Harry Potter and toastites
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
A bottle of good merlot while camping is a wonderful thing. Luckily my son-in-law Erik’s Dad, Rocky Tuttle, is a wine guy, namely, he studies the stuff. While my family was visiting Annie and Erik a couple of months ago in 29 Palms, California, Rocky was also visiting from Arizona and provided the wine for a barbecue we had at our cabin at the 29 Palms Inn. He bought some inexpensive (about $10 a bottle) Columbia-Crest wine from the local grocery store. It was extremely good. I am a merlot guy, so I know. The wine was 2004 Columbia-Crest Merlot, but it must also say “Grand Estates” on the label. I brought along two bottles for this camping trip.
Unfortunately I couldn’t open the bottles. The cork was just too tight. Luckily, I have a 
15-year-old son, Jake, who is immensely powerful, so he opened them after a bit of effort.
This has been a very relaxing camping trip. Lenie has taken to reading the boys Harry Potter’s 7th book during the day because they are within a hundred pages of the end of this 759-page book, so I’ve had lots of time to just think. I think J. K. Rowling will be remembered just like Shakespeare, who was also very popular in his own time. We know from the history that people flocked to Shakespeare’s plays, especially his comedies, and now we read him hundreds of years later.
Hopefully, the language won’t change as much in the future as it did between Shakespeare’s time and now. Shakespeare was at the beginning of 
modern English, inventing many of the words and phrases we now take for granted, but we can still understand him with the help of a good English teacher or a guide. But our modern English is evolving quickly, at least as quickly since Shakespeare’s time. Isn’t that weird? The language we speak today is changing so much that we probably will have difficulty understanding Harry Potter a few centuries from now. If we let some teachers from the inner cities have their way, we won’t be able to understand some of our citizens a few decades from now.
Rocky Tuttle, by the way, is much more than a wine officionado. He is Gold Beach High 
School’s greatest football star, prominently displayed in its Hall of Fame. He got a full football scholarship to Idaho State, then got an offer to try out for the Green Bay Packers in his senior year. He said ”no” and decided to pursue a career in banking. I asked him if he regrets that decision, and he said he didn’t. “I realized I was simply finished with football,” he told me. He ran a 4.4 forty in college. That’s fast!
We’re eating good while camping. One of my favorite snacks is a toastite made from apples we picked from our own trees at home and blackberries we picked while here. Sandwiched between two pieces of whole wheat bread, it’s very healthy, besides being delicious. I also 
sprinkle on a bit of cinnamon sugar. We spray the insides of the toastiter with Pam, but any oil will do. Otherwise the bread sticks to the toastiter. They also cook quick in the fire pit, so you have to check them often or they’ll burn.
The boys make a sour candy from the unripe blackberry kernels. They just break them out and carry them around in their pockets. I tried some: very good but very sour.
I was off with my prediction of the number of strokes, but Tiger Woods did win the PGA Championship today. Hooray! During the TV ads, I went out in my yard and practiced chipping. Unfortunately, Tiger’s performance didn’t inspire my game at all.
We’re at the 
The swamp cooler in our fairly primitive cabin works fine, but we have to battle a few flies and ticks. This is one of our favorite motels. It’s primitive by design. We even have to go outside to use an attached bathroom. It has regular plumbing but no swamp cooler, so it’s like being in a sauna. But we love the place. Sam and Rob sleep in the loft, Jake on a couch, and Lenie and I have a real bed.
The Inn is an oasis in the Mojave Desert. Very old with about a dozen little cabins scattered around it. It has a natural little pond with lots of palm trees, a huge garden that supplies its excellent restaurant, and a pool off the restaurant. We especially like to swim at night as we listen to a musician perform. (I mentioned the 
We arrived at my daughter Annie’s house in time to celebrate her 25th birthday at the 29 Palms Inn in 29 Palms. Both Annie and I, as well as Jake and Robby, had their grilled salmon, which was as good as any 
I’ve ever had. Annie is tall and pretty and married to, as she likes to say, The Man, a tall, handsome Marine Corps sergeant named Erik Tuttle. They were high school sweethearts and now have two little grandkids, Olga 
and Gavin, for Lenie and I to enjoy.
to Annie with the poolside crowd joining in. Very nice! Beverly and Bill are an extremely talented duo and I bought a copy of the lone CD they have produced as a present for Annie.
Annie will ultimately take over the editorial duties of Backwoods Home Magazine, after I am so old and senile I sound like an idiot when I write my libertarian editorials. She is a very good thinker and writer, also libertarian, and 
keeps a 
early August move to Erik’s new station at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. I think they’ll enjoy the break from the 107-degree heat here and the endless miles of desert, but they’ll have to get used to North Carolina’s summer 
humidity.
hitting the earth about 50,000 years ago. It is 4000 feet wide and 700 feet deep.
earth’s crust. Its oldest rocks are 1840 million (1.8 billion) years old. (The earth is only 4.5 billion years old.) But the Canyon carving itself, which was created by the relentless flowing of the Colorado River, is only 5 to 6 million 
years old. The Colorado drops about 4600 feet as it travels the 277 river miles through the canyon. The canyon width ranges between 8 and 16 miles. Words cannot describe its immensity. I’ve posted a few photos, 
but they don’t do it justice either. You just have to come here to understand.
Every time I drive through Indian Country of the Southwest, I am struck by how desperately poor most of the Indians appear to be. Their culture seems to have imploded ever since their first contact with European civilization back in the 16th century. BHM has done articles about how the diseases of Western Civilization killed as many as 95 percent of the indigenous populations of the Americas, but we’ve never explored the cultural and psychological shock that seems to have devastated the remaining Indian populations even to this day.
Maybe I’m not even stating the phenomenon properly, but it is evident that most Indian populations of the Southwest do not fare well
We made it to the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest of Arizona, both of which are stark but magnificent. The trees that have turned to stone are 225 million years old, which is the very beginning of the rise of dinosaurs. It would be another 40 million years before dinosaurs would come to dominate earth and then reign supreme for 120 million years until a meteor the size of Mount Everest would hit on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and wipe them out and lead to the rise of mammals and finally humans. How’s that for a quick history lesson.
We’ve got another week of travel to go, then we’ll be back in Oregon and go right into two weeks of deadline for the next issue. Thanks to my laptop and the fact every motel you stop in has free highspeed internet, I’ve been coordinating things with various writers and my staff back in Gold Beach. While in Rush, Colorado, Don Childers and I even worked up a tentative cover he will paint for the new issue. It will be of the totally self sufficient house of one of Don’s neighbors. I toured it and took a lot of photos, so I’ll have to write up the text for it when I get back along with my other jobs.
We traveled about 435 miles today, stopping by a New Mexico field to catch giant grasshoppers. Otherwise the boys passed the time in the car playing on their DS, which is a hand-held game system. The game they played was Age of Empires, in which they battled each other utilizing the armies produced by their different civilizations. Very realistic game. Their armies depended on the crops their villages grew, the size of their natual resources including gold mines, and their skill at raising and commanding an army.
It was 96 degrees as we pulled into Albuquerque, New Mexico just before 7 p.m. I told my kids to enjoy the cool weather because in a few days we’ll be at Annie’s house in 29 Palms, California, where it will be 10 or 15 degrees warmer. How do people live in this heat?
It never gets above 70 degrees in Gold Beach, Oregon, where BHM is located, and never above about 80 degrees a mile and half inland where I live. I’ll take my six or seven months of Oregon rain a year over this heat. A lot of people can’t stand so much rain, and they move out of Oregon a year after moving there. It took my body about a year and half to acclimate, as I seemed to get frequent colds, but then I got used to things and have lived happily ever since. Despite the rain, coastal Oregon is not muggy like it has been in so many places during this 4500-mile (so far) trip.
When BHM’s senior editor, John Silveira, and I were 20 years old we hitchhiked through Albuquerque as part of a 9000-mile plus hitchhiking trip across America. It was just a little city then, but now it is huge. We had some problems back then with thugs who threatened to kick the crap out of us. Luckily we got out of town, the heat, and the potential trouble intact. We subsequently ended up hitchhiking through Watts in L.A. the evening of the Watts riots. We survived that too and ended up at John’s sister’s house in San Diego.
Holy hailstones! Second day we were here the sky ruptured and let loose an avalanche of huge hailstones. While out for a walk, we saw thunder in some distant rain clouds so headed inside. Then, within about 15 minutes, it 
started raining, then thundering, then the hailstones as big as golf balls began. We found a rug on on the porch and covered the car’s skylight with it so it wouldn’t get smashed. I was out just a few seconds when a big hailstone hit me on the top of my head like a hammer. I went back in and got my hat but still had to cover my head with my hand.
One of the skylights in Don’s living room was broken and the house sprang about eight leaks in various rooms. The hail must have done a lot of damage to the roof. We all scrambled for pots to catch the leaks as the lightning and hail went absolutely nuts for about a half hour. Then it was all over and the sun came out after a little while. 
What weather!
We passed the 3000-mile mark last night as we headed into Osceola, which is south of Des Moines in the middle of Iowa. Mile after mile of corn with an occasional hay field. Very beautiful! Just before we hit Iowa, we stopped in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit with Lenie’s
As Mark Twain wrote extensively about topics based on the Mississippi, I had my photo taken with his statue on the museum grounds. The guy who gave us the steamer tour had his hair curled and mustache trimmed so he looked a bit like Mark Twain. I don’t think anyone will ever shave their head and put on a goofy grin to look like me. But at least I got to hang out with Mark for a brief sit.
States like Minnesota and Wisconsin are fairly densely populated, not with big cities but with many many small towns. Iowa was too but not
We had a bit of a scare today. Lenie had some jaw pain, tingling in her fingers, and chest discomfort so we stopped in an emergency room
