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Saturday, January 9, 2010 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM

Hooking Up, Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM, January 8, 2010
Hooking Up, Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM, January 8, 2010

The weather seems to be colder than usual all over this winter and here is no exception at the moment. Below normal temps (in the 40s) and a breezy wind chill kept most folks inside today. Even the long-eared owls who usually spend the day in the evergreens here found shelter elsewhere. Brrrr....

Night camp

Site 29 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM

A Voyage and a Harbor

The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.

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