirrels are the German Luftwaffe and our home the British House of Commons.  Nor is the stick (pardon the pun) that broke the camel's back the drudgery of bending over and picking up the 50 gallon trash can's worth of branches every week.  A large limb did fall and dent the hood of Tammy's car a few years back but that is when I still valued the friendship of the foliage.

Over the course of the years I have tried to take a preemptive approach to removing the dangerous trees before they can inflict damage on our property.  Much like Bush's War on Terror.  I don't hate all the Ents.  Just the arborofascists that want to destroy our way of life by suicide bombing my house by crashing down on the roof.  And also like the war on terror, my preemptive pruning just seems to make them angrier and more prolific.  Every time I remove one, three more seem to grow in its place.  But in any case, the twig that finally convinced me to want to move to a gated, over 55 community with no trees, was a thirty inch diameter Beech that fell into the lake behind our house.  No property damage, fortunately, but my sources tell me we may need to bring in a crane to remove it.  True story.  I will post the pics when the crane rolls in.

In the mean time I will continue to advocate for better understanding between the  autotrophs and heterotrophs because we all have to share the same Earth.

She Bang

It has often been noted that political women have a twofold burden when in the public eye.  Not only must they be quick witted, but they have to look good doing it.  Men, it is often lamented, do not have to live up to this double standard.  Well even the most apathetic student of evolutionary psychology will come to learn the fallacy of this argument in the first year of his studies.  It is a well known paradigm that women are attracted to virile behaviors [in men] such as an ability to kill and skin a bear in the wild or the resources to make a lot of money during a bear market on Wall Street.  Men, on the other hand, are attracted to physical attributes such as nice skin and large breasts.  It is a self evident truth [in light of advances in dermatology, plastic surgery, and Lasix] that it may indeed be more convenient to change one's superficial looks than to reconfigure one's masculinity.  You will therefore forgive me for limiting my remarks to Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin as I see no hope for Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman.  Rick Perry and Mitt Romney can obviously kick the shit out of them so all they have to do is have a rutting match to lock up the female Republican vote.  No one seriously doubts that the Ann Coulter Pod People care for much else.

So what does Sarah have that Michele does not?  Bangs of course.  If you have a forehead that only an extraterrestrial could love then I suggest it should be hidden behind some hair.  A very facile and effective grooming approach that I am quite certain will soften Michele up a bit.  Her inscience won't play too well outside of Iowa so perhaps her coiffure can.  Conservative women, after all, are more pretty than pedantic.  If you don't believe me I suggest you compare and contrast the women of Fox News to the lineup over at PBS or MSNBC.  OK, perhaps Rachel Maddow is sensual in a sexy butchy sort of way but Fox has the 18-55 male demographic tied up with Jenna Lee and Courtney Friel. 

We should not apologize for our licentious feelings as they are just that, feelings.  Both men and women have them.  But we can rise above them.