insight pared

KNOWLEDGE SHARED

Outdoor bold

To access Roland's weblog and column archives

Click Here

Tip o' the Day

Lest you think what I'm about to tell about handling flashlight batteries sounds trivial, or only relative to wilderness travelers or for aboriginal fisherfolk standing poised with a cocked fishing spear in the bow of their dugout on a black and cloudy night, it's not. It's a simple little tip that has brought me and mine more comfort over the years than a sharp knife, and almost as much as dry matches. It's a tip that can help your critical equipment survive airline baggage handling, a rear-ending car crash, even beneath-covers, after curfew reading of books by innocent children.

Since our line of wilderness work often called for saddling ponies before daylight, and sometimes unsaddling them after dark, flashlights were an important component of our tool kits. We used headlamps fitted with elastic straps to fit over sombrero or ball cap. As daylight crept upon us, we routinely dropped our headlamps into saddlebags for emergency use if caught after dark. Our problem surfaced when the horse we rode squeezed through a narrow opening between trees and banged the saddlebag. Or bucked off into the sunset when stumbling into a hornets nest. In short, our problem became acute when we needed the flashlight at some later point and discovered the switch got activated in the commotion and we had no light.

Our first solution was to carry more batteries. Our second, and better solution was to open up the flashlight's back and reverse the batteries. The type we used carried four double-A's, two on the left, two on the right. By reversing the two on the right, the switch would not activate. Each of the guides--and the outfitter--became quite adept at opening the back in the dark and switching the two right-hand batteries end for end.

In the headlamps we used, a clamp was provided behind the light reflector to hold a spare bulb. The flashlight's wiring was plastic-embedded and heavily coated. The lights, for all practical purposes, were impervious to damage--except for the switch activation problem. We tried taping the switch down, but multiple uses, meant wearing out the adhesive, rendering that idea impractical. Then, "Voila!" one of my more thoughtful guides discovered our easily adopted reversing-batterues solution.

It's the practice I follow today in every mobile situation: in our motor van, in horseback saddlebags, in airline travel. A quick switch of two batteries end for end, in the dark; then a smile and a shout: "Let there be light"

And there is light!!

Ethan Lester, the 13-year-old lad who sent a--well--evocative email telling me how much he liked Echoes of Vengeance, appeared challenging on the surface. The truth is, though, he turned out to be sort of my idea of the all-American type kid I reckoned myself to have once been.

I promised to send Ethan (who signed off as "molester" on "punkrockjunkie2") a Bloody Merchants' War if he'd answer a list of questions about himself. Here's the lad's reply:

Age: 13

Lifestyle: pretty much your average 13 year old California boy lifestyle

Reading habits: I read all the time. I read you and other "western" authors because I don't get much of that kind of stuff here

Hobbies: write short stories, listen to music, read, play football, baseball, and pretty much anything else where u can tackle someone or hit something

Location: [Ethan sent his mailing address in Camarillo, CA]

Then he added: "will u really send me a book that would be so awesom [sic]

HELP! OUR GOVERNMENT IS ON ITS WAY!

You go to sleep right after you're born, live 60, 70, maybe even 80 years, wake up and find you've seen a bunch and done a bunch, but don't know a thing.

Back when I was a pup, milk went for ten cents a quart at Ma & Pa's corner grocery. Or a loaf of bread sold for the same dime. The reason my folks patronized the corner grocery was because the "Pa" part of the business sometimes bought my mother's excess garden produce, eggs, and the like.

There were no supermarkets in those days; at least none I could recall. I suppose there might've been a Piggly Wiggly up in Portland, or a Safeway in San Francisco. But small town America was still served by the corner grocery.

Then the other day I blinked my way through the fast lane at a supermarket check-out counter and lost most of a five-dollar bill for that same loaf of bread and quart of milk that, together, sold for less than a quarter 60 years ago. What happened during all those years I was asleep?

When World War II ended and gas rationing ended and our family was able to travel and my dad got too sleepy to drive, he pulled off U.S. 99 or 66 at a place with a blinking neon light, paid five bucks and our family slept in a little cabin complete with hot-and-cold running cockroaches and fluttering miller moths. Back then, there were no convention centers advertising heated pools for patrons, jacuzzis for jet-setters, casino for gamblers, valet parking for the svelte, and babysitters for the kids at a bargain rate of $179.50, plus tax. Just the other day I read a Motel 6 billboard as "starting at 54 dollars." If their price is also "plus tax" Tom Bodett might as well turn off the light he left on for me.

Unable to afford the high cost of sleeping in somebody else's bed, my wife and I picked up a van with the idea of sleeping in campgrounds. What a laugh! Have you gone through the sticker shock at a campground gate lately? Merely parking your own car in somebody else's former barren stubble field costs more than parking in a Holiday Inn suite a few years back. Even "rustic" state parks campgrounds providing a pit toilet, a place to shut off your engine, and nothing more thinks it okay to value their services beyond the means of most visitors to pay.

We're talking inflation here, aren't we? Inflation over six decades that brings milk up from ten cents to $1.79 per quart, bread from ten cents to $2.49 a loaf. I don't want to buy the bakery or the dairy or any of Del Webb's properties; only a glass of milk, slice of bread, and a place to lay my head come dark.

I know, I know. The price of bread is up because the price of wheat is up because the price of seed drills and combines and gargantuan tractors is up. Has something to do with the cost of doing business--and the cost of doing business is spelled I-N-F-L-A-T-I-O-N.

You can't beat high supermarket prices for bread and milk by eating at McDonald's or Wendy's because they have to buy buns for their burgers and milk for their shakes--guess where? So an entire Junior Bacon Cheeseburger and Frosty costs more today than a live hog did when I was a tad.

We should, of course, still our beating hearts because there's no dearth of government officials to provide comfort and assurance that we need not fear so long as their guiding hands are on the controls. And the higher officialdom climbs, the more disdain they exude for the fears of us great unwashed. Government economists are employed to assure us that our economic coefficiency is on the rise against free enterprise wannabees like China and India and Japan; that the dollar is stable against the euro and the ruble and the krugerrand. We should be comforted, we're told, that America's balance of payments is healthy; that our Gross Domestic Product has never been more solid.

Is that really so? Bill Gates and Warren Buffit excepted, there are a few of us out in the midlands who, despite the promise of the past, still struggle. To tell the truth, my Domestic Product balance is more "poor" than "Gross." My dollar is flimsy against maxed out credit cards, And our household economic coefficiency is on the wane against all the loan sharks who're swimming slow circles around our sinking future.

Why is it, then, that I'm confused that economists--especially government economists--talk in an incomprehensible language to folks who have to stand in line at supermarket check-out lines to blow their entire paychecks for ten-cent's worth of milk or bread? Economists use charts and graphs and columns of numbers that seem most to comfort them--but leave their audiences cold. One wonders if they're impervious to the rising price of all-day suckers?

I don't know where officialdom buys their gasoline, but it must be at different pumps than ones I visit. I don't care how many charts and graphs and columns they trot out to persuade that inflation is well in hand, that high government ministers are on top of all us great unwashed's problems, and that my fears for my children and their children are groundless. Only thing is, I know that a gallon of gasoline, a quart of motor oil, and a barrel of fuel oil for my home costs 43-percent more than it did a year ago. God gave me eyes to see and a head with which to think, and I see that fuel for the millions of trucks on our roads and highways went up by a third. And I know it costs more to operate diesel locomotives and ships at sea. Because operatiing costs are higher, those goods they deliver must also arrive at increased prices.

I'm not sure who's smoking the weed here, but it ain't me. I know my dollar isn't worth a whole hell of a lot more today than the match used to ignite all the government tracts and studies and graphs and columns that's supposed to make me understand how much better off I am by having my benevolent government watchdogging my money.

Once upon a time I actually believed that each of our political parties was rushing us to doom, albeit in different ways: one seemed bent on destroying our natural resource reserves in their greed; the other by spending us into bankruptcy. In today's era, though, I'm having trouble distinguishing which is which.

Worse, I suspect it's possible that both are both.

May God have mercy on us--because our own benevolent high government officials won't!

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

Comments

for more info about these and other Roland Cheek books

Click Here

Click Here

for detailed info about each of Roland's books

Read Reviews

Read their first chapters