Water is always a fierce issue in the American west. Through the doings and undoings of the last century, we have managed to steer our course to a place where few of us are immune to the concerns of drought, water rights, gerrymandering of vast drainages, and their consequences on our often overabundant lives. This becomes especially evident when one or more of the core elements in this increasingly strained system fails to fall into climatological norms. Nowhere is this more evident than in California, where the largest agricultural nexus in the US and several of our largest and most sprawling cities must compete for water that comes from as far away as Colorado to keep the machine wet. When winter does not produce snow for the great ranges of the west, nearly everyone in California ... read more

They told me I was goin' down to Vietnam. Up until that moment I had never heard of it before. Had to go look at a globe to see exactly where that was. -John D. Recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Vietnam. John D. worked as a ski lift operator in the winter months and ran a fishing boat out of San Diego in the summer. He had a mild manner and a sometimes distant look when he talked about the past at the twelve-step meetings I drove him to a few times a month. He seldom talked about the war at all, but the more he exposed about his life leading up to and following a certain event, the more I was curious about the scars, the rumors, the medal, the moment.... I wanted ... read more

Note (again): This blog is also photoless thanks to the myriad of incompatibilities between Travelblog and your average Chinese computer. We are presently unsure whether this relationship is the intention of some saavy censorship body or merely innocent technical difficulties. Assume what you will but, as we will endeavor to highlight, censorship in China is broad spectrum and actually quite lacking in intention and daftness. Reading a map is a martial art. It is easy to understand the idea of cartography, but difficult to replicate that ideal on the surface of a spheroid. Add to that the complications of rivers and mountains and major pieces of information become obscured on the surface of the paper. Multiply that with the changes of human development and false information enters the fray to make navigation something not so firmly ... read more

"There once was an old farmer with one son and one horse. The horse ran away and the man was unlucky. When the horse returned it had found a mate, now the man had two horses and was very lucky. His son tried to ride the horse and fell off, breaking his leg. Now the man felt unlucky again but soon the nation went to war and all of the young men were called to fight. Luckily, because of his recently broken leg, the farmer's son was excused and he was again lucky" A swiss man told us this story at Chinese customs the other day as we were receiving a bit of unexpected news. The Irkeshtam pass bridges the border from Kyrgyzstan into China's wild west in a gap where the Tien Shan technically meets ... read more