Beartooth Highway, Montana, August 30, 2007

Link to video at YouTube.

I actually wrote about this drive last April (here), but the video was made later (August) and I didn’t get around to sharing it until now – don’t exactly know why, just miscellaneous distractions and life in general.

The road with all the switchbacks down Cedar Mesa in the video is the Moki Dugway, built in the late ‘50s to for transporting uranium ore from a mine to a processing mill in Mexican Hat. A sign before you get to it says, “The State of Utah recommends that only vehicles less than 28 feet in length and 10,00 pounds in weight attempt to negotiate this steep (10% grade), narrow, and winding road.”

Link to video on YouTube.

Deadwood, South Dakota, August 25, 2007

If video doesn’t play, try this link.

On September 30, 2011, the day after we got to Natural Bridges National Monument, we took Sipapu Natural Bridge Trail all the way to the bottom of the canyon and through to the other side. This image is looking back through the bridge back toward where we came down.

Sipapu Natural Bridge Trail, Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah, September 30, 2011

If video didn’t work, try this video link.

Selected Information Resources: Natural Bridges National Monument

• National Park Service
• Wikipedia
• Wikitravel
• The American Southwest
• Utah .com
• The Natural Arch and Bridge Society
  • Sipapu Natural Bridge
  • Kachina Natural Bridge, and
  • Owachomo Natural Bridge

Sunday Commentary

That’s all the US fiscal cliff debacle was – a manufactured crisis, albeit a crisis that was cobbled together with intentions of inducing politicians to either legislate responsibly or have significant spending cuts and taxes kick in automatically.

I can’t say that I’m really surprised that the fiscal cliff was “averted” – temporarily – but all the politicians have done is a little fiddling and “kicked the can” – once again – a little further “down the road.”

And I think we have only had a temporary reprieve.

They will be right back at this again in February or so when the debt ceiling issue comes up – and we are already bumping up against the country’s current debt limit.

And you can’t blame it on one party or the other, one group of politicians or another, or one house of Congress or the other.  They… are… ALL… to… blame!  and that blame includes more than just a couple of presidential administrations and does include this one.

If we’re not there already, the United States is headed for a level of unsustainable debt – the government’s spending is already beyond sustainable.

A responsible media should long ago have been all over the real problems with our country’s fiscal future.  The media, though, is just as irresponsible, acting as enablers for policies, programs, and spending beyond what we can afford – mostly in the unspoken names of ratings and entertainment instead of doing truly responsible journalism.

Social responsibility is important. However, social programs and their beneficiaries, long term, will be adversely impacted by irresponsible fiscal policies.

________________
Image: Fiscal Farce: Approaching the Cliff

Some rights reserved by DonkeyHotey

By Mary E. Wilkins. – ©1900

On Monday morning Love Lord sat on the side-door step, stitching some fine linen shirt-bands for her father. It was a day in early May, moving from dawn to dark with a rush of strong fresh winds, made almost as palpable as wings by the apple and cherry blossoms which they loosened and bore away from the trees. There was a fine apple-orchard in full bloom in the rear of Parson Reuben Lord’s gray-shingled house, three large white-plumed cherry-trees stood in the side yard, but Love would never taste the apples and cherries therefrom, unless perchance some scanty measure of poor fruit could not be readily sold. All of Parson Lord’s alabaster boxes of life were sold, and the proceeds devoted to foreign missions. Love had never questioned the wisdom of it; she had never questioned the wisdom of any of the orderings of her life. She regarded them as indirectly ordained by Providence through her father, and not to be cavilled at, except possibly in one instance. Love at twelve years of age had had many lacks of life, but only one active sorrow, and that sense of loss and deprivation after the delight of possession which induces rebellion. Love had lost her mother when she was scarce more than a baby; she had been brought up by a rigorous widow, a distant relative of her father’s, who had trained her according to all letters of law and faith. So inexorable had been her method, so thoroughly had Love been taught to perform her duties, that there had seemed to be danger of their losing the distinction of hand and individual work. Little Love had lived as under the self-regulating motive power of an automaton, her native inclinations, whether towards grace or perversity, being wholly amenable to her instructress, as to a spiritual sun and wind. Cousin Daphne Weatherhead, as the widow was called, was the only person with whom she was brought in close contact through her childhood. Of her father she saw very little except at meals, at family prayers, and on Sabbath days, when she sat for hours, with her solemn innocent eyes intent upon him, as he proclaimed the truths of the Word and the terrors of the law from his beetling pulpit.

Parson Reuben Lord was so closely welded to his faith and his devotion that he seemed to gain therefrom a strange stiffness, almost ossification, of spirit. People, while holding him in utmost respect for his stern consistency of life, yet regarded him with awe which had in it something of terror. His fervent zeal for the cause of missions seemed the ruling passion of his life. His two brothers were still laboring in foreign fields. It had been the sorest trial of his life that delicate health in his youth had kept him at home in narrower and more peaceful tillage. It had also been a sore trial to him that his first-born child had not been a son, whom he could devote, with more certainty of the acceptability of the sacrifice, to the cause of Christ in heathen lands. There was, however, a belief in the village that he had so devoted his first-born daughter, Elizabeth. When the child died, at the early age of seven, after a most wonderful life and precocious maturity of religious experience, afterwards celebrated in a memoir which became a village classic, people were strengthened in this belief. It was also reported, on the authority of Aunt Betsey Ware, who had officiated at both births, that the parson made a similar dedication to the Lord of his second daughter, Love, in spite of the expostulations of his poor wife Mehitable, whose maternal affection overcame her religious ardor.

It was even said that Mehitable Lord had faded away and died because of her preying grief over the loss of her first-born, and the fear lest the second, who was delicate, and had that sensitiveness of disposition which is sometimes thought prophetic of early death, should follow her. However that may have been, Mehitable Lord died when Love was too young to have anything but that vague sense of loss of love in the abstract which, while it changes the whole savor of life, does not rend it with bitterness.

Love had no little mates during her childhood. Cousin Daphne Weatherhead, seemingly with the best of motives, kept her aloof from them. “You are the minister’s daughter, and should endeavor to follow in the foot-steps of your sainted sister,” Cousin Daphne would remark if the little maid seemed to cast a wistful eye towards the frolics of the young of her kind. Poor little Love used, for she learned to read at an early age, to strive to console and amuse herself with the perusal of the memoir of her sainted sister. Sitting in her little chair, with the book on her small aproned knees, she bent her childish brows over its pious pages, and pondered gravely its every word.

Love’s childhood, which might well have been considered somewhat dull and joyless, though so straightly ordered in the paths of righteousness and peace, held, however, but one grief. When she was six years old she had had a doll presented to her by a loving old dame who had brought up a family of fourteen children. The doll had belonged to her youngest daughter, and was a homely, rustic specimen of her race; but Love took it to her heart with a great content and the most credulous admiration. She was guilty of the one act of deception and the one lie of her childhood for the protection of this poor doll which had come to her for motherhood. She hid the fact of its possession from Cousin Daphne, and then she told a falsehood when questioned.

The pleased old grandmother who had given it to her told of it here and there with innocent garrulity, not dreaming it would do harm. But when Cousin Daphne heard the news, home she came, and poor little Love underwent a miniature inquisition, and remained firm under her rack and thumb-screw. “No, Grandma Streeter didn’t ever give me any doll,” declared she, with blue eyes looking straight into Cousin Daphne’s, yet with a recoil glance of horror at her own wickedness. The word of this small sister of a departed saint was pitted against that of an ancient mother in Israel, but Cousin Daphne made diligent search, and discovered the doll hidden away under Love’s feather-bed. When she held it before Love, and the child saw the beloved symbolic baby, never of any beauty whatever, and now battered and marred by the caresses and corrections of many mothers, until only a little girl in whom the first strength of maternal imagination can encompass miracles could hold her of any account whatever, she expressed no shame or contrition; she only stretched out her arms with a cry of love and agony: “Give her to me! oh, give her to me! Don’t take her away, Cousin Daphne!”

That confirmed matters. Love knelt in prayer with her father and Cousin Daphne, until, out of docility and terror, her soul was melted within her with contrition for her heinous sin. Poor little Love seemed to almost see the lapping of the infernal fires around her, and she could not even hold the doll in her arms for comfort. She did not see the doll again for years. She used often to wonder where it was, what Cousin Daphne had done with it; but she would no more have asked her than she would have taken the name of the Lord in vain. And as for asking her father, she would never forget till her dying day his countenance of stern wretchedness and condemnation when Cousin Daphne had told him of her wickedness, and the almost despairing fervor of his prayer. She would as soon have asked for a little graven image.

Love was twelve years old when Cousin Daphne was found one afternoon sitting stiffly in her chair, with her knitting-work in her motionless hands. She did not come to prayers, and when Love went to call her, Cousin Daphne’s face looked at her unseeingly out of the gathering dusk. After Cousin Daphne’s death she lived alone with her father, it being held that with her fine training she was able to keep his house at the age of twelve. Love knelt with her father an hour every morning and evening, and listened to his reading of the Scriptures and prayers. She prepared his frugal meals, and sat timidly and respectfully opposite him at table. The rest of the time he remained alone in his study, walled in, as it were, with the thoughts of dead divines and fathers of the Church in mummy-cases of old calf-skin, and was in sore labor over his many-headed sermons.

Love kept his house, as she had been taught, as if it were her own soul; she cleaned it as she would have cleaned her heart of sin; she made all the poor furnishings shine as if they had been the trappings of the Temple, and acquitted herself like a housewife of twice her age, to the approbation of all the village matrons. This morning, although it was still early, the house was neatly set in order from garret to cellar, and there were two hours for the fine stitching before dinner. She sat there, hearing the soft rush of the spring wind and breathing in the flurrying sweetness of the cherry blossoms, but with no consciousness thereof. She set the beautiful stitches, like a little row of pearls, with the precision of a machine, her fingers working with no aid from her mind, which was intent upon a dream she had the night before about her lost doll.

As Love sat there the dream was to her what the perfume was to the cherry blossom, and would have been as evident to a sense made for its perception. Love had dreamed, the night before, that she was up in the garret of her father’s house, when she heard a little wail, like that of a young baby. She started and looked around, and it came again, seemingly from the vicinity of an old hair trunk which her father had carried to college in his youth. An experience which she had had at church that day had possibly, by some obscure system of suggestion, induced the dream. That Sunday Love had seen for the first time the squire’s new wife. The squire had lately married for the second time, a woman from the city, elderly, but very beautiful and stately. She had brought her orphan grandson to live with her. This grandson, Richard Pierce, was a boy of fourteen, large for his age and forward of understanding. He was nearly fitted to enter Harvard College. That Sunday, young Richard, sitting in the squire’s pew, looked across at Love, sitting all alone in the parson’s pew. Love was slim and tall, but with a pretty roundness under her little drab spencer cape, with apple curves of pink cheeks under her scooping bonnet, tied under her sweet chin with a sober-colored ribbon like her cape. Not a bright tint was there about Love, except in her face and hair. Young Master Richard looked at her with the half-indifferent, half-earnest gaze of an intellectual boy whose mind is devoted to matters in his estimation more important than the faces of girls, and yet has at times, in his own despite, his heart stirred faintly with the instincts and imaginations of his kind. At last Love, compelled perhaps by his gaze, looked at him, though it was in the midst of a fiery appeal from the pulpit. She gazed at the boy with an utter calmness and unconsciousness of scrutiny, as if he were something inanimate. Indeed, to this young Love, with her perfect innocence of ignorance and the long training of her mind on spiritual lines, a boy did not mean as much as a girl, nor much more, than a rose-bush or an apple-tree. Richard, as if something in himself, of which he had not known, was discovered by her gaze, looked away with a great blush, and then Love turned her eyes from him towards his grandmother. They were suddenly alert, full of the most timid yet ardent admiration. The one love with which the child had any acquaintance, and for which she had as yet any yearning, was in the face of that elderly dame. It shone plain to her sight when she glanced at the grandson by her side, and it beamed forth, like a light in the windows of a home, when she saw little Love gazing at her in such timidly beseeching and admiring wise. Love cast down her eyes before the sweet mother-look of the squire’s lady, her heart leaped, her mouth quivered as if she would weep. She thought that never, never since her own mother, whose caresses she remembered better than her face, had there been any one as beautiful as this woman. That morning Love heard no more of her father’s discourse. She was conscious of nothing except that mother-presence, which seemed to pervade the whole church. The inexorable fatherhood of God, as set forth in the parson’s sermon, was not as evident to the hungry little heart in His sanctuary as the motherhood of the squire’s lady. She continued to gaze at her at intervals, with softly furtive eyes of adoration, as if the lady were the Blessed Mary, and she a little papist; and when she sometimes received a tenderly benignant glance in return, she scarcely knew where her body was, such was the elation of her spirit. When, after meeting, she was going down the aisle, and came abreast of the wonderful lady, and the soft sweep of her velvet cloak brushed her face like a wing, she could not help an involuntary nestle against her side, as if she were a baby. Then the squire’s lady bent down, her beautiful old face framed in gray curls, and smiled, and lifted her hand, and patted Love gently on the smooth curve of her cheek. Love could have gone down at her feet. Nobody since her mother’s death had ever caressed her to that extent. She gave a quick look up at the lady with something between a sob and a smile, then shrank back, followed her out of church, and watched her drive away with the squire and Master Richard, though she did not see them at all.

Somehow this encounter with the squire’s lady set Love to thinking, more strenuously than usual, of the lost doll of her childhood, and that night she dreamed that she went over to the old trunk, and suddenly her doll peeped at her from behind it. It wore the same muslin frock sprigged with green which she remembered well, and the same bonnet made of pasteboard covered with green satin; but the little face, which looked up at her with the lips parted in a wail, was, curiously enough, that of the squire’s lady, gray curls and all, with the tiny cheeks crumpled delicately in pink and white, like an old rose-bud. When Love awoke, she could scarcely believe that the dream was not true, being one of those for whom dreams are separated from the real by insensible shadings rather than sharp divisions.

Love pondered over it all the morning, and that afternoon, her father being away, she stole guiltily up to the garret, and stood listening, breathless, in the midst of the great stretch of space, with the rafters converging over her head. There was only one small window, and the afternoon was growing old. On either side of the garret, under the eaves, lay long shadows of dark mystery, which to the child’s excited fancy seemed often stirring to arise. The garret, like the rest of the house, was very clean and sparse. All the small store of discarded household furnishings was stowed away neatly against the eaves, and the middle space was bare. Love could see the great arc of an old tow-wheel which had not been used for many a year, and near it a cedar chest which contained her mother’s meagre wardrobe, two barrels full of old sermons, and the little hair trunk. There was not much besides, except a surtout which had belonged to her grandfather, which hung on a nail over the trunk.

Love stood listening, she scarcely knew for what, but the influence of her dream was strong upon her. She was like a little statue of fearful attention, in her straight blue gown, her hands clutching nervously at her sides, her eyes dilating to the dusk and her own fears. Finally Love went over to the trunk and peered behind it. There was no doll there, at once to her disappointment and her relief. She opened the trunk, and it was full of old letters. Love straightened herself, and in so doing jostled her grandfather’s surtout. One sleeve swung out and hit her cheek with a curious impetus for anything so presumably soft and light. Love started back; a sense of the uncanny thrilled her; then she caught hold of the sleeve eagerly, and there was her doll. Cousin Daphne had been a subtle concealer; people had seldom found out anything which she wished to keep secret. She had doubtless many curious hiding-places in empty habits and meaningless forms for the privacies of her own character, and she was at no loss, working from within out to practical illustrations, to find a concealment for poor Love’s doll. [continue reading…]

Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, August 22, 2007

Custer State Park, South Dakota, August 22, 2007.

Welcome to 2013!

We’ve made it past the Mayan apocalypse… and the 2012 elections.

A month ago, on December 2, I started posting vintage Christmas images, 2 a day up to Christmas, followed by New Years vintage images through yesterday.

That makes at least one post every day, something I haven’t done for a while.

Most of those posts were actually scheduled in advance, just as this one is – as I write this, it’s actually December 20, 2012.

Scheduling posts in advance takes some of the pressure off.  As it stands right now, I have posts on Exit78 scheduled every day for the next month.

As the line at the top the page says, I’m “sharing photos, videos, vintage images I’ve discovered, and — occasionally — commentary and thoughts from retired life and travels.”

The posts that I have scheduled at this point are semi-random images associated with the videos that I’ve made over the last year and a half.  The associated video is also included.

Some of the images may have appeared hear before, but I’m not going to go back and try to figure that out.  However, going forward, these images will probably not appear here again.  I’m selecting images from a  folder that currently has over a thousand in it.  Once I use an image, it’s removed from that folder so that it shouldn’t be used again after this.  It may occur, if by some chance I forget to remove a picture from the folder.

My intent is to post here usually just once a day.  If I have commentary or something else to post, I’ll either move the scheduled post to the next open day in the queue (preferred) or just have an extra post for that day.  For instance, the post that I had originally scheduled for today has been moved out to February 2, 2013.