Ohiopyle Sate Park

    Beth and I camped at Ohiopyle State Park over the weekend, a popular whitewater destination on the Youghiogheny river in southwest PA.  The park is beautiful but very crowded on weekends, so we did most of our exploration on Monday. A bike trail from Pittsburgh to Washington DC passes through the park, and in between showers we pedaled that for a few miles then explored the small town of Ohiopyle. I happened to see a foot long trout jump up and out of that churning water behind us towards the falls, like a salmon, something I never would have expected had I not witnessed it. ( Beth took the pics with her new Motorola phone, and as usual click on them to enlarge! )

 

Pooh Sticks

    Spent some time playing 'Pooh Sticks' with the granddaughter a couple weeks ago as she visited for a week while mom recovered from back surgery. I used to play this game with my son -now her uncle- when he was small, dropping sticks into a creek and watching them pass under the bridge before disappearing downstream. The name was derived from a Winnie the Pooh video my son loved, and naturally this is something kids have been doing for ages. At one point Renley walked over to a huge log with the expectation that we could somehow lift it into the water, but eventually she settled on this large stick. I guess she became bored with the small stuff and wanted

a bigger thrill, but in the end it got stuck in shallow water near the shore. She also passed a half hour climbing onto boulders to see which was the best in her 4 year old mind. 

       The energy of kids always reminds me of how far we all come in learning about life, and how sluggish we become...There would be no need for diets if adults moved so much...(and as always, click on pics to enlarge )

Texas

 We returned from two weeks in Texas two days ago, visiting the grandson and family in Dallas/Fort Worth area, and took a day trip to this state park an hour southwest of the city. The Tyrannosaurus model is not accurate in that that species never lived in the area nor at the same time as the species that did live there, but it was obtained after the 1964 NY State fair from an exhibit that the Sinclair Oil Company had produced. Despite its inaccuracy it's still a hit with ‘kids’ of all ages. The Paluxy River runs through the park in which the old rock that contains the footprints has been exposed by erosion. The Acrocanthosaurus that made the tracks in the picture was a resident carnivore that weighed about 13,000 to 14,000 pounds and lived 123 to 113 million years ago. When the water level is very low one can literally walk the same path, although the local people also use deep pools in the river for swimming and there are picnic tables and playgrounds for family use.  About ½ mile from the park entrance, religionists have erected what they call a ‘creation museum’, apparently to offer a counter message to the scientific reality of the geological history of the area.  According to Wikipedia, certain people mistook some tracks to be human, and so:

 “ young-Earth creationists continue to believe that humans and non-avian dinosaurs lived at the same time, a notion that is contrary to the standard view of the geological time scale. Biologist Massimo Pigliucci has noted that geologists in the 1980s "clearly demonstrated that no human being left those prints," but rather "they were in fact metatarsal dinosaur tracks, together with a few pure and simple fakes."^[6]

^{AS always...click on pictures to enlarge them...}

  

 

Beaver Meadows

Took a walk at Beaver Meadows yesterday, another small  CCC area in the forest with some trails that circle a beautiful reservoir. I had to walk from the macadam road along the access road which was a sheet of ice in some places and had snow that was too deep for the car in others.  A few people had managed to drive in with four wheel drive and I found their footprints in elevated impressions where the deep snow they had walked through had been compressed and then the softer snow around the prints had melted. Because sunshine has been rare this winter a blue sky day such as this was a blessing, with warmth to the sun that hinted of spring.

Postscript: 3/3/21- Despite the snow at the CCC site, most of it has melted in town and I saw the first Grackle in a tree today. The return of the migrators is always a welcome sign of spring!

 

Anecdotal Evidence

 

 There are common phrases we banter about such as Murphy’s Law –‘if something can go wrong it will’- which of course is no more valid than ‘if something can go right it will’- although sometimes it seems as though one or the other is true because it feels that way at that moment. Years ago my mother and I used to joke that ‘every time you approach an intersection the light is always red’, regardless of the direction. When I tested the truth by counting how many times it really was red or green, it turned out that the light was green 52 times and red 48 after 100 intersections- exactly as statistical evidence would predict. Sometimes red was ahead and sometimes green.     

   When walking along a deserted road where it can be miles before seeing another vehicle, if a vehicle does eventually come along, it seems as though there is always one coming from the other direction so that all three people converge at the same place at the same time. Beth and I call this the vortex effect-as though the energy is somehow being drawn together to that one point.

    Lately I have been noticing how slowly people seem to move, so that at age 65 I walk across a parking lot or through a store faster than the average person, not because I am rushing, rather because I naturally walk and move more efficiently.  At the register in a store some people seem to place their items on the counter slowly and let the cashier check them out before reaching for their money or a credit card-rather than being prepared to pay ahead of time. When at an ATM, some people seem to be incapable of pushing the buttons efficiently. They buckle up and adjust the mirror and do all the other things they could do after leaving the bay. When driving, Beth and I sometimes judge how long it takes people to turn after they have put on their signals. A 10 is fast, safe and efficient, and a 1 is turtle slow, and 3’s and 4’s seem to be the average; Very few people seem to be able to slow down and turn as smoothly as their vehicle would allow.

    These are all anecdotal observations which I have not put to an empirical test like I did with the red lights, and the truth probably is that I become impatient with peoples slowness or lack of consideration and thus I  remember those instances more often. Science would be my clearest measure of  whether   people actually are slower or if I am being influenced by my own bullshit-as is so prevalent in the world these days.

 

Rachel Marie Powell

 

  Powell was one of the rioters at the White house, the so-called bullhorn lady, and is a divorced 40 year old mother of eight living about 1 ½  hours southwest of here in Sandy Lake, PA. She had her first child at age 16 and their present ages range from four to the mid twenties. Besides an apparent disregard for birth control and overpopulation, a search of her car turned up a "go bag" that contained a tarp, zip ties and two loaded magazines for an AK-47. During an earlier search of Ms. Powell's house, FBI agents found two other "go bags," one containing ammunition, rope and duct tape and a second one with Ninja throwing stars, knives and lighters. The FBI also found paper shooting targets with written slogans on them, including "Guns don't kill people, I do," and "Prayer is a good way to meet the lord, but trespassing is faster."

       On February 2^nd she gave a New Yorker interview in which she said that “I garden” and “raise chickens” and that she had been working part time jobs and sold cheese and yogurt at a farmers market. In short, she is an adamant ‘anti-mask’ protester who over the last year has been sucked down the rabbit hole of lies and conspiracy theories by people like Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones and Donald Trump.

     Anyone unfamiliar with western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio should know that this is a darkly conservative area with an enduring provincial attitude. When Trump made his campaign sign “GOD, GUNS and COUNTRY”, this is the people to whom he was trying to appeal. It the only area that I passed through during my cross country walk in 2006 where I encountered negative comments from people and where a driver deliberately swerved to harass me. 40 years ago when a friend and I rode bicycles across PA, we were resting in a town park in Sandy Lake when people noticed us and harshly yelled for us to leave. 

     In January, when I drove to southern Georgia through West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina,  I noticed that western PA was the only location where people still had dozens of Trump signs in their yards. Most of them will remain there for the next four years as people refuse to believe he lost in a fair election. Some of his supporters in Warren County live in dilapidated houses, but Mr. Trump remains their hero as he flies in a private jet to his Florida mansion. Some claim they fear socialism and the welfare state while cashing their stimulus checks; yet despite the hypocrisy  they prefer the greed in the abuses of capitalism over a more equitable, humanitarian distribution of wealth. Some defend their right to own AK 47s because the men who wrote the 2^nd amendment said so, forgetting that in 1776 muskets required 20 seconds to reload. Some believe they must ‘make America great again’ while changing the oil on their boats and trucks and ATV’s and drinking beer and eating pizza and not quite noticing that they have it pretty damn good. Others condemn the rioters but not Trump, and never acknowledge his role in encouraging the behavior. Trump once claimed  “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That is True for some of his supporters. The gulf between opinion, fact and reality, between moral conscience and political expediency has become so skewed that I do not know if some people will ever crawl out of the rabbit hole. Postscript: Trumps attorney general Bill Barr said to Trump during Trumps final weeks: "..your people keep shoveling this shit out" ..."my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit." "...part of Trumps "..clown show." ...and yet there are millions who still believe it.

       As Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote:

        “One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.”

CoVid

 

 Had my first of two Moderna covid vaccine shots yesterday, and after twenty four hours the only side effect is mild soreness at the injection side-similar to any other shot. The second shot is scheduled for March 10th, after which additional side effects are more common although mostly mild and short lived. The Moderna vaccine is an mRNA type which stimulates cells to produce a 'spike' protein similar to the spike on the virus. The cell displays that protein on its surface which stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies against it; those antibodies later are used against a genuine covid infection should a person be infected. 

    I am disheartened but not surprised by the anti vaccine people and the general wariness against vaccines. Approximately 25-30% have a hesitancy about the vaccine. I attribute that to their historical suspicion caused by past abuses by researchers, and to the anti science stance of some politicians and the scientific ignorance of Americans in general. There are still many unknowns regarding how this virus will mutate and the effectiveness of the current vaccines over time, but so far they dampen the seriousness of the disease. As the virus mutates, new booster vaccines may need to be developed, but there is also a possibility that this coronavirus will eventually mutate into something no more serious than the common cold. We shall see. Meantime vaccines are the best defense against the rampant spread which will slow the mutation rate.  POSTSCRIPT: May 19, 2022- An NPR study of 3,000 counties nationwide found a direct correlation between those people who voted for Mr. Trump and death from co-vid. Those who voted for him are 2.26 times more likely to die from the virus than those who did not. That is because they neglected to get the vaccine. Reasons to not get the vaccine range from suspicion of government microchips being implanted in the vaccine, to fear that it was developed 'too fast' to be safe, to a faith in 'Gods will'. Much of that 'reasoning' is associated to misinformation they are consuming on the internet or television or in their local church. But there are annual awards called Darwin Awards given out each year to people who "eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival."                The mostly Republican members of this group should all receive the award posthumously.