Epiphany of the day...

There is a piece of conventional wisdom out there that is typically expressed as "when the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems begin to look like nails."

It occurred to me, as I fell asleep last night, that there is a corollary, of sorts, to this wisdom, which was brought to the fore after having run my eyeballs over the well-worn idea that one will never have occasion to need a knowledge of algebra to get through life. Every time I read this, I take a deep breath, because once you start down this road (what do you really need to know to "get through life"?), there's really no place you need to stop.

Biology? Chemistry? Physics? Any science at all? Nope.

History? Who cares? Those times are in the past, and the market for history teachers is rather limited.

Literature? What for, in a world with iTunes, MTV, and 600 channels of entertainment?

Music? Art? Heck, in most cash-strapped school systems, these subjects are among the first items to go because there are more critical needs.

You get the idea, but actually, I've digressed...

Folks that proclaim the uselessness of anything past basic math are typically not very good at anything past basic math. And since life generally never poses a challenge worded the way similar problems appeared in school textbooks, one has to ask: Is it that the skill is useless, or does the speaker suffer from an inability to recognize opportunities to use that skill?

A tentative attempt to use the same analogy to express what I want to say might take the form of "if you don't really understand what a hammer is used for, then you are unable to recognize opportunities to benefit from nailing things together."

* * *I took some photos of the forest Saturday, but they don't really convey the scope of what has happened very well. This first shot was of a mountainside, taken from the shoulder of Highway 160 about a mile north the Wolf Creek Ski area. All of those vertical grayish-brown stalks are the trunks of dead and dying pines.


This next shot was taken almost at the top of the Wolf Creek pass, and shows the damage a bit more clearly.


I take some comfort in recalling verse from Robert W. Service's The Pines:

The peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be last to go.

Service's pines also speak of there being a "hardy score" ready to shoot up whenever one of the ancient pines "falls from the crumbling walls," and while beetles may not give that "hardy score" much of a chance to shoot up, the photos—as striking as they are—suggest that the devastation does not appear to be all-encompassing.

Personally, I wouldn't mind a good, hard, beetle-killing winter.

Cheers...