Travel Ruminations

Robert Hauptman

Description

Travel Ruminations is a personal account of the author’s walking, hiking, and mountain climbing over a 75-year career in all 50 U.S. states and 38 countries, but it is more than a mere memoir. Interspersed are remarks on the ecological aspects of his environments and the devastation caused by human activity.

Sujets

• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Naturalism
• Memoir
• General officer
• Social sciences
• Outline of physical science
• Ecology
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680537314
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Travel Ruminations
Walking, Hiking, and Climbing Among Forests and Trees in an Ecologically Abused World
Robert Hauptman
Academica Press Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hauptman, Robert (author)
Title: Travel ruminations : walking, hiking, and climbing among forests and trees in an ecologically abused world | Hauptman, Robert
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2023. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023934309| ISBN 9781680537307 (hardcover) | 9781680537314 (e-book)
Copyright 2023 Robert Hauptman
Contents Note Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI Part XII Part XIII Part XIV Notes Glossary Bibliography
Note
The following is neither a memoir nor a diatribe on nature and ecological devastation. It is a hybrid that celebrates the joys of walking, hiking, and mountaineering with interspersed remarks on various aspects of nature. In this, it is at least similar to Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home; although his trip covers a mere 200 miles over a three-week period, mine encompasses the world in 75 years.
Part I
Here I am, lost in my own woods again. I am blazing boundaries. Occasionally, I wander far enough, get turned around, and do not understand the lay of the land nor how to reassert control. And so I meander until I manage to find my way back to a marked boundary or a landmark such as a stone wall. I know that I can never get so befuddled that I would wander forever because despite the extensive wild acreage here in southern Vermont, my lands and my neighbors’ are eventually bounded by streams or country lanes, although it might require many miles to re-reach civilization. On the other hand, I may be wrong, since some years ago, a woman who managed to follow the Appalachian Trail (AT) from Georgia to Maine, stepped into the woods, and could not find her way back to the trail; after a month or so, she died!
Death is always near at hand in urban areas but also in woods, forests, pastures, deserts, and jungles, although we do not have too many of these latter alien environments in the US. Luis, my late Aymara brother-in-law, would catch deadly, neurotoxic coral snakes in the Bolivian Amazon and managed quite well; he never mentioned that he had gotten lost. But Yossi Ghinsberg did. Indigenous tribal peoples learn subtle signs and can travel for many miles off or on trails invisible to outsiders, in Peru or the Australian Outback, for example. Ghinsberg tried his hand at this in Bolivia and his tribulations, delineated in Jungle, comprise the single most harrowing account I have ever read. (It is also a film.) I seem to think that he suffered more than Shackleton, whose escape to and then from Elephant Island is the locus classicus for all such adventure tales. Bolivia, I believe, is doing okay as is Ecuador; the peoples and their governments care about the environment, ecology, and protection of the land, at least to some extent. Ecuador would be foolish to allow the Galapagos and its unique fauna to succumb to purely commercial interests. Sadly, this is not the case in Brazil where farming, logging, and mining continue to destroy the land through purposeful burning and clear-cutting. A substantial amount of unsullied world acreage and animal habitat are lost each year to this ecological devastation. Indigenous activists and others who oppose the Brazilian government and commercial interests sometimes lose their lives. Indonesia has the same problem.
Ecological harm also derives from animal husbandry, the cultivation of creatures, especially steers and pigs, but also chickens and turkeys, raised and then slaughtered for their flesh. It requires many times as much land to produce red meat as it does to plant and harvest soy beans or wheat, corn or string beans. And these crops do not require the deaths of millions of animals. Furthermore, the methane released by all of those castrated bulls and sheep and goats is a major contributor to global warming (and noxious air). I imagine that at least some people who never consider animals and their plights and rights would balk if they paid a visit to a feed lot, where thousands of animals are crammed into a muddy area awaiting transportation and death.
It is a shame that more folks including Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, all of whom theoretically ascribe to ahimsa (nonviolence and the sacredness of all life) but do not practice what the Kapisthala Katha Samhita of the Yajurveda, the Shatapatha Brahmana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, even the admittedly violent Mahabharata, the Tripitaka, the Agamas, and other texts preach. All of these religious people find reasonable excuses to kill animals and their fellow human beings; the single exception may be the Jains, but it is not impossible that even some of these folks eat meat, in the same way that kosher Jews may sometimes consume shrimp or pork or Moslems may occasionally drink alcoholic beverages. Naturally, observant Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains will be aghast at the presumption that they may not invariably conform to ahimsa, but one need not wander in Delhi or Lhassa to confirm this. Many years ago, my wife Terry and I flew from Luxembourg via Reykjavik back to New York. Sharing our row was a young Indian sitarist (a student of Ravi Shankar’s teacher) planning to perform in America. Our vegetarian meals arrived, but since “Raj” had not ordered one he refused to eat anything. It was a very long flight and so, many hours later, our next vegetarian meals arrived. He looked longingly at the attendant and asked what she had. She replied, chicken and beef. He said, I’ll take the chicken. In a state of real shock, I asked how he could eat a dead chicken. This is his verbatim reply: I am of the warrior class; we can eat meat if we want to. So much for ahimsa.
And those wandering, urban holy cows in India and Mauritius should probably be air-lifted to a sanctuary somewhere. They cause a lot of trouble and gridlock and can even lead to a human fatality should someone accidentally harm one. Hindus hold that these animals are sacred and they do not take their beliefs lightly. Analogously, it has always struck me as paradoxical that a person who thinks that abortion is murder would be willing to murder an abortion doctor, one of whom told me that the same people come into her clinic over and over again; these impoverished folks use abortion as a birth control method.
The local Vermont deaths are very different. Here we have hunters legally shooting anything that moves including turkey, deer, bear, and moose. Many smaller creatures have their seasons too but one never hears of raccoon or woodchuck or skunk or river otter hunters. Those city folk who come to the forest to exercise their manliness make some big blunders. One, who mistook an enormous ox for a deer, was an unerring shot (with his laser scope?) and killed a friend’s animal so that his yoke was reduced to a single creature. Another, so the apocryphal story goes, brought a goat to the weigh station. Was he embarrassed? Did he compensate the owner? Sometimes these deadly hunters accidentally shoot their fellow woodsmen, which is why I stay away during deer season, when the woods are teeming with hotshots, while the deer have taken a vacation and gone off to New Jersey. There are far fewer deer in southern Vermont today than when I was a child almost 75 years ago. Deaths also occur with some frequency in the mountains and we will get there soon enough.
But really, the worst deaths are unnecessary murders of the innocent. I grew up in a period of civil unrest, because of the extreme disregard for minorities especially in the South, where segregated life was as harmful here as Apartheid was in South Africa. Restaurants, public bathrooms, motels, water fountains, and even regular education were all off limits to African Americans, whose families had been here for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of the segregationists. When entertainers such as Billie Holliday traveled with white musicians, she had to hide on the bus. This was a disreputable period in America’s history and it stretches back to Reconstruction and reaches us today because some people still disregard the rights of minorities. For many Americans now, the Civil War seems as ancient as the War of 1812, but the last of the Civil War Widows passed away comparatively recently and I knew someone who was born during our national conflagration, so it is in reality close enough to continue to bring heartache to those who dislike the South or, conversely, Southerners who continue to revere the Confederacy, which existed to defend plantation owners who refused to give up their human chattel.
I was in college as our Presidents began to infiltrate Viet Nam with advisors and then military personnel and simultaneously along came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) which altered matters legally, which does not mean that minorities are still not mistreated. It does seem a sad commentary on America’s founding principles that it takes acts of Congress such as the CRA, the 19th Amendment, or the unpassed ERA to give minorities rights that they have under the Constitution or women the right to vote or equal rights under the law. Our patriarchal society and the Congressional legislators who somehow get elected often do not honor the rights and best interests of their constituents. They are politicians and care about reelection and the needs of their parties. By 2020, a substantial number of people across all spectrums became so disenchanted with the way things were not progressing that the Black Lives Matter movement led to ongoing demonstrations and, sadly, destruction and looting, neither of which have anything to do with the furtherance of human rights. The first time that I visited Mississippi, not long enough after the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, I was so petrif