Special Agent
     Laundry day in Hawthorne Nevada. I didn't get much wrong apart from loading my wash plus soap into the dryer instead of the washer before inserting my quarters and turning on the machine, then waiting thirty minutes for it to thoroughly dry my already dry, but still unwashed clothes. I was just pulling them out when another customer walked in to whome I exclaimed, " Wow, this washer actually dries your clothes too." He noticed my mistake about half a moment before it finally dawned on me. He gave me a look that said, how stupid can you get? Before he could press that point home the camp manager ( this was at the Good Sam campground where I'd stopped to buy a shower and inspired by my new found cleanliness was following that up with some laundry) stopped in to say hello to the man who had just arrived. He asked him if he had caucused, they knew each other, and the Nevada caucuses of the 2016 presidential race had just occurred. Yes , he answered, and he'd "voted for the idiot". There was no question who he was referring to. He meant Trump. He also seemed very proud to have promoted the candidate that he considered an idiot. Trump had won the Nevada caucus. He was winning most of them. The other candidates were helpless to stop him, and unable to explain or understand his broad appeal inside, much less outside the Republican party.
    Apart from the strangers odd way of characterizing his choice for president, and a genius for discriminating between washers and dryers far exceedingly my own, there was nothing about him that struck you as impressive. He looked just like any other old coot living out in the desert. Turns out ,as we talked, and he told me about his life he was much more impressive in life story than appearance. But what do we expect of people who have lived life much larger than the rest of us? Should they resemble the people who play them in Hollywood? My experience is, they seldom do. They tend to look like the rest of us schlubs.
      We got as far back as 1958 in his story. He told me that that was when he was in the military, in Indochina, and he was recruited by the CIA, a career that lasted almost twenty years. He'd killed for his country, and been shot at, he said. It would have been a suspicious story coming from anyone else but I was warming up to him, and still find it all believable. Then came marriage to a beautiful casino floor manager in Las Vegas. After her untimely death he took to drinking and misspent the money she had left him. Much of it went to buying brothels in central Nevada. He had owned three, including the famous Bunny Ranch. It was there he'd had the misfortune of having partners who were skimming off the profits for themselves. This lead to a fight. That led to two bullet holes in his belly which he was happy to show me. The other guy didn't walk away. You don't get into a gun battle with ex-CIA may be the moral of that story.
      Was any of this true? Was all of it or none of it? Who knows? Might make a great book really. Someone could buy the movie rights. Someone could play a younger, slightly more chiseled version of our hero. I'm thinking ,Matt Damon.
     I eventually got those confusing machines worked out, which one was dry and which one was wet, and in what order to use them. I rode out of Hawthorne cleaner, happier, and wondering about all the schlubs out there. They've all got some kind of story to tell. An hour alone with them in the laundromat of a one horse town might be enough to throw off all your first impressions, or maybe just confirm your harshest suspicions. Maybe you just need to pick the right laundry, or the wrong machine.

Populist times, populist choices

     "Populism is an impulse ,not an ideology". Historian Michael Kazin

       This may go down as the most entertaining election for president of our lifetime. You can substitute the word "entertaining" with disturbing, or saddest ,or disastrous if you like. I'm not saying that this election makes me hopeful ,or bolsters my faith in democracy, I'm just pointing out that even when life appears hopelessly out of kilter there is still some amusement to be had.
        Nothing could be more preposterous than the campaign of Donald Trump; preposterous, and apparently unstoppable. He is managing to do what no leading Republican presidential candidate has done and which all have strived for over the last thirty years. He is attracting new blood into the grand old party. His appeal crosses all lines of color, education, ideology, and religious commitment. There seems to be no common denominator to the Trumpians except a generally right of center point of view and a mistrust of Republican party leaders. That ought to define Cruz's support. His Senate career has been all about sticking it in the eye of party leaders, while holding down the right of the party of the right. He has a track record. He has the rhetorical style of a street preacher, but he lacks Trumps gift of banter and over the top bluster. This has brought to Trump the votes that Cruz has failed to win. The message that he presents more skilfully and authentically is muffled by the noise of the Trump circus.
         If you're looking for consistency in the Trump campaign, or evidence of core beliefs you're looking in the wrong direction. What you get from the Trump campaign is Donald Trump, and whatever he happens to believe, or says he believes at that moment. Over the the last sixteen years as Trump has been considering a run, or running for president ,he has changed his views on almost everything. Recently we saw an astounding triple reversal in a three day period. 
        You may have guessed I'm not a Trump fan. That's not to say I'm feeling the Bern either. Bernie represents an opposing populism to Trumps right of center approach. Populism crops up from time to time in American politics, especially during traumatic times. The great depression saw the rise of left wing populist movements ;Father Coughlin and Hughy Long. At the end of the tumultuous 1960s former Democrat governor George Wallace ran as an independent candidate for President to the right of Republicans and Democrats and did a better job of threatening the two party monopoly than anyone apart from Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. The message of populism is this : The people are the rightful rulers and their influence is being usurped by powerful and unscrupulous elites. It's time to take back our party. It's time we take back our nation and throw the bums out! I suppose there's something to be said for that. Does that make me a populist? Populists rarely self identify. I guess that's the second reason for suspecting me of populist tendencies. I deny that that I am one.
       Sanders populism identifies Wall Street bankers as the culprits of choice. Billionaires ,and the rest of the top one percent are not far behind. Somehow in the Sanders imagination if we can get a hold of the piece of their wealth that is truly excess and spread that out to the more deserving we will become another Sweden. Want will be banished, neighbor will look after neighbor, education will be free, and we'll all be driving solar powered Volvos. Oh, happy day!
         Somewhere between Trumps chameleon flexibility, and Sanders democratic socialism, and Cruz's thundering sermons, there must be some less offensive choice in this election. This quieter, more sensible choice would be a doer rather than a blusterer. They would have a track record for getting things done, bringing people of disparate viewpoints together and hammering out consensus, or standing in the way of popular folly when that is called for, and bending popular will to their greater courage or insight like Churchill or Lincoln. They would not be facing indictment for recklessly exposing vital secrets to enemy agents and hackers then lying about it. They would not have a past record of unseemly financial arrangements, or a history of facilitating the threatening of victims of their husbands unwanted sexual advances, or the reputation assassination of those who came forward. I'm asking too much. It's a bit like asking for normal times when the cosmic calender has you scheduled for interesting times instead. In times like these all you may be able to do is sit back and enjoy the show, or at least find a little time for laughter between the tears.

A trappers improbable tale

  Hugh Glass was born near the end of the 18th century. For someone who would make his name in the untamed American west this was either the perfect time to come into the world or the worst. The territory that would later form the western States was raw, primordial, without cities or towns west of St. Louis, hostile to outsiders, and dangerous to anyone that lived there. America had bought this territory from Napoleon when he needed the money to wage war against the British Empire while Glass was still a boy, The United States lacked the resources, or even the population to fully claim it. Into the breach stepped adventures, traders, and entrepreneurs. Glass was among them.
   One version of his story has him becoming the captive of Gulf Coast pirate Jean Lafitte and pressed into service to man his fleet. After his escape from life as as a pirate he went westward to join  the Pawnees, or perhaps, taken captive by them before winning freedom. He took a Pawnee wife and later joined a delegation of chiefs to represent the tribes interests in Saint Louis.., When Saint Louis trader, General William Henry Ashton  assembled a hundred trappers to establish his financial empire in the Rocky Mountains, Glass was chosen as a guide. Ashton business model was innovative, and characteristically American.  His beaver trappers would be largely self financed free trappers. Up until then the fur trade in North America had relied on native Americans to do the trapping, and hired men ( engages) to do the trading. What Ashley introduced was a little like Uber going up against entrenched taxi interests.  It was wildly successful, and it would change the history of the west beyond anything that had happened since the Louisiana Purchase.
    Glass became famous not as a successful trapper or even an explorer, but for the awful mauling he received from a Grizzly sow and his overcoming those injuries after being left for dead by his companions. His story became entwined with the story of the western fur trade. It's also the basis of the Oscar winning film the Revenant starring Leonardo DiCaprio. His struggle to survive was almost super human, and if anything, even more dramatic and improbable than the drama captured on film. 
    I loved the movie, but was disappointed to find it had played so fast and loose with the story as it has been recorded. I don't fault it for moving the action  from its Great Plains setting to the Rockies. The cinematography is stunning, and the setting more in keeping with the old west as we imagine it. Anyhow, where can you film in the Dakotas that looks anything like that territory before large scale farming, powerlines and roads, the damming of its rivers, or fracking?
     Ashton's hundred would become the vanguard of the movement that would discover the ranges and valleys of the western United States long before other European Americans would arrive on their way to the oilfields of California or the forests of Oregon. After the beaver of the American west were nearly wiped out from trapping those trappers who against all odds were still alive, would guide explorers and  surveyors, and emigrants. Manifest destiny was their destiny, made manifest. Their trails became the west's highways, as their camps would become our cities and towns.
       In the almost two centuries since Glass's ordeal so much has changed. It's astonishing that much of the scenery has not.
       As an itinerant bicyclist in the west, looking for a little adventure I move daily through scenes that excite the history buff in me. This last week I cycled from the Northeastern corner of California to Pyramid Lake in Nevada, then South to the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range, Mono Lake and the Owens Valley. Wagon trails passed through here during the California gold rush. Kit Carson, himself a former trapper, guided the explorer John C. Fremont across this same route so little changed by the passage of time. To see what they saw, to drink from the same springs and bath in the same hot springs, to watch the moon's rise over the mountains as they did, is a privilege and a thrill. The trail is a little smoother for the grading and the paving, the ride a little faster on two wheels, but the continuity is astonishing. Best of all there's so little danger anymore of being mauled by angry bears, or pierced with arrows .