Bushcraft - shelter building

I'm enrolled in a year-long bushcraft course, in which we're learning all manner of things, including axecraft, clothes making, primitive navigation, and shelter building. I decided to merge the old and the new, so I took liberties on my shelter with a bit of paracord and a tarp. I have the rafters up and the tarp secured, but I have a lot more work to do. I envision a more enclosed shelter when I'm done with it. I will have foliage entirely covering the roof in Picture #2. In Picture #3, you can see the makings of my bed, which will be made soft with spruce boughs.

 

Carrifran Wildwood

One of the most irritating rants I go on is about how ecologically impoverished the UK is. In America, it's not hard to find a mixed forest on the edge of many towns. In Scotland, finding a healthy-seeming forest requires Internet research and a long pilgrimage. 

The other weekend I pilgrimaged to the Carrifran Woodland in southwest Scotland, where conservationists are experimenting with one valley in the Moffat hills. They've planted 500,000 native species of tree and shrub within 1,600 acres, with the idea of showing what an ecologically-restored Scotland might look like. They are twenty years into the project, so the trees are not tall, but when you walk over the land, you get a sense of the project's potential, even during a time of year when the forest has sunk into its winter slumber.

Take a close look at this next picture.

There's a lot to unpack in the above picture. Look at the far hill in front of us. There, you'll see a forest on the left half of the hill and grassy vegetation on the right side of the hill. This picture tells us so much about Scottish ecology and the lack thereof. The forest on the hill is probably made up entirely of "Sitka Spruce," a non-native species which is being grown for timber. These forests are not really forests--they're typically monocultures that have almost nothing residing within them. The forest does show, however, that forests CAN grow in Scotland, even up and over hills. Now look at the bare side of the hill on the right. This moorland terrain used to seem beautiful to me, until I learned that it isn't naturally desolate. It is actually a human-created wasteland. The only reason that hill is bare is because there is an overabundance of deer and sheep which nibble any and all saplings to death. Walk on that bare hill and then walk through the Sitka Spruce forest and you'll be disturbed to realize that it is ecologically impoverished, with few birds, bugs, plants, and animals.

Now look at the shadowy forest in the foreground. This is Carrifran Wildwood, where most all of the trees have been hand-planted with a variety of tree species, and where sheep and deer are discouraged from entering. This piece of land, when it comes of age, might show us what Scotland could look like if it's managed until it doesn't need to be managed.

Town of Moffat, 7 miles from woods

2020 election impressions

Thoughts and emotions as of this moment…

It appears that Biden, now that he’s secured Wisconsin and Michigan, will win. What relief I feel is dampened by:

1. the fact that Trump will use all the dark arts at his disposal to corrupt the election, meaning that we’ll, at best, have months of unpleasant post-election drama to suffer through.

2. the fact that the Senate seems like it'll be controlled by Republicans, meaning that, for the next 2-4 years, we'll have to deal with the same old legislative logjams and political rancor.

3. the fact that the Supreme Court will be dominated by conservatives.

4. the fact that this election does not sound the death knell for the Republican Party as we know it. The Party will be less inclined to modernize and clean up its image. Trumpism may well last beyond Trump.

5. the fact that, from 2021-2024, there likely won’t be an ambitious or productive legislative agenda. Just more of the same nonsense where Democrats try and Republicans obstruct.

6. and, worst of all, the fact that almost 50% of the voting public voted again for one of the most rotten, corrupt, untrustworthy, and incompetent conmen who’s ever played American politics. I find this disturbing. I might give the 2016 “blow it up” voters a pass, but these 2020 voters ought to know better. It’s cliche to say that one has lost his faith in humanity, but my faith is truly being tested, even with Biden ahead. I can still think America is a wonderful country knowing that there are a handful of KKK cells out there. No country is perfect and there will always be bad apples. But knowing that half of the voting Americans have learned nothing from the last four years makes me think the bulk of us are either politically deranged, tragically uninformed, or morally stupid. It is harder for me to love my country knowing that almost half of its voters have voted for someone who is, among a thousand other offenses, trying to corrupt an election and corrode all that’s good about our democracy. Why isn’t this offense enough to turn on him?

Lastly... I’m hoping that we all (and I'm including Trump’s supporters in "we all") have reached a point of exhaustion with Trump. I halfheartedly predict that his yammerings and tweets will burn out like a fire without oxygen. We just don't have the energy to pay attention to him anymore. His disappearance will be nice, but there is nothing about the next term that excites me. All of this makes me want to go on a vacation from political news for the next four years.

A primitive understanding of manhood

Some men like Trump because they think he’s “manly.” (Click for NYT story about why many Latino men are drawn to Trump’s machismo.) What grotesque understanding of manliness are such men evaluating him with? Can’t they see that Trump — who whines about “unfair” questions, who walks out of a tough interview, who constantly displays toddler-like petulance, who exhibits no impulse control, and who weakly hints at his impending defeat — fails to meet any traditional criterion of admirable masculinity?

One thought that keeps coming to my mind is: Haven’t these admirers ever played sports?

I played hockey and football from my early youth up until college. They were tough, violent sports that presented all sorts of intra- and interpersonal challenges. No matter the challenge, we were taught by our coaches to never whine, to never brag, to take personal responsibility for your mistakes, to support your teammates, to be gracious in victory or defeat, and to play to the last whistle even when the game was lost. We were by no means a brotherhood of principled Spartan soldiers; a lot of my teammates fell short of living up to these virtues, but no one disputed the worthiness of these virtues, and our coaches, to their credit, tirelessly reinforced them from year to year.

All of the above are not necessarily “manly” values because women embrace them just as well. But if we as a society are going to have vaguely tailored values for boys and men (and I don’t see why we shouldn’t), let’s get them right. No vision of ideal manliness should involve the ignoring of rules, the unscrupulous taking of what you want, and the putting on of a “strongman” front. Rather, it would be better to cultivate and practice:

stoic self-control (which doesn’t preclude emotional availability)
protection of those in need
resilience
physical courage
moral fortitude
worldliness
humility
self-examination
awareness of and determination to manage one’s flaws
and the responsibility to serve our families, communities, and beyond

We should look up to, celebrate, and vote for people who possess these values because these are not only pro-social, but because they take work and discipline to attain. Humiliating your wife via an affair or walking out on an interview are easy because you’re acting on destructive impulse alone. It takes a cultivated and disciplined adult to weather a tough interview or manage unruly instincts.

I wish to put it more coarsely: If you like that whiny man-baby because you think he’s a strong man, you have a primitive understanding of what strength is and what an adult ought to be.

"The Good Lord Bird" TV Review

I give the first episode of Showtime's The Good Lord Bird a C+.

I've been patiently waiting for fifteen years for a John Brown show/movie, and finally Showtime is featuring the adaptation of a James McBride book.

You can tell Ethan Hawke has fun with the full-throated Jeremiads (and what actor wouldn't?), but they're used too often when they could have been used to greater effect if used sparingly (think Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction). Hawke is one of my favorite actors, but he's too young to play Brown. Physical comedy is not Hawke's strong suit, and everything about the depiction feels excessive. I would have preferred a younger Robert Duvall.

I can handle a little teasing of John Brown, but he's almost completely depicted as incompetent, foolish, zealous, or insane. For his first depiction on the screen, I would have liked to see a bit of nuanced reverence. The book Cloudsplitter (which I highly recommend) did better to capture Brown's moral ferocity and amusing radicality. Same with Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising (also excellent).

Overall, the acting is largely poor; the action is choppy, unrealistic, and forgettable; and the script feels oddly rushed, even though they had plenty of space to tell the story. I don't have much hope for the rest of the series. What a waste.