Camping Wednesday: Lots of Unmaintained Trails.

Wednesday was a bit of a disappointment. The Fitbit says I awoke around 3:15 to use the loo, but didn't fall asleep again until 3:50. The next time I looked up it was 8:30. I guess that means I slept well.

Omaha rose about a half hour later and we had scrambled eggs and bacon. The bacon was amazing, I must get that brand again. We burned two pieces of toast so badly they were sacrificed to the fire, but the next two came out perfect. It was one of the nicest breakfasts I've had in a long time.

The Great Red Cedar

Omaha and I headed out for Slide Lake. At first, it seemed that we'd taken a trail that led to a washed-out and impassible road, but no, our navigation was worse than that; we were entirely on the wrong side of the map. Recalibrating, we headed out a place called Lookout Tree Trail, which had one of the largest Red Cedars left in these woods. It was supposed to be the backend of Beaver Lake Trail (the part that was marked inaccessible yesterday on the map). The tree was quite fantastic, but beyond it the trail was completely overgrown, and there was no way we were gonna get to see the other side of Beaver Lake.

One of many forest roads.

We drove up Forest Road 23, which was an adventure in ruts and bumps, only to discover it, too, was washed out long before we reached the next trail. For our next trick, we stopped at the Clear Creek Boat Launch (which was nine miles away from Clear Creek Campground), then tried to go up Forest Road 22. That too was a failure: a large piece of road maintenance equipment had slipped off the side of the road and was lying there looking as if something very unfortunate had happened to its axle.

I played a bit with the camera, taking multiple exposures to try and get higher resolution, pseudo-HDR style photographs, so if you click on any of the photos and wonder why there are so darned many pictures of this road, that's why.

We finished off the last 1.2 miles of Old Sauk instead, the trail we had done yesterday. Omaha's knees and ankles held up very well today, so I suspect that she's mostly just not exercising them enough. We ended at Miller Creek, which was a lovely place to take our shoes off and soak our feet in the cool water.

For our next trick, we tried to find Frog Lake. The book advised us that Frog Lake wasn't very interesting, and the book was eight years old, which means that it also wasn't very accurate. When we finally found the trail, it was so overgrown from disuse that Omaha and I couldn't possibly have hacked our way through it.

One of the saddest things I saw was a sign that read, "This forest was replanted in 1939. Look around to see how well the new forest has recovered and grown. The Forest Service does everything it can to maintain and make useful our national forests for every generation." It saddened me to think that Sonny Perdue, a man who thinks only in board-feet, was in charge of these forests. I suppose it's been like this since Reagan, who infamously said,

I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?

All of them, Mr. President. All of them.

I finished one book, a smuffy romantic fanfic called Anna Summers, PA, and it was as adorable as the first time I'd read it. (It has a Goodreads entry!)

For dinner, Omaha and I made Chicken Foil, with freshly sliced potatoes, condensed cream of mushroom soup, and a pack of frozen stir-fry vegetables. Omaha made the foil packets extra-thick this year and it really paid off– everything was incredibly moist and delicious, and somehow nothing got burned. Only the potatoes were a bit underdone, but I suspect they'd be better blanched first.

We played Boss Monster, a card game in which you and your opponents strategically build dungeons out of cards drawn from a deck, then lure unsuspecting heroes to their doom. If your boss has to deal with the hero personally, the hero lives and you get a wound; otherwise, you collect the hero's body. If you collect five wounds, you're out of the game. The person to get ten souls first wins. It's a nifty conceit, and a bit tricky. Omaha beat me twice.

We did the dishes afterward, and I told Omaha that she'd accomplished something remarkable in our thirty years: she'd turned me into a decent husband. She said I'd always been a decent husband, just a little rough around the edges, but the nice thing was that I'd always been a partner in smoothing those edges down.

There's something very sweet about knowing you and your partner are still great lovers and great friends after so long. Camping, even simple camping like this (definitely not glamping, ugh!), away from the clatter and chatter of the busy world where bloviating idiots rule for the moment, reminds me of the smallest pleasures: food, warmth, shelter, good campany, love. Everything else is either stress or pleasure, and even the pleasures are distracting from what's really important.

We got to bed by ten again.

Flying cars: A way for the rich to screw the urban poor without giving up the "urban" part

It took me a while to figure out who these "New, Personal All-Electric Aircraft" being sold to. The Blackfly, Volocopter, Liberty, Solexa, Cora, Lilium, and the Vahana, and so forth are all being sold (or at least pre-sold) as vertical-take off, two or three-person aircraft with super-modern software to ensure that flying this vehicle is safer than a car and easier than a video game, with all the sensors, navigational tools, and touch controls you could possibly want. The advertising gleefully tells you that electric nature of these aircraft means that your fuel supply is anywhere you could plug in a Tesla or a BMW I8, and the average reported range is about three hundred miles. With multiply redundant power supplies, autorotate enabled on some models, and a last-ditch parachute in case things really go bad, these cars are being touted as the next big thing in personal aviation, and they're even being sold as "the democratization of personal air travel."

Somewhere in America, Paul Moller is crying in his beer.

I've finally figured out what these flying cars are for. Given that the Liberty starts at $400,000, and the luxury edition goes for $600,000, the average citizen is not going to own a flying car anytime soon. On a camping trip recently, I passed by a massive mansion being constructed seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but as the crow flies only about 105 miles from downtown Seattle.

That's for whom these cars are being developed. It's not for the 0.01%, but for those between 1% and 0.01%, the ones who can't afford an island off the coast of New Zealand, but who can afford a million-dollar car that lifts them (literally) above the common people and gets them to the city in 30 minutes or less, where they trade their electric luxury airplane for their electric luxury car. This used to be the province of people who could afford helicopters, but helicopters are dangerous and expensive to operate; a local news anchor once told me that "just turning the helicopter costs a thousand dollars." But these things fit in a parking space, plug into your citys' graciously granted EV outlets, and doesn't cost you much more than your car does. (Yes, lift is much more expensive, energy-wise, than tires, and it does take something to get off the ground, but compared to aviation gasoline, electricity is cheap.)

I wonder how these people feel about The Event, the supposed coming culling of the human herd that Doug Rushkoff and Charlie Stross sometimes write about. Are they hoping that their out-of-the-way-ness means they'll be safe from the great disaster that comes when the food, water, and electricity distribution networks freeze up? I doubt it; they've still got neighbors and they've made their homes in places where the locals are used to walking long miles.

Electric flying cars are just another of those metaphorical walls the rich are obliged to build, only it's a barrier made of distance and energy, not of brick and mortar. It's a way for the rich to escape the city (and not having to pay it any property taxes!) while also leaving the city intact and accessible, another resource to be mined rather than a place to be lived.