A View to a Chill

Bowhunting in North Dakota in late December is for serious nutters...

Happy coincidences on the Gregorian calendar allowed me to turn three days of paid time off into an 11 day vacation at the close of 2012. Our man in North Dakota, Tim Overmoen, had a large buck prowling his river bottom hunting ground.  So far as anyone knew he had not fallen to a rifle bullet or a muzzleloader sabot during the earlier gun seasons.  A last minute archery hunt was mounted.   California hunting buddy, Greg Clemmer, had to beg off at the last minute.  Seems a nasty sore throat and fever settled into pneumonia, so he spent the last week on the hunting season sprawled on his sofa.  Slacker.  
 
The Winter Solstice observed, the Mayan new year ignored, and Christmas Eve festivities executed, on Christmas Day I drove by myself to my Aunt Phyllis' farm a few miles west of Hillsboro, North Dakota.  Phyllis spends her winters in town these days so I had the place all to myself.  I didn't have my license yet so I spent the afternoon on a ridge above the Tim's segment of the Goose River conducting a recce.  

Did I mention the temperature?  Highs were in the oughts and teens all week, so sitting in the open or using my climbing tree stand was not an option.  I used a pop-up portable blind and a small propane heater to create a wee little cube of tolerable that measured five feet on a side.  The heater worked better when I wrapped it in a space blanket. 

I played the wind as best I could, choosing three different spots as warranted.  In the space of six days I encountered as few as four and as many as two dozen deer, but all were does and fawns.  I could have put a stalk on several of them but I was there for bucks.  I saw two bucks, but not necessarily the buck, and neither graced me with a shot.

In my down time I slept in, finished reading Boneshaker and Cairns, started reading Humans and The Moral Animal.  On my drive to and from ND and during slow afternoons in the blind I caught up on my backlog of podcasts, mostly from Gresham College, the LSE, and the RSA.  On Saturday Auntie and I drove to Grand Forks to see Les Miserables and have a spot of supper.

Alone on the farm where I spent the happiest days of my childhood and where I collected many fine hunting stories as an adult, I realized that a place - even this place - is but a canvas upon which people in relationship, family, and community create cherished memories. 

On the Monday of New Year's Eve the high was expected to be only zero degrees (yes, Fahrenheit) - too cold even for this nutter - so I packed my kit, loaded the truck, and drove back to Minneapolis, looking for home. 

David B. Williams Has a Very Special Way of Looking at the World

Starting with just a pile of rocks...

Cairns: Messengers in Stone, is one seriously clever, entertaining, and informative book.  As author David B. Williams examines the natural and unnatural history of cairns, the people who make and use them, the stones they're made of and how they age, and what grows upon and around them, he treats the reader to a rich and involving story that in less capable hands might have been merely a disordered midden of cocktail party trivia.

Across nine chapters, a variety of brief guest essays, and a collection of simple illustrations, Williams touches in useful detail upon topics as varied as anthropology, archeology, astronomy, biology, burial practices, cannibalism, carbon dating and other dating techniques, chemistry, communication, cosmology, ecology, engineering, ethnology, folklore, geocaching, geography, geology, governments, hiking, history, language, lead poisoning, legend, lichenometry, linguistics, mountaineering, mythology, Neolithic hunting practices, paleoanthropology, physics, polar exploration, political history, religion, shamanism, sheep herding, sociology, tool making, tourism, and volcanology. Along the way, Williams makes a powerful yet credible supposition: that cairns - being deliberately assembled way-finding aids - represent not only human tool-making, but also a very early example of human symbolic communication.

If any of these many perspectives on the natural world and human history interest you then you will enjoy this book. 

My copy of Cairns: Messengers in Stone, was a Good Reads First Reads Giveaway.

Not All Private Voices Presage Madness

Some people's inner voices are smarter and more eloquent than others...

Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel B. Smith is a brisk and compelling read.  Smith has a gift for making an ancient story current and a complex story accessible.  There's more to say on this but I'm behind schedule on a couple things...

 

Prayers to Broken Stones

Winter solstice is darker and more desperate this year...

 

The great stones stacked by our Neolithic ancestors mark the moment.  Death presses hard upon us.  The bereft wrestle with theodicy, faces numb and streaked with tears.  The sun returns but offers little warmth.  Prayers go unanswered.  The cosmos unfolds faster than light.  We scarcely notice.

The phrase, prayers to broken stones, comes from the title of a fine and sad anthology of fiction and horror by Dan Simmons.

Oh, Is That All?

I'm sorry, but a team of commandos in every school is not going to be one of the answers...

As a nation we are all reeling from the horror of Sandy Hook.  Even before we understand precisely what happened and why, we are flailing around for the means to reduce our fear of future attacks.  A company called Chameleon Associates posted an article titled, Countermeasures against School Shootings.  Some of their ten countermeasures are thought-provoking and bear further consideration, but number eight is typical of a very popular notion we've been hearing since last Friday.

“Have armed response capabilities – Having an armed security guard on premises does not mean you have “armed response capabilities”. Most armed guards are neither trained nor experienced with tactical response to an active shooter scenario. The armed security guards must be trained in: instinctive shooting, when-to-shoot scenarios, when to stop shooting or chasing, shooting through a face-forward crowd, hand-to-hand combat, aggressiveness training and more. The shooting technique for the guard must be based on an instinctive reaction where he does not need to think, only react and attack the shooter fully neutralizing him as soon as possible. He should not call for backups (someone else will.) He should not take cover (this allows the shooter to be in control.) He should not stop to treat or evacuate the wounded (someone else will.) The guard must know how to shoot while moving fast, forcing the adversary to defend himself. This type of shooting and response requires A LOT of training to the point where the guard’s response is completely instinctive.”

Oh, is that all? Most cops aren’t trained to this level; just ask the nine wounded bystanders at the Empire State Building shooting this year. I wonder what recruiting, screening, selecting, training, equipping, insuring, maintaining, providing time off, and supervising a person at this level would cost each year. How many of these shooters does Chameleon Associates recommend per school to provide sufficient counter-force for one attacker?  How many for two?  On these details they are silent.

Posting heavily armed and armored Navy SEALS in every school in America is certainly a comforting fantasy as we recover from the horror of Sandy Hook, but at some point we'll have to reclaim all our senses and find solutions we can sustain in the real world.