Thursday, April 28, 2011 - Sewemup Mesa Canyon, Gateway CO
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Boondocked, Sewemup Mesa, Gateway CO, April 28, 2011
I'm Losing it
Broken Generator Mount, April 28, 2011
Hoo boy, this looks like trouble. I noticed a new creak as I went over a bump pulling into a roadside Point of Interest back in Uravan CO. The pan the generator mounts to cracked and is threatening to drop it on the road. Nineteen years and 130,000 miles have revealed a weak spot in design of the pan. Behind the break is a large rectangular hole for the cooler (that thing you see hanging below the pan to the left of the break) that extends almost to the turned up and now broken lip of the pan.
I can't see any reasonably simple way to stabilize this break out here in the boonies. I need a welding shop - or failing to find one, maybe with some hardware from a Home Depot or Lowes I can jury-rig a temporary fix. In the mean time I don't think a complete drop-the-generator-in-the-road failure is imminent. I hope not. It's 90 miles from Uravan to Grand Junction - with some luck I'll find a welding shop enroute.
Night camp
Boondocked - Sewemup Mesa Canyon, Gateway CO
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - no signal
- Locate Sewemup Mesa Canyon on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Emptiness
Emptiness shouldn't be thought of as a negative. A lot of people misconstrue that as meaning the opposite of something is nothing. But this is something slightly different. I don't want to get into comparative religious things because that's a complicated topic. But if we were to think about it, the problem of life and death has to do with what comes in between, and what comes in between is an awful lot of suffering. We're not just talking about the pain of suffering, we're talking about suffering. Our common everyday parlance it's called stress. That's a kind of suffering and we die from this. From the standpoint of Zen Buddhism this life isn't some sort of stage mock-up for something else that comes after this. This is what we have. We're right here and we're being in this present moment. What you want to think about when you think about emptiness is a way in which to stay present. Just as, in a way, in a very strange kind of concept, there really is no such thing as time. There's no dress rehersal for anything.
The Artful Mind, Reverend Sohaku Flagg, Rinzai Buddhist priest, in an interview with Nanci Race, Jan/Feb 2003