Musings

In keeping with my new persona as a crusty old writer, I have decided to post a short story that is in keeping with the questionable and generally amusing tradition of tall tales of the old west.

I wrote this on a whim one morning, and later decided to submit it for publication with Field & Stream Magazine, one of the leading journals devoted to serious hunting and fishing articles for the outdoorsmen of the USA. As I haven’t heard from the editors, I guess that it must have provoked some disgust and outrage.

I can only say that I am grateful that they did not mail me a rejection slip wrapped in a sanitary napkin, or other appropriate container for hazardous waste. So, as a minor holiday gift to my readers, here is:

A Big Fish StoryWord Count: 1221
According to a Goshute Indian friend of mine, there is a tiny lake high in Utah’s Uinta Mountains that nestles in the caldera of a small extinct volcano. The Indians call it Iceberg Lake, and in it resides an extremely rare species of fur-bearing Trout. I know it sounds ludicrous, but I believed my friend.

You see, some years ago, after much coaxing, he introduced me to one of the rare delicacies of the Intermountain West: Sugar-cured Great Salt Lake Grasshoppers. These huge, yellowish insects are collected by the Goshutes when they appear every five years or so, and properly cured, they taste a lot like lobster or shrimp. That experience made me a believer, so I didn’t reject his fish story out of hand.

Determined to try my hand at fly-casting for these rare trout, I got my friend to draw a map to the lake’s location. The trailhead seemed to be at the top of Lung Blood pass at about 12,000 feet, and climbing up to that pass is no easy feat, especially when you are nearly 70 years old. From there, the trail snakes along the crest of the mountains, well above the tree line for about five miles, to finally drop down a little through thick patches of Lodge pole pine and Aspen to the lake.

So on a bright August morning, I started out with tackle, waders, snacks stuffed in a small backpack, and fly rod case in hand. After the brutal climb to the pass, it was mid morning, and I sat down on a convenient boulder to eat a cheese sandwich and take in the view. It was nearly a cloudless day, with only a few puff-ball clouds hugging a mountain top here and there, and you could see clear into Wyoming.

After scouting around for a few hundred yards, I spotted the old Indian trail leading through a split granite cliff face toward the north. I slipped into the backpack and using my pole case as a walking stick, headed out along the high ridge. The trail was surprisingly level, and I made good time to the point where it dropped into the forest below. The lake was a bit of surprise; you couldn’t see it until you were nearly on it, but it was very deep, and about 400 yards wide.

I took off my gear, and after resting for a while, crept quietly down to the lake’s edge. I peered into the crystal-clear water and could see several fish swimming in the shallows. They looked blurry; sort of out of focus, and their heads were much larger than their bodies. This is a sure sign of a lack of nutrition, as I had seen it before in high altitude lakes that were stocked by the Fish and Game with Eastern Brook Trout. Very few survived the harsh winter at those heights.

I put together my fly rod, and tied on a tiny dry fly; a #22 Midge. On my first cast, a trout struck immediately. It jerked hard for an instant, and then the line went limp. I reeled in and saw that the fly was gone. The trout had swallowed it whole, and had bitten cleanly through the leader like some sort of Piranha. Those fish were damned hungry!

Shaking my head, I tied on a larger fly, and cast out again. I flipped the rod tip a few times to make the fly look life-like, and wham! Another trout chomped down, severed the leader and swam off, probably belching contentedly. I’m sure they were so hungry that they could digest the steel hook and feathers with no problem at all.

Disgusted, I reeled in once again, tied on another fly, and went through the same routine. Soon, I had gone through a half-dozen of my very best flies, and so I regrouped, tied on a much heavier leader, and attached big #12 Royal Coachmen and Silver Doctors. The outcome was the same; they bit through the leader and swallowed my flies. Soon, I was reduced to a few large terrestrials like grasshoppers and beetles in my tackle box. With their large heads, the trout swallowed them all, and none had even broken the surface to allow me to take a good look at them.

I couldn’t believe it; those trout had taken all of my lures and were swimming around with about an ounce of steel in their bellies. I searched through the bare hooks, spools of leader and line, and other paraphernalia in the box, looking for something at all to attach to the line. Nothing, nada. Wait a minute! I spotted a small horseshoe magnet that I had found last season and had casually tossed into the box. I know it was madness, but I was desperate. I tied it onto the line, and cast out, reeling in very slowly. Bingo! The magnet clamped onto the side of one of those trout, and I reeled in and flipped the small fish onto the shore.

It flopped around in the sunlight, the rays catching its glimmering golden coat of downy fur. As it flopped around, the magnet popped off, and I had a terrible time holding onto the little devil. It was a 12 inch acrobat, and the normal fish slime and the slick fur made it slip out of my hands every time I tried to grasp it. I did manage to flip it farther away from the shoreline, and exhausted, it finally gave up and lay quietly.

After it made its last gasp, I picked it up in both hands and examined it closely. Sure enough it was fur; close cropped and dense, covering its body from the tail fin up to the gills. By this time, I was tired and hungry, and consumed with culinary curiosity, I decided to cook and eat it on the spot. I made a ring of rocks and started a small fire within it. As it burned into coals, I sharpened the tip of a slender pine branch and speared it through the fish. I didn’t try to clean the fish first, because I was afraid of it slipping under the knife, giving me a nasty cut on the hand.

It didn’t smell too good as the heat from the coals scorched off the fur, but in minutes, the tender flesh was cooked. I got out the cheese, and one of the cold beers I had brought along. It wasn’t a bad meal. The stubble of fur gave it an interesting texture, and added a sort of almond flavor to the delicate trout taste.

I finished my impromptu meal, and seeing the sun was near the western horizon, I knew I had to start back to my car now, or take the risk of descending the pass in the dark. When I stared up the car, I suddenly realized that I could never prove what I had experienced. I should have stayed to catch at least one more to bring home. On the drive back though, I realized that it was the Great Spirit at work. He wanted that lake and its unique inhabitants to remain a secret between me and the Indians. And, of course, I’ll never tell where it is.
Image courtesy of Celticwriter

If you have been following my blog, you know that I have a dim view of the prospects for the world economy. Many of the predictions I have made are coming to pass, and governments are having more and more difficulty in glossing over the problems to an electorate or citizenry that is becoming increasingly impatient with slight-of-hand studies and bogus ‘statistics’ that are offered to support assertions that things are going to get better.

The massive transfer of private debt to public debt has done nothing to alleviate or resolve the underlying problems which continue to compound daily.

As I see it, the worldwide pool of starving and disenfranchised people continues to grow, the number of viable industries continues to shrink; and basic resources are increasingly difficult to obtain. The flow of goods and services around the world is reducing to a trickle, and civil disorder is becoming so common that we are becoming numb to news reports of crime, outrages, and rampant bad craziness. Global anarchy or the rise of totalitarian governments are certainly possible outcomes.

I have concluded that, in the long-term, individual survival and prosperity will hinge on the ability to obtain and control local resources of food, water, and energy. In particular, the small isolated plots, patches, or oases that are of no interest or value to governments, the wealthy, or other organized groups that have the firepower to take what they want, when they need it.

It is becoming evident that water will soon become the new oil or gold as a store of value. Unpolluted cropland and fisheries will be close seconds. The trick, for the individual or extended family, will be to seek out and obtain such havens far from routes of easy access such as roads, rivers, harbors, and landing strips. Ideally, such places would be defensible by individuals or very small groups. In this regard, nature should be used a weapon. It should be damned difficult or impossible for groups of people to get there on foot or by off-the-road vehicles or ocean-going ships, and natural bottlenecks should allow for strategic defense against mobs or ‘militias’ by the few.

Sounds like James Hilton’s Shangri La, doesn’t it?

Actually, such places abound; from the oasis of the Sahara to certain mountain valleys in the Alps; from the Amazon to the high valleys of Papua New Guinea; and in my own neck of the woods, the Great American Desert and the Slickrock of the Colorado Plateau. You only have to spend the time and effort to look for them and invest the time in determining their long-term potential.

Because there is little or no interest in such places by developers and mining companies, they are presently ‘dirt cheap’, to make a bad pun. As an investment, they are very unlikely to decrease in value, are not subject to bank failures, home invasion robberies, or the whims or potential illiquidity of the stock market. In addition, they are very unlikely to be confiscated or taxed to death by greedy governments.

Over time, you could make the place you obtain fairly self-sufficient without actually living there; just make sure you have a fail-safe means of getting there in a timely manner if and when it becomes time to kiss off ‘civilization’.

I have been scouring published data from a variety of disciplines over the last few years, ranging from modern economic theory to anthropology and climatology, looking for clues as to the future prospects of modern technical civilization.

I have concluded that complacency may well result in a future in which society self destructs a few years from now, resulting in humans surviving in greatly diminished numbers on a devastated world. History is replete with examples of famines, health, and environmental crises that humans brought upon themselves resulting in the total collapse of organized societies ranging from the natives of Easter Island to the Mayans and early civilizations of Asia and the Levant.

One of my favorite scientists, Jared Diamond, has elaborated on this sad history in his scholarly book, ‘Collapse’. It is well worth reading.

Our complacency is exemplified in the current struggle to obtain an agreement between countries regarding the global warming phenomena. Governments simply ignore the urgency and dither around, with politics and ‘junk’ science driving the process toward some ‘compromise’ solution. I believe that the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ is largely responsible for this behavior.

Everyone seems to think that technical or scientific solutions will appear like the magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat. Unfortunately, this appears very unlikely this time around.

Supporting evidence to back my assertion can be found easily if one takes the time to look. Some examples:

(a)Climatic feedback loops that are in play that amplifies climate extremes. These then trigger rapid and dramatic changes that last thousands or even millions of years.

(b)Global homogeny of food crops, whose strains are now susceptible to total global devastation from mutant viruses and/or insect ‘pests’.

(c)Worldwide dependence on certain local ‘bread baskets’, such as the American/Canadian Mid-West for corn and soybeans.

(d)Infectious microorganisms such as HIV that can mutate within hours to defeat any antibiotic measures.

(e)The global crisis that is developing over the availability of potable water, and the contamination of water and agricultural top soil with heavy metals, pesticides, and radioisotopes.

(f)The ongoing collapse of ecosystems and species vital to human survival due to overpopulation, slash & burn of forests and rangeland, the breakdown of the oceanic food chain, overfishing, human draining of estuaries and vital marshlands, destruction of coral reefs, and so forth.

(g)The enthusiastic proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that are now in the hands of societies driven by superstitious belief systems and accustomed to resolving social disagreements through conflict.

And, the world is now depending on a handful of highly educated people around the globe to come up with painless and easy solutions to these and other unknown developing problems.

Of course, the idea that we are likely to come up with unanticipated technical answers to environmental problems is not entirely bullshit, but the odds of solutions arriving in the nick of time are very poor, and it will only take a nudge from some unanticipated event like Mount Vesuvius having another major eruption, or some plate tectonic motion in the Pacific to start the cascade of events leading to global disaster.

The only hope we have, in my view, is to take off the blinders and look at the future with a jaundiced eye, then force global cooperation to make immediate and painful adjustments to human social behaviors and organization that results in a coordinated response to these developing problems. This means truth in government, including the ‘bad’ news.

As an example of the problem, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ‘father’ of Pakistan’s A-Bomb program, publicly admitted last week that China shipped to Pakistan weapons grade uranium sufficient for two bombs, along with the detailed plans to construct the weapons and start Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Khan then handed out the information to other Muslim countries. Yet, little or no mention of the new disclosure of this world-changing event has been made by governments or the mainstream press. Why? Because it is not ‘politically correct’ at the present time.

Where is the outrage? This sort of manipulation of public opinion and promotion of complacency has to come to a screeching halt, if we are to survive.

Another example can be found in the recent destruction of dams on rivers such as the Elwha River and others in Washington State (over 40 dams destroyed so far) and many in California in order to ‘rehabilitate’ habitat for species like the spawning Salmon. Pressure from environmental groups promoting ‘Ecotopia’ were the driving force, and it became ‘politically incorrect’ to offer countering arguments & suggestions.

Well, I am an avid fisherman and environmentalist, but several facts should have been considered:

Open bodies of water such as lakes and reservoirs are some of the best carbon sinks on the planet, removing millions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The ‘clean energy’ hydroelectric plants kept billions of tons of CO2 that otherwise would have been generated by coal-fired plants out of the atmosphere for decades. It is not difficult or expensive to build zig-zagging ramps up from the river bed to the surface area of the lake behind the dam that would allow the fish to reach their spawning grounds. In addition, the rivers could be ‘flushed' on occasion to simulate spring flooding that is necessary for ‘pristine’ river habitat. This is currently being done at Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.

Political correctness is one of the major evils that have been thrust on society, and it will kill us all if we don’t do something about it.

This is a major task for the social sciences, and they are just as important as the physical sciences in dealing with the developing crisis. We cannot afford to wait to get a plan of action underway, and we must prepare ourselves for the unpleasant adjustments that we must make to our current ways of life and thinking.

The alternative is for humans to become a part of the greatest extinction event since the demise of the dinosaurs.

My dear Opera friend, Isabel Wicked Lizard sent me an e-mail today with a searchable link to a great musical website that features an astounding array of quality music videos with an emphasis on Latino artists.

Your can find it here: Musica

Listening to some of the selections by artists I never heard of from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and so forth, made me regret again the great loss to the USA of the musical cultural heritage of Cuba. The Afro-Cuban influence on the American musical scene was pretty much quashed for a long time by the politics of fear and hatred that surrounded the rise of Fidel Castro and his government.

All we had to tide us over was the great band of Stan Kenton and his classic tune, ‘The Peanut Vendor'.

A few really great artists such as the trumpeter, Arturo Sandoval, were able to slip the noose and expose us (primarily New Yorkers) to the exciting talent emerging in that island nation; and of course, Carlos Santana, Mongo Santamaria, Pete Escovedo, and other giants of the genera finally let us have it right between both ears.

But, it was a long time coming, and I often wonder what the state of America music might have been today, had this trend toward 'Salsa' been allowed to flourish unimpeded. Now, please understand that I am definitely NOT a fan of Hip-Hop, Grunge, Heavy Metal, and the other noise that masquerades as music nowadays. I am sure there may be selections by individual artists that transcend the norm, but I simply can’t wade through the ear-splitting garbage to get to it.

But, I was very pleased to follow-up on Isabel’s kind e-mail. No doubt, I’ll learn a lot.

And so, Isabel, here is my response as a way of thanking you. The artist featured in the attached video is long dead. He could not read music and was without any formal schooling on the piano, but he was a GIANT in the progressive jazz scene. I’m sure most of my readers have never heard of him.

According to the laws of physics, all of the earth’s heavy metals should have sunk to the planet’s interior, with the densest elements such as Uranium residing at the core. Very little should have been found in the earth’s crust, and hydrothermal transport and plate tectonics really can’t account for the rich ore bodies that we currently mine today.

This makes a good case for the hypothesis that these ore deposits are the direct result of asteroids and comets impacting the earth in the distant past. A similar theory has been advanced for the near-surface petroleum deposits that fuel modern society.

The exhaustion of these resources presents a danger for our future every bit as urgent as that of global climate change. It follows that our advance as a global civilization can only be maintained by replenishing these resources from outer space.

I read this week that Russia is working on a nuclear rocket that it hopes will facilitate rapid and less expensive transit of humans and robots from the earth to the outer reaches of the solar system. I applaud this development as, in my estimation, it is the only power system that makes sense, given the vast distances to be crossed and the diminutive power that will be available from the sun near the orbits of the asteroid belt and the gas giant planets such as Jupiter.

It is in these outer reaches that rich sources of our vital hydrocarbons and heavy metals will be found in nearly unlimited quantities.

In 1960, NASA and the AEC created the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office to manage project Rover/NERVA. In the following decade, it oversaw a series of reactor tests: Kiwi-A, Kiwi-B, Phoebus, Pewee, and the Nuclear Furnace, all conducted by Los Alamos to prove concepts and test advanced nuclear propulsion ideas.

Aerojet and Westinghouse tested their own series: NRX-A2 (NERVA Reactor Experiment), A3, EST (Engine System Test), A5, A6, and XE-Prime (Experimental Engine). All were tested at the Nuclear Rocket Development Station at the AEC's Nevada Test Site, in Jackass Flats, Nevada, about 100 miles west of Las Vegas. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, the Nixon Administration cut NASA and NERVA funding dramatically.

The cutbacks were made in response to a lack of public interest in human spaceflight, the end of the space race after the Apollo Moon landing, and the growing use of low-cost unmanned, robotic space probes. Eventually NERVA lost its funding, and the project ended in 1973.

We have a lot of catching up to do, and the politicians in Washington have foolishly spent our future on banking bailouts and schemes to keep our outmoded industries afloat. In 2004, NASA proposed Project Prometheus, and the Nuclear Space Initiative. The programs would have developed new types of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), as well as performed research on nuclear propulsion.
But they were shot down by politicians blinded by their own home state pork barrel projects, and by rabid and ignorant civilian organizations such as The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, based in Gainesville, Florida.

Sometime ago, I made a post herein titled ‘Keeping things in perspective’. You can find it here: Perspective

Had the trillion-dollar deficit been applied to the development and implementation of long-range plans for the sustainable expansion of space exploration and the human occupation of our solar system, we might have been in a position to truly re-mediate all of earth’s environmental problems by the beginning of the next century.

And, the deficit would have surely been repaid in short order, rather than becoming a lingering millstone around the necks of our children and our children’s children.

New and unimaginable industries would have arisen to replace the archaic system we have today, and the future of mankind would have likely been assured. But, given our lack of foresight, we are now faced with widespread poverty and the rationing of diminishing resources for the foreseeable future.

And, no defensive system for the inevitable future bombardment of earth by more asteroids and comets from outer space.


A nuclear rocket engine. The fuel could be hydrogen or a variety of other gases, and would greatly reduce the fuel required as well as have a higher specific impulse than existing rocket engines. The hydrogen is plentiful in the solar system, and could be derived from frozen water in nearby comets and asteroids, as well as the surface of the Moon.