Neanderpundit

mile after mile

Yesterday I went out on a saunter with a friend of mine.

Well, since this is the guy I’m going to Africa with and who is financing the trip, it was more like “Let’s see how long before we have to call in medevac for the old fat guy”.

The idea was to park at the Kickapoo state recreation area and hike up the Vermillion River. We figure it went about seven miles, all told, and it waqs through some pretty rugged terrain. We ended up having to ford at more than one place, and my Danners held me in good stead (which reminds me, I need to get them aired out and the dried mud scraped off)

Speaking of which, the Danners were perfect. Thanks to Chris Byrne and all the folks who suggested them; they fit me perfectly and gave me the support I needed, and are the perfect hiking boot. I may have to get a cold weather set when my Sorels finally bite the dust.

Anyway, I managed to do the whole trek, incluiding a half dozen rips up and down bluffs easily 100 foot high, (yes, not all of Illinois is flat as a board) and my guide was the only person who needed assistance (didn’t eat before the hike, and his blood sugar crashed)

Luckily I had a can of pineapple and he was in good nick in a few minutes- but he ended up handing HIS pack off to one of his boys.

Pack- oh yeah. I packed in the following items, bottom to top:

Sleeping bag
Hoodie
change of clothes
Two changes of socks
Fourteen hundred pairs of underwear (you go through a lot of them, sliding facefirst down a 100 foot bluff)
six D cell Maglite (weapon. Not legal to carry firearms in state parkland)
first aid kit
food for four for three days (tinned beans and meat, tinned pineapple, freeze dried foods, water)
plastic bags
rope- 100 feet
and about another ten pounds of assorted stuff totalling 45 lbs. I dragged this pack through hell, and made it, while the old hands struggled with shoulder bags full of water.

I’m a little proud of myself.

And more than a little sore.

The subject intrigues me and sends me in a lot of different directions.

The James Burke series “Connections” and it’s spawn resonated with me because that has always been the way I think. The whole of human behavior, and the progress of man through the ages, is a constant pattern of behavior- of reaction to forces, of utilization of resources. A non-vicious infinite regression.

If we look at a map of the united states, you can see that the oldest cities are on water. Newport News. New York. Hampton VA. St Augustine. Quincy. Civilization began to spread from those places in North America. The next oldest cities follow inland rivers and lakes. After that, railroads. A great deal- if not all- of the west was settled a whistlestop at a time. Finally, the automobile allowed us to have jobs more than an hours walk or horse ride from our homes, and allowed manufacturers to establish facilities away from water and rail, but by the new highways that sprang up all across the land.
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Some real, old technology.

The Friden Flexowriter.

From the early days on, if you wanted to get information into a computer, or an NC machining center or lathe, you used this.

They also had the ability to do personalized mailings, etc. There was a bare minimum of computational power in this bugger, and by the time this sucker rolled off the line, it had no less than a handful of actual solid state transistors in it, some of them actually used to make simple decisions.

Meeeemreeeeeez.

Yeah, it’s forlorn and dusty. I still use it sometimes to punch out a piece of cose to test soemthing.