Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  (530) 515-2137      Red Bluff Daily News   8/05/2014

Campsite journal; fire season

Sometimes you can find a place while traveling—specifically camping—that lends itself to an almost unreal detachment from the woes of modern life and strife. Camping is, for many, the ideal means for quality, low stress family togetherness. For us—our motorhome parked in the prettiest spot available, with fresh water and refuse tanks allowing for weeks of campsite enjoyment—it’s recreation unlike either skiing or relaxing at home.

Setting aside the routines of work, school, social and entertainment habits is a great way to really step out of life’s demands and focus on the basics. Campfires and stoves churn out food tasting better because it’s outdoors; hiking on tree-lined trails rewards you with views; venturing out on the water in crafts of all sizes and designs gives the timeless challenge of enticing one of those fin-bearing creatures onto a hook and thence a fry pan. Limited (or even nonexistent) Internet access, spotty cell phone coverage, and marginal radio reception remind us that the nation’s foolishness and the world’s tragedies carry on. Hence, book reading or listening become day-passing preoccupations.

Currently, a lake at 6,300 feet with highs in the 70s helps us to figure out how to avoid an unpleasant return to a 100+ degree outdoor furnace. Much that I’ve observed is inspirational; seeing families recreate outdoors together, with children and kids of various ages acting out their God-given, innocent natures, restores my faith in American values and culture. Remember when turning kids loose in the summer was, with little trepidation, standard procedure? They/we would play, bike, run and live out fantasies, knowing when and where lunch was.

In the case of “families enjoying East Lake” (one of two alpine lakes in the Newberry Caldera National Volcanic Monument), some vignettes beg recounting: Give kids some life vests and a variety of hard and inflatable floating toys, and their playful industriousness takes over. They’ll easily paddle, even with hands; a small kayak, turned over, becomes a hull to sit on. The smooth gravelly shore begs to be kicked, thrown, piled up, mixed with water or just run upon with little bare feet. A rope, a floating log and yards of shore can turn into hours of fun. A camp road might become an “art walk” with chalk etchings overnight.

Combining kids, worms, poles and water clear enough to see the “fishies” down there produces some surefire, nearly-endless activity for them, and entertainment for those observing the passing scene. One time I was napping and heard a big splash, opened my eyes to hear a boy yell “A fish” and watch him pull in what appeared to be a good sized one. This 18-incher turned out to be, when I asked him later, not only the biggest one on this trip but the biggest in his short life. After that, I called Leon (his name) “the mighty fisherman” to his delight. (Within an hour there were five little fishers at that obvious “hot spot” until boredom sent them to other diversions.) Another young girl, taking her turn with her dad fishing from a canoe, hauled in a 12-incher; she proudly beamed that it was the first fish she ever caught. Overheard from one group was the exclamation “Look, there’s only half a worm” (and it won’t be the last one that gets away).

A major source of…inspiration maybe…is seeing extended families of grandparents, brothers, sisters, parents, cousins all behaving in a warm, interactive, loving manner. They’re all just visiting and having fun without any self-created soap operas or strife (with occasional exceptions). The kids—from 2- and 3-year-old munchkins to preteens—are mostly playing together, rarely stop, and are, physically, the spindly, non-bloated creatures I remember from my childhood. For all of the government’s efforts to fight obesity, these kids seem to have found answers in the outdoors: playing, fishing and riding bikes and scooters all day. Just sayin’.

As wild fires plague California and Oregon, a news report and interview on Lars Larsen’s radio show gave perspective to the efforts to tie all things natural to global warming/climate change, etc. Some Oregon official pronounced, at a news event, that the fire season is “60 to 80 days longer” due, of coarse, to climate change/disruption/whatever. Larson interviewed a long-tenured professor of forest studies who, together with colleagues, had studied literally decades of growth and fire patterns; they had made rather specific predictions for the places and years that were most likely to experience conflagrations (predictions proven accurate).

They researched, recorded and analyzed overstocked forests, due to decades of fire suppression and opposition to logging, and concluded that when lightning strikes find an abundance of fuel, modest, localized fires inevitably become massive, nearly unstoppable conflagrations. I was reminded, on a plaque at a Newberry Caldera overlook, that native tribes thinned the forests by starting fires to create open meadow for their food source, deer. The anti-logging fanatics have promulgated forest policy so adverse to healthy forests that they have created these wildfire catastrophes. And that longer fire season? The professor has documented that there has been no discernible lengthening of the fire season for 200 years, warming alarmism aside.