Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

Westward Migration – History and Recreation of Traveling the Oregon Trail

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oregon trailThe Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck offers three travel tales braided together. There is the westward migration of Americans starting around 1840; the tale of Buck’s own crossing of the old trail with a mule team and wagon; and memories of his father’s horse and mule, wagon and carriage adventures – and unresolved father issues.

Buck decided to make “an authentic crossing of the Oregon Trail.” In preparation he read many travel diaries and historical accounts. The trail “has been meticulously charted and marked, with long, undeveloped spaces now preserved as a National Historic Trail” but also crossing private land. I was surprised to learn that, “except for two bad stretched of suburban sprawl,” the trail is generally accessible, especially since much of the way is now farm and ranch roads or even paved highways.

Early in the book Buck presents a lengthy story of the brother who accompanied him. The brothers woes of unemployment after the Republican Recession of 2008 and temporary crippling in a building accident segues into the 1840s and 1850s, when “families were disrupted and lives destroyed by the financial panics and bank failures that recurred every decade” further aggravated by “religious squabbling and labor strife” and the political issue of slavery. Migration west became “a safety valve that prevented a calamitous society from imploding.”

Pioneer knowledge has been lost
Buck recounts his efforts to obtain a wagon and mule team – somewhat hard to do since no one does this sort of trip anymore. He’s lucky to have his childhood familiarity with livestock and Amish and Mennonite friends who use horses for farming.

But horses aren’t suited to a long hard trip. Draft horses of the 1800s were “agrarian mastodons” while mules were smarter, tougher, and “the common phrase ‘stubborn as a mule,’ [is] a classic example of a man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.”

Buck provides a lot of information about mules. “No less a figure than George Washington was America’s original maharajah of mules… [students don’t know] that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer.”

I enjoyed this part of Washington’s life, which I hadn’t read about before. Europeans viewed Washington as a hero for defeating the despised British, so in 1785 the king of Spain sent him donkeys as breeding stock for working mules. I’ve met little burro donkeys with backs a bit higher than my waist and big riding donkeys – so different – so I found the descriptions delightful.

Buck also shares his efforts to recreate a suitable wagon, and even diagrams of the triple-tree design for hitching a three-mule team to a wagon. I didn’t know that the term “Conestoga” refers to an eastern cargo wagon that played almost in role in the western migration, or that the first factory assembly line produced wagons, not Ford cars. There’s even a side trip through how building the famous eastern canal system helped evolve a practical wagon.

After a hundred pages, the journey west begins
There’s a lot of information from trail diaries on the trip west. Runaway teams, disease, and hunting accidents caused frequent injury and death. Bridges are a special hazard for mules, which “can get a third of the way across… look sideways… panic… and overturn the wagon or crash into cars in an attempt to escape.” Covered bridges prevented this by blocking the animals view – and I thought they were just pretty! Buck includes a story of his father getting a terrified team across a bridge with his kids help.

RVs are a special hazard for Buck. They would often drive slowly very close to the mules to take pictures or drive ahead to stop, nearly blocking the road, to take more pictures as Buck drove by. He calls RVer men who wanted to make jokes about the wagon as “himbos,” as a play on “bimbos.”

An amazing woman pioneer
The westward migration was a huge change from fur traders and “backwoodsmen like Daniel Boone [who] could disappear into the great forests for months alone. Carrying just a small haversack, a musket, and a long knife.” But in 1836 there was “enormous prejudice against” white women going west with their husbands. This led into a wonderful tale of Narcissa Prentis, the firs white woman to cross the Rockies. She married a fellow missionary – apparently for the convenience of both – and sent installments of her diary back east with various fur traders they encountered who were headed that way. (People seemed to take the burden of delivering letters very seriously.)

Continue reading →

Stubborn as a Mule

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Oxforddictionaries offers this definition:

Having or showing dogged determination not to change one’s attitude or position on something, especially in spite of good arguments or reasons to do so

Several sites have the definition, but not even our reliable Phrase Finder posts an origin.

Word Detective has a related phrase that I’d never heard: “took the studs,” meaning to become stubborn and usually said of a mule. WD found a citation in the Dictionary of American Regional English for “take the studs” (or “get” or “have”) comes from 1797, “and it’s clear that it’s a term primarily applied to balky horses and mules, and, by figurative extension, to uncooperative people.” The word “stud” has an obsolete definition “first appearing in Chaucer in the late 14th century, is ‘defiant of destructive agencies or force; strong, stout.'”

listserv.linguistlist.org has a handful of citations:

  • 1771 T. SMOLLETT Humphry Clinker II. 169 The captain..becomes stubborn as a mule, and unmanageable as an elephant unbroke. ·
  • 1812 M. EDGEWORTH Absentee xiii, in Tales Fashionable Life VI. 260 She was as obstinate as a mule on that point. ·
  • 1853 J. Y. AKERMAN Wiltshire Tales 138 As cam and as obstinate as a mule. ·
  • 1922 J. JOYCE Ulysses 411 The likes of her! Stag that one is. Stubborn as a mule! ·
  • 1923 Nation (N.Y.) 17 Oct. 432 Then there is the Missouri mule. He it was who won the war. 1972 Listener 21 Dec. 858/2 Not for nothing did the idiom ‘as stubborn as a Missouri mule’ come into the language.

So mules have been identified with stubbornness for a long time. Rinker Buck, in his best-selling book The Oregon Trail, writes that mules are smarter than horses and sometimes smarter than humans who try to drive them into danger. “The common phrase ‘stubborn as a mule,’ [is] a classic example of a man ascribing stupidity to the beast instead of to himself.”

Clean Energy for Conservatives – for Liberals – for Americans

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I ran across an interesting article on csmonitor.com about Clear Path, a conservative organization advocating for clean energy.

“Curbing the impacts of climate change isn’t the only positive of switching to lower-carbon energy. Innovating and deploying cleaner fuels helps create jobs while reducing US dependence on foreign oil. That’s a plus for the economy and national security, not just the climate… even if climate change weren’t a risk – which we think it is – these policies would still make sense…”

It’s not just conservatives looking at clean energy with a fresh perspective. There’s a shift in thinking on the left, too.

Clean Energy’s principles offer everyone something: Smaller government, innovation, energy security, lower air pollution risk, free market choices, all based on actual cost/benefit analyses.

In the 2008 election cycle, candidates on both sides of the aisle agreed climate change posed a risk and that cleaner energy sources offered a solution. Since then, partisan rancor has overwhelmed the debate.

It’s time to get off the Blue Team and the Red Team. Save your tribalism for your favorite sports team. Real life must depend on real data and realistic policies – if only because reality has a habit of winning over human wishes. To obstruct every idea because of distrust is deeply pessimistic and ultimately self-defeating. We’ll never all agree – after all, there’s 300 million of us Americans – but I like Clean Path’s belief that we can do this together.

Value Families or Family Values?

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way we really areAre collapsing family values the cause of America’s troubles?

  • Dire pronouncements on the future of American families.
  • Single moms worry their sons are doomed to lives of violence.
  • Pundits propose harsh penalties against people in “non-traditional” families.
  • Real wages are falling.

If this sounds like the latest news, consider The Way We Really Are  – published in 1998.

A family historian and faculty at Evergreen State College, Stephanie Coontz states her goal is to

“complicate an issue that the consensus proclaimers argue is so self-evident only a fool would disagree”.

Beaver Clever’s All-American “breadwinner family” where father works away from the home and mother raises the children is only 150 years old. In the breadwinner family, women’s access to economic and political roles is restricted, but historically productive work was part of mothers’ work. Breadwinner men’s nurturing is restricted, but historically fathers were part of daily parenting of children. Continue reading →

In a Nutshell

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The phrase means something is concise, or reveals its core or essence in a short incident or event. Phrase Finder says Pliny the Elder used the phrase in Natural History in AD 77. As translated into English in 1601 by Philemon Holland, Pliny says a copy of Homer’s poem the Iliad was written on parchment and “enclosed within a nutshell.” A rather ridiculous idea since the poem runs hundreds of modern pages, and parchment – animal skin – would be hard to fold. But whether Pliny believed such a thing existed or not, here the phrase seems to mean something that is very small, not concise.

Shakespeare, who often took themes from the classics, alluded to the ‘something compact’ idea of ‘nutshell’ when he gave Hamlet the line:

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

The figurative use of ‘in a nutshell’ to mean specifically ‘in few concise words’ didn’t emerge until the 19th century. Thackeray used it in print in The Second Funeral of Napoleon, 1841:

“Here, then, in a nutshell, you have the whole matter.”

SayWhy picks up on Pliny the Elder, and Wikipedia refers to Shakespeare, but I think Phrase Finder has the best explanation – an origin to the modern meaning.

Life – Rare or Ubiquitous?

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All the interest in NASA’s search for life on Mars led me to revisit old favorites.

People who want to write about life on other planets instead write about life on Earth. It’s the only life we know. These two books share the same information sources but the authors have very different perspectives.

What you’ll find
rare earthRare Earth presents the paradox that microbial life may be nearly everywhere but complex life almost nowhere. While some exobiologists assume Earth is an average, typical world, Rare Earth shows how unusual Earth is. The Sun’s uncommon richness in heavy elements, the narrow habitable zone in space, our oddly large moon, and the unexpected role of plate tectonics make Earth a rare planet in a rare position.

Fierce volcanic ocean vents are supplanting the idea of gentle pools of prebiotic soup as the site where life began. Current thinking on global catastrophes from Snowball Earth to the giant meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs makes life’s persistence seem remarkably lucky.

Ward and Brownlee present the rich controversy in this active and far-ranging science. They explore lines of evidence and important clues that lead to competing theories. Their prose conveys the uncertainty without awkward phrasing. It is a wonderful book to read.

Rare Earth ends with a chapter assessing the famous Drake Equation. Captured captured by aliensopens with the creators of that equation, Frank Drake and science’s gatekeeper for wild ideas, Carl Sagan. We meet an array of people including NASA’s controversial administrator, the Mars Society (founded in Boulder), and UFO fans. These strong, flamboyant characters are obsessed with the thought of intelligent life on other worlds. How they go about designing laser-powered space ships, imaging the pareidolidal Face-on-Mars, searching for planets around distant stars (today found!), and arguing over the constraints on life makes interesting reading.

Same and different
You will learn more about science from Rare Earth and more about people from Captured by Aliens. From the number of words I wrote, I guess I like Rare Earth better. But both books draw the same conclusion. “To us, … it appears that Earth indeed may be extraordinarily rare.” [W&B] “You start adding these things together and you get a bit of a chill, an omen of present and future loneliness.” [A]

What Amazon says
These books are over a decade old – I could only find print versions on Amazon – so the details are out of date. They have fared quite differently over the years. Rare Earth is highly rated with many reviews and a high “Best Sellers Rank” on Amazon. Captured by Aliens is also rated highly but by fewer reviewers, with a modest sellers rank.