A Deep Hidden Yearning That Demands to be Known

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Photo #513: Hell's CaveLocation Taken: Hell’s Half Acre, Wyoming
Time Taken: November 2012

I’ve been in an odd funk, a mood I call “twitchybored”.  It’s a boredom that won’t easily be assuaged.  I keep trying all of my favorite activities, and even some of my less favorite, but it doesn’t take too long before I start getting this twitchy feeling inside of me.  It’s a growing discontent with whatever I’m doing and it won’t stop until I quit the activity – at which point the boredom kicks in again.

In the past, I’ve found an activity that doesn’t make me twitchy before too long, but this one’s been going on for days.  The last time it was this bad was when I was living in Chicago and my computer broke.  I couldn’t get it fixed for months, and well, I got an urge to play computer games pretty early into that time span.  It’s said urges that are the root cause, really.  They don’t fully go away until I give in at least a little, and give my brain the type of stimulation it wants.

Right now it’s not entirely clear what urge is being so demanding, since said urges don’t exactly speak in English.  Though given how much I’ve been listening to Final Fantasy music lately, there’s a good chance I need to break out the Japanese RPGs again and get a good dose of storytelling and grind-heavy gameplay.  Which, alas, is a problem.  I’ve got those types of games for the Playstation 2 and the Nintendo DS, but well, the PS2 isn’t hooked up to anything and I really hate wire wrangling behind our TV.  And my DS is getting old and some of the connections are failing, and I’m not sure I have any RPGs that don’t require one of the buttons that’s on the fritz…

Maybe if this urge keeps going this strong, I’ll actually wrangle these wires.  But still, it’s days like this that almost make me wish I grew up in a cave in the middle of nowhere or something.  I couldn’t have an urge to play a certain type of game if I hadn’t a clue what games were, after all…

Who knows, maybe in thirty years I’ll be having urges to go trampoline-dancing on Europa or something…

  

Why are hidden treasures so tough to get in to see?

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Photo #512: Rough MountainsLocation Taken: Eastern Washington
Time Taken: October 2012

There are some places that are simultaneously very difficult and very easy to take photos of.

There are long stretches of highway that wind through beautifully rough terrain with miles and miles between exits. If you’re bold, perhaps you could stop at the side of the road, but people frown on such things unless you have no other options. And perhaps you could just take the next exit and work your way back, but that assumes there are even other roads going near the fabulous rocks and whatnot that caught your eye. Rough terrain, full of heart-stoppingly beautiful mountains, also tends to be full of heart-stoppingly difficult paths, and well, if it’s too tough, no one’s going to build a road there. The highway claims the pass, and the mountains that surround it are left alone.

And yet, if you’re not the one driving, all you have to do to preserve the scene is be quick with the camera. There’s nothing stopping you from taking photos on the go, after all. But well, you do have to hope the windshield is at least somewhat clean and the motion blur isn’t too bad. And you only have a few chances at the photo, so you’d best get it right quickly. And, of course, you can’t exactly pick the ideal angle and composition.

It’s almost enough to make me take up hiking, just to get into some of these places.

  

Groundhog, Woodchuck, Whistle-Pig, Brown Furry Thing That’s Not An Elk…

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Photo #511: Not A GroundhogLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: November 2012

I saw a groundhog today. It was munching its way through some grass at the side of the road, next to the stoplight I was waiting at. It wasn’t concerned about the cars at all, just the tasty grass, as it wandered around.

I’ve seen a lot of groundhogs at that particular area. It’s got a lot of mowed grassy areas that are rarely actually used by the humans who mowed them, with plenty of space for burrows, plus there’s a forest nearby as well. It seems like a pretty good place to be a groundhog, no real competition, plenty of food, and a reasonable degree of safety. There’s no predators around, even the local hawks aren’t large enough to be a problem for a full-grown groundhog. All they have to watch out for are cars, and they seem to do a good job of it.

I don’t have any photos of groundhogs, though. I’m pretty much always driving when I see them, and I don’t carry my camera around every day. I do have many pictures of elk, though. They’re kinda like groundhogs, brown mammals that adapted well to humanized habitats, right? Eh, close enough.

I keep forgetting groundhogs exist, though. Ask me to list local wildlife and I’ll never remember to include them. They’re, well, too generic. Stout body, not too thick, not too thin. Basic four limbs and a tail, all at standard proportions. Not too small, but not that large. A face that has no specific features, somewhat like a beaver but not too far off of many other animals. Brown fur, covering them solidly but never anything distinguishing. If you boiled down the essence of common features of a mammal, you’d probably end up with a groundhog.

I suppose it’s not bad being generic. I mean, animals choose these features more often than others for a reason. Putting them all together has to work fairly well.

  

Woodhenge, USA. Not to be confused with Woodhenge, UK. Lots of people made these things.

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Photo #510: WoodhengeLocation Taken: Cahokia Mounds State Park, Collinsville, Illinois
Time Taken: November 2012

To continue from yesterday’s discussion about Cahokia, this is another fascinating example of technological might found at the site: woodhenge!

Yes, woodhenge. Think stonehenge but with wood. At least it’s not carhenge.

And technically, it’s a replica. The problem with woodhenge is that, well, it’s made out of wood. Wood rots and weathers away fairly quickly. The only reason we even know woodhenge existed was that rotting posts changes the chemical composition of the dirt it’s sunk into, so archeologists could find and map these ancient wooden circles.

Yes, plural, they made several. There’s a whole series of varying sizes of circles of wooden posts marked into the earth. Every single one has posts perfectly lined up for marking solstices and equinoxes, so just like stonehenge, this was likely used for tracking the movement of the sun.

Given how important it was to maximize the output of the fields that surrounded the city, knowing exactly what time of year it is is crucial to keeping the city fed. When the sun rose at a certain point along the circle of woodhenge (probably marked with a post), it was time to break out the seed corn and get planting! Another post would warn you that winter was close enough to worry about frost, and you’d rush to get the last of the harvest in. And so on.

These days we use calendars to keep track of such things, and growing zone graphs on the back of seed packets. It’s much the same concept, really. And while we’re using a lot of wood for paper to print the calendars and graphs on, at least we don’t have to worry about the posts rotting away.

  

The Grass, Dirt, and History of Cahokia

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Photo #509: Monks MoundLocation Taken: Cahokia Mounds State Park, Collinsville, Illinois
Time Taken: November 2012

Behold! The grand city of Cahokia!

This grand temple was once the center of the largest city in the world, the cultural hub of the continent! The people who lived here traded up and down the Mississippi River, bringing together copper from the north and shells from the south to create fabulous pieces of art!

And, well, today it’s a giant mound of dirt used primarily by joggers as a good source of stair exercise. You can see a few of them in this photo, those little specks of orange and white at the notch in the mound. Which isn’t a notch, really, just angles making a lower terrace look like one. But that should at least give you a sense of scale. This is a really really big mound of dirt. About 100 feet tall, 951 feet long, and 836 feet wide, and made entirely by people. This really required a massive amount of manpower and effort to construct, back in the days before heavy machinery.

There’s mounds scattered all around this large one, though they really are just lumps of dirt on an otherwise flat region. You could make the place into a golf course and you wouldn’t realize these were anything special. For an impressive feat of cultural achievement, the city didn’t leave much behind. It took a lot of archeological work for people to realize what this cluster of mounds actually was, and by that point a significant amount of the outlying mounds were removed due to the growing suburbs of St. Louis, just seven miles away. I guess both the ancient peoples and the modern ones knew a good spot for a city when they saw one.

There’s evidence that the city covered some six square miles of land, about a tenth of the size of modern day St. Louis. But even then, the prevalent theory is that the city died because it succeeded too well. In the days before modern transportation, refrigeration, and agriculture, growing enough food for a city and getting it to the people before it rotted was a monumental task. At some point, you just wouldn’t be able to feed everyone properly, and the excess would leave. As would some of the other people, following the trend, and so on. All the local natural resources slowly ran out, and eventually everyone decided to find more prosperous lands elsewhere.

There’s not much left of the place now, despite it being abandoned for only about 500 years, about as long as the much better preserved Machu Picchu. I guess it shows if you really want your culture to be well known long after you’re gone, build with something other than wood and dirt. Sure, it might be great for the environment, but wood rots and dirt erodes! It’s the fancy stone places that get all the tourist bucks these days, since most tourists don’t want to use their imaginations to the extent needed to see Cahokia these days. The city was grand and vast, but it’s just piles of dirt these days.