TheBanyanTree: Snow Moon

[Mike Pingleton]

Congratulations, Dale!  I suppose telling others 'no' is the price you pay
for crafting your own dance card.

I'm somewhere between 14 and 26 months away.  It sure seems like I'm
serving out a sentence in a work release program :)

Mike (also mad about the whoopers)


On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:12 AM, Dale Parish <dale.m.parish at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Russ warned me that retirement would serve up less free time than working
> ever did, and I took him at his word, but I wasn’t prepared for the
> onslaught of requests for time that avalanched down upon me before
> retirement has even arrived.  Monday will be my last day as an employee,
> and Tuesday starts my retirement.  The folks at work keep asking me what
> I’m going to do with all my spare time. Ha!
>
> As I mentioned my retirement date to friends in various organizations, it
> seems they all believe that the sole reason I’m retiring from employment is
> to dedicate my former employment time to volunteering for our
> organization.  As if theirs was the only organization to which I belonged,
> and I had no need for any spare time for myself.  I should have listened
> better, Russ.
>
> But I can hear the John Deere and Kubota both calling me.  If I can afford
> diesel on my retirement pay, I’d be busy and happy for much time to come.
> After rupturing a disc in my back a couple of years ago, I’m afraid to do
> what I used to do with the chain saw—it’s a back stressor.  I’ve become
> much more patient with myself climbing up and down at a more leisurely pace
> than I used to do, and guess I’ll get used to it.  It’s amusing in
> retrospect to observe how patience comes so much more naturally to one for
> which the majority of his life is behind him than in front.  One would
> think that youth with most of their life in front of them would be the more
> patient individuals, and the aged, with less time remaining, would be more
> impatient.  Doesn’t work that way.  You just learn what’s more important
> and are more aware of your limitations.
>
> I started reading Ox Team Days- Story of the Oregon Trail, about Ezra
> Meeker, who traversed the Oregon Trail in 1854 and fifty-four years later,
> after making and loosing several fortunes on the west coast, decided to
> repeat the Oregon Trail in the opposite direction at age 70, and made the
> trek from the Dalles in Oregon all the way to Washington DC by ox team,
> documenting his trip. He has some interesting observation on how much
> development had taken place in those 54 years.
>
> The book is a real reminder of how much television and movies have warped
> our perspective of history.  All the westerns show wagon teams being pulled
> by horses—not so.  While some horses were brought west, the wagons that
> made the Oregon trail were almost all pulled by oxen—horses were just too
> light and lacked the disposition and endurance to make the trip.
> Interesting, too, that the first people to make the transcontinental wagon
> trip remarked that the prairies were much smoother than the roads back
> east—and a lot less muddier and rutted.  That changed quickly.  Historians
> attribute the Oregon Trail to the largest mass migration in history at that
> time, with some 350,000 making their way west, although after 1849, many
> veered south after crossing the continental divide, towards California and
> the allure of gold.
>
> Twenty or thirty years ago, Dick Estelle, the “Radio Reader” read the
> story of two brothers who were the youngest ever to cross the United States
> by single engine airplane.  The story was a good one—well written for a boy
> in his teens.  I don’t remember how I heard about it, but that same
> boy—forty years later-- decided to repeat the Oregon Trail trip from the
> Mississippi River following the original route, and got his brother to
> accompany him. It was an interesting book, especially for me to imagine
> taking either—not both—of my two brothers along.   Some of the
> disagreements that arose between them being the same that probably would
> have arisen between one or the other of my brothers in the same
> predicaments.  In the book, he included a lot of later history, including
> the references to Ezra Meeker and other Oregon Trail pioneers.  After
> reading his account, I hope to find time to follow the trail on an extended
> camping trip.
>
> Been thinking about StarGazer a lot lately—Cindy has taken up bird
> photography, and has made several traipses to Galveston taking pictures of
> birds along Nine Mile Road and other places on the western end of the
> island.  She heard about a group of Whooping Cranes being over in Jefferson
> County, and went over and found them near the road, and was able to get
> some good pictures of the group of three Whoopers, close enough to read the
> marking on their leg bands and transmitters.  This two days before the yoyo
> shot and killed two of them.  She is outraged—she’s traveled to Rock Port
> several times to photograph the bigger flocks of Whoopers, and was elated
> to find three in the next county over, before this yoyo shot two of them
> There’s no excuse for it, but it’s sounding like they’re going to let him
> plead out to some lesser charge and do no time. The birders are outraged
> that he can’t be shot.  At least do significant hard time.
>
>
>
> Hugs,
> Dale
> --
> Dale M. Parish
> 628 Parish RD
> Orange TX 77632-0264
>
>