We were leaving a wildlife area where we had been photographing all day. The track we were driving on was narrow and poorly paved, so when we came around a blind curve with dense brush on both sides and realized that a truck was approaching our front bumper at full speed, in reverse. Our driver leaned on the horn without effect. At the last possible minute the driver in front of us cranked the wheel and went off the road and through the bush to get around us without slowing down, followed by the elephant who seemed intent on practicing metal sculpting on the guy's vehicle. The trouble was that he spotted us, now that the guy in front of us was now behind us and accelerating away at a rapid rate. So we followed suit, dropping the car into reverse and backing away from the elephant, trying to stay slightly ahead of his accelerating speed. Of course, the narrow road made it impossible to turn around (and frankly, even if we could, I doubt that we'd have time before being overtaken by the pissed pachyderm), so we backed up for a couple of kilometers before he finally lost interest.

The question, of course, is why he was angry, and we finally figured it out. Following the elephant at a distance that was far too close was a van from one of the local lodges, filled with Asian tourists, all of them hanging out of the windows of the van and snapping pictures of the elephant chasing the cars, laughing gaily at the spectacle. If only the elephant had turned around I would have had something really special to shoot. Sigh...

As we left Custer State Park one morning, we found ourselves winding along the northern end of Highway 87, otherwise known as the Needles Highway. This part of the road winds through tall granite hoodoos or pinnacles that tower hundreds of feet above the forest. They are massive and craggy and beautiful, so we stopped at a pull-off to photograph them. As I mounted my camera on the tripod, Gary, who was squinting at the pinnacles, asked, “Are those people up there?, pointing to the left-most tower. Mounting a long lens on the camera I looked, and sure enough, there were two climbers, about to summit the tall, skinny rock. We photographed them for about an hour as they made their way to the top, ultimately standing side-by-side on the summit. “Sure would be nice if we could find them so that we could give them some of these pictures,” Gary mused.

I took that observation as a challenge – and an opportunity to perform something of an online science experiment. That evening, when we had settled back into our hotel in Lead, I booted my computer and brought up Facebook. I posted this message on my wall: 

One week later, I got this response:

Hi Steve,
 
Thanks for hunting us down to share your photos. Nice job on those. It would be cool to see some more of the shots. And I'd be happy to give a short interview. Evenings work best for me. Looking forward to chatting with you.
 
Chris

A friend of a friend knew someone who was a climber in North Dakota, but he knew of a climbing club in South Dakota. He sent a message on is own Facebook page asking the climbing community about my question, and a couple of days later, magic.

So anyone who tries to tell me that social media is a waste of time will get an argument. Just sayin’.

When our friends Joe and Claudia Candido suggested we join them and another couple for an eight-day sailing adventure in the Caribbean, neither of us gave it a second thought – other than to get progressively excited as we got closer to the date. So there we were in St. Thomas, aboard a beautiful 50-foot sailboat, ready to head off into the British Virgin Islands for a week of island-hopping. We sailed, ate, dove, snorkeled, ate, hiked, and ate – oh, and drank something they serve down there called a painkiller. Sabine tells me it contains pineapple juice, orange juice, coconut milk, and ice – oh, and rum. Lots and lots of rum. And the final touch, which is elegance at its best, is the fresh nutmeg they grind on top. These things bring on hallucinations and visions of the finest kind. So we stayed really busy. What we did NOT do, however, was access the Internet, check e-mail, or listen to voicemail.

As someone who is – I’ll admit it – addicted to all of the electronic tethers that keep me connected to what I have come to call the real world, the idea of forced disconnection created a level of anxiety that began to preoccupy me for several days before the trip. How would I stay in touch with customers? How would I stay on top of world events? How would I respond to calls in a timely way? I fretted endlessly, coming up with all kinds of scenarios for getting my messages. At one point I found myself mapping all of the Internet cafes on all the islands where we planned to stop.

To make matters worse, I decided to leave my laptop home, opting instead to bring my iPad. Even though I had to travel directly to a client engagement after our vacation, I had my presentations on a flash drive and could easily use a client laptop to run them. Still, I was just this side of frantic as we left the harbor, still blissfully awash in WiFi.

By day three I was sore from pulling lines (they’re not ropes in spite of the fact that they’re ropes), working winches and repeatedly banging my head on the coaming that led down into the salon and galley. And by the end of that day I realized that I had not yet checked messages – or had a desire to. So I grabbed my gadget bag, snuck onto the deck with my Blackberry as we passed an island with a tower, and turned it on. It buzzed and hummed, downloading three days of messages. Reluctantly, I went through them – all 97 of them – and discovered that among the ads, spam, promises of Nigerian riches, notifications about notifications from Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn updates, and jokes from all the people who keep me well supplied with humor, there were – count ‘em – four that needed a reasonably quick response. I snapped them off, turned off the phone, and stowed it for another three days. Sure enough, when I turned it back on I had 118 messages and two voicemails. Both of the voicemails were from well-wishers, telling me to enjoy the vacation. Two of the 118 e-mails required a quick response.

This was our first real vacation since 2008. As the sole proprietor of a small (as in one person) business, it’s difficult to disappear for long periods of time because there’s no one else to mind the store. Luckily I can stay more-or-less connected when I’m traveling, but even so, being out of the office is difficult. Or is it? Clearly I had overplayed the threat of being disconnected in my own  mind, and had allowed the anxiety to take over and fester a bit. So what’s the lesson? One, vacations are extremely important and should NOT be skipped; and two, the world does not come to an end when you take one.

There is a third lesson at   work here that you may have keyed in on, and it’s a technological one. Remember, I climbed up on deck with my Blackberry and made a phone call. From the deck. Of a boat. Sitting in the middle of the Sir Francis Drake Channel, under sail. I had a strong signal and never had a problem. Every island, every rock, every piece of coral, it seemed, had a working cell tower. So I may not have had WiFi, but I did have a good 3G cellular connection – if I wanted it.

I didn’t.

When Wal-Mart first came to Vermont, the last holdout state in the country without one, there was public outcry from all directions. The end of innocence, many said; if they come our way of life is over, small businesses will be forced to close, entire communities will change. “It will be the same as what happened to small towns when the interstate highway system went in,” said a man holding a STOP WAL*MART sign in front of the newly-opened store. “All the cars will bypass the towns and the towns will die. There’s no upside – everybody loses.” Everybody, that is, except the 200 or so people who got full-time jobs there and the countless people in the supply chain who indirectly found jobs as a result of their presence. But like it or not, in spite of the perceived downside, Wal-Mart’s arrival had a positive impact on the local economy – a net add. The same is true of Costco, and Home Depot, and Linens-n-Things, and countless other faceless box stores that funnel money into the local economy. I may not like certain aspects of the evolution, but after the final accounting, things are in the black.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for my childhood home.

In 1968 my father’s job as an exploration geologist for Chevron took our family to Madrid. This was still Franco’s Spain, a right-wing police state of rules and pomp and circumstance constructed around a core of self-importance. The country was clean and well-maintained, there were monuments to self everywhere, and the only perceived social ills were the omnipresent Gypsies that would rob you blind if you let them (one of them once tried to carry off my dog). Spain was the safest place on earth – you could walk down the darkest, dingiest street in the city at 3 AM without a fear in the world, because the criminals knew: mess with the public order and you will disappear.

I was reminded of this recently when I found myself in a taxi in Chicago and the driver began to extoll the virtues of the city’s mayor. My wife and I were there for a trade show, and while riding back to the hotel from the convention center, we chatted with the driver, commenting about how clean the downtown area was and how safe we felt. “Yessuh,” said the taxi driver, a black man from New Orleans who was as big as a house and who played trombone in a local jazz band. “You can thank the mayor for dat,” he explained. “Dis mayor cares about his city and he spends a lot of money to make it what it is.” Then he paused for a moment and said, rather ominously, “You mess with the Mayor’s city and he gonna f**k you up.”

That’s what Madrid was like in the 60s and early 70s. Draconian? Perhaps. But who am I to judge?

Time shift, now, to February 2012. I was in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress to give a series of talks, and decided to spend a few days in Madrid afterward. The last time I was there was mid-2001, and the tech bubble was on fire – it wasn’t due to collapse for another few months. Spain was happy, vibrant – even the Gypsies were profiting, harvesting riches from the hordes of tourists that swarmed the city. If they weren’t fleecing the public through pity (hungry babies, fake disabilities) they were flagrantly stealing. My wife once chased a group of Gypsy women away from an American woman whose backpack they were rifling, while it was on her back – in a crowd. They were completely unconcerned; she was completely unaware.

This trip, though, the Gypsies are nowhere to be found. In three days I saw two, not the swarms I’ve learned to be wary of. What I did see, though, were immigrants of another sort: West Africans, Romanians, Albanians, all with a game or an angle, street-tough (and street-worn) Russian prostitutes who disappeared into the shadows when the police passed by.

Spain is currently in the top ten of the European economic failures. With unemployment topping 20% and national debt at a staggering € 680 billion, only Greece and Italy surpass it in terms of economic morbidity among developed European nations.

The Plaza Mayor is the historical center of Madrid. Built in the 17^th century as the administrative center of the city, it is an enclosed, cobblestoned square with arched stairways leading off in all directions. Architecturally it is a treasure. There are small cafes in each corner, perfect for people-watching, and there have always been clusters of students scattered about, often surrounding a guitarist playing soul-stirring Flamenco. There were artists as well, and under the arches of the inside perimeter of the Plaza there were always coin and stamp vendors, selling to collectors. But now things have changed. Instead of the old Spanish men selling coins and stamps, they have been replaced by north Africans who, at the first hint of a police presence, grab their blankets and bootleg products and melt into the crowd.

The artists have been replaced with marginally-skilled caricaturists. And the guitarists and students are now overwhelmed by an armada of Brobdingnagian cartoon characters. Over there you can have your picture taken with seven-foot Smurfs. Here, Mickey and Minnie Mouse. In that corner, Garfield. And in the center, in the shadow of the giant bronze statue of Felipe III, an extremely fat man dressed in a Spiderman suit tries desperately to look superhero-like, a wedge of hairy belly sticking out between the two halves of his costume.

Leaving Plaza Mayor I stroll up Gran Vía to the Plaza de España, a monument to the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. The centerpiece of the plaza is a tall marble monument with fountains. The monument itself is covered with carved likenesses of characters from Cervantes’ many books, and on the back side, facing the royal palace, is a massive bronze statue of the errant knight himself astride his horse Rocinante, and his sidekick Sancho Panza on his mule. It’s a massive execution, ten feet tall at least. But today it is covered with graffiti, and at 9:00 in the morning four very drunk Russian teenage boys are climbing on Rocinante, making lewd sexual movements with the horse. Two police officers standing nearby watch but do nothing. When I lived in Spain many years ago (and I must say, admittedly, many years ago), that statue was a point of pride in the city, and to touch it or deface it was to risk losing a hand. The Guardia Civil, the state police agency, was a group to be revered – and feared. What the hell happened?

One of the beer bottles falls over and breaks; the teen boys laugh loudly, ask if I want beer. The police continue to ignore them.

But it wasn’t just the Plaza de España in Madrid where I saw aberrant behavior. On March 1^st, while I was attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the 60,000 attendees of the conference were joined by 25,000 protesters, many of them students, who flooded the city’s Plaza de España in front of the bullring, which is now a covered shopping mall. Protesting the rising cost of tuition, the moribund economy, and bleak employment prospects, the crowd swarmed the Plaza in a Facebook and Twitter-coordinated assault and stopped traffic in all directions. They were loud, a bit rowdy perhaps, but relatively well-behaved until an uglier element arrived in the afternoon (anarchists, I was told). That was when the damage started; they set trash bins afire, broke windows in cars and businesses, and created violent havoc until the police arrived, breaking heads and dispersing the crowds -- An “Occupy movement” of a whole different sort.

As I watched all of this going on, I could not help but draw references to Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. In that book he tells the story of New York City before Giuliani, when the city was garbage-ridden, police were not respected and the subway was for fools – or those looking for trouble of the worst possible kind. The city had stepped over that invisible line, that tipping point, beyond which the decay of social order accelerates rapidly and often, cannot be stopped. But Giuliani did stop it, by identifying and eliminating those elements that empowered the lawless element in New York.

Is this transformation a necessary part of the evolution of Europe, and by extension, Spain? Perhaps. But for someone who remembers a very different place, that doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

I met Terry on a flight to Omaha. He was an older man, kind and gentle, with a quick and easy smile and a never ending story to tell – the kind of seatmate that makes a long plane ride almost enjoyable, especially for someone who loves to listen to a good story as much as he likes to tell one. After we got situated I introduced myself, and we began to talk.

“My grandfather ran his own winery in southern California until the day he died,” he told me, his eyes far away. “We lived at that winery, and I played hide and seek among the grapevines. I remember the smell of the fruit in the hot summer; it was so sweet it was cloying. And toward the end of the season, just before harvest time, there was a very different smell in the air – a heavier smell, a smell that you just knew meant that the grapes were ready to be picked. The weather was different too: there was dew in the morning, and we didn’t go out to play until later.

“He had a wonderful old house on that winery with a huge cellar – at least, to a kid, it was huge. It was deep, and long, with hand-laid stones lining the walls. On one side was a long row of sour-sweet-smelling barrels that contained different vintages of his favorite wines. I loved to go down there; it was a secret place, one that my grandfather and I shared. It was our fort.

“On Saturdays, he would make dinner – pasta, salt cod, sausages, whatever we wanted – and he and I would go into the cellar to pick out the food we would prepare that day. The place was a jungle of savory foods, most of them hanging from the ceiling. There were handmade salamis and pepperonis, white and chalky and smelling musky; big, yellow rounds of cheese; and gallon jars of tomatoes, pepperoncini, and pickled onions. Depending on the menu for the evening he would walk among the foods with the big pocketknife that he called his matasuegras (mother-in-law killer), slicing off huge chunks of salt cod, great wedges of hard cheese, and thick, greasy slices of salami. We’d sit down there in the cool dark air and eat smoky sausage and hard cheese and drink secret glasses of wine from his personal cellar, ruby red from the bare bulbs, watching the snarly shadows on the walls from the tree roots that hung from the low ceiling. For dinner he’d make big steamy bowls of pasta, with meatballs the size of tennis balls wrapped around seasoned croutons, and a thick, rich tomato sauce, cooked all day long in a big battered aluminum pot with sausage, pork chops and a big handful of basil in the bottom.

“He was a special old man, and he lived until he was 95. My own kids got to know him, and he lived long enough for them to realize how special it was for them to get to know their own great-grandfather. I have pictures of them all together, and I treasure them.”

 He smiled at the thought, and drifted away for a few minutes. I interrupted his reverie to ask him the reason for his trip to California. Retiring, I asked? He shook his head, smiling. “No, I retired a long time ago. After being bored for a few years I decided I’d like to run a winery of my own. Since I wasn’t working, I had time to think about my grandfather, and those memories I had of him were so good I made a decision. The time was right to do it now, so I did it. I bought a winery.” I told him how great I thought that was, and how he must already look forward to drinking the first glass of his first vintage. “Oh, that’s the only pleasure from this great and grand venture I won’t get to enjoy,” he chuckled. “Not a drinker?” I asked. He laughed out loud at that. “No, I like wine as much as anybody. The problem is, I’m dying. I have cancer. The doctor tells me that I have about two years if I take care of myself, so if I’m going to die, I want to die in that basement, smelling those smells. If anything’s going to take me away I want it to be those smells.”

The most recent of these occurred last week, when I found myself in Red Oak, Iowa, a tiny place about 35 miles East of Omaha. It’s beautiful: This is farming country, corn, mostly, and everywhere I looked I saw ramshackle barns and turn-of-the-century farm houses in various states of disrepair. I was about halfway there in my rental car when I received a text message from my client, the owner of a small but extremely forward thinking independent telephone company. WE’RE IN THE BAR, it said. And since the only bar in town is in the only restaurant in town which is in the only hotel in town, as near as I can tell anyway, I knew where to find them.

There is a kindness to this part of the country, a geniality, a genuine sense of welcome that is part of life here. After handshakes all around and much back slapping, we settled down to eat. It was harvesting time and the talk over dinner was about corn (most of it headed to ethanol plants in China), crop yields, moisture content, and new grandkids. It's funny: Even though these people own and operate successful and profitable (albeit small) telephone companies, many of them are also farmers or at least come from families with farms. I had been with them several times before, and at one point in the conversation one of them asked me if I had taken any good pictures on my way over from Omaha. I responded that yes, I had seen a large corn harvester off in the distance with the sun setting behind it, and with the dust cloud it created I had managed to get a few good shots. He then told me that I should've gone over to get closer to it because they're pretty cool machines, to which I responded that it was way off in the distance on the other side of corn field, and that while it would have been nice to be closer, I couldn't very well take my rental car bouncing across a half-cut cornfield. He smiled, and I knew something was up. “That was probably my buddy you saw,” he smiled, “and he’d love to show you his combine if you'd like to see it.” Needless to say I effusively accepted.

This kind of thing happens to me, it seems, all the time. By showing enthusiastic and real interest in the working lives of others, I have had the opportunity to walk up the cables of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, spend three days on a cable-laying ship in Singapore, tour an 800-foot supertanker, land in Los Angeles sitting in the cockpit jump seat in a 747 (well before 9/11), wander through the unbelievable inner workings of a cotton gin in north Texas, and now sit in the driver seat of a combine with tires taller than I am. Does it get any better than this?

The remarkable thing about this machine – besides the fact that it is HUGE (look at the size of the tires in the photo, below) – is that it is 100% guided by GPS. It knows the dimensions of the field, and performs least cost routing to ensure that it drives the most efficient possible path as it covers the corn field. As a consequence, this thing saves the farmer as much as $120,000 per year in fuel, and at least that much in seed, fertilizer and pesticide.

When we finished, we drove over to Stanton, the next town over, and took a driving tour of the place. It’s a beautiful little town and is also the home of Mrs. Olsen, whom people my age will remember as the spokesperson for Folger’s Coffee back in the 60s and early 70s. And because she was from Stanton, they designed the water towers in her honor (below).

I love this job.

Cannon’s film is a story about scientific curiosity, but it is primarily about Bernd Heinrich, the man. He is an enigma of sorts; he is a committed runner, and was the first person in the world to run 100 kilometers, largely without stopping. He holds world records for ultra-marathon distance running, and has even written about it in his lyrical book, “Why We Run.”  But it is his other books for which he is best known. They include “Winter World,” about the natural world in the depths of New England winter; “Summer World,” about the fecundity of the same area in summer; “Mind of the Raven,” an entire (and wonderful) book about Heinrich’s extensive work with these remarkable birds; and “The Geese at Beaver Bog,” about the birds in and around the pond adjacent to his home.

Cannon spent a year with Heinrich, documenting his life, getting to know him, his family, his students, and the rich, remarkable curiosity that drives him.

You won’t be disappointed: For $25 (which includes shipping) you can be as charmed as I was. Order it here, and enjoy!

Now consider this: While baseball fields vary somewhat in size, there are certain standards that must be met. For instance, the distance from home plate to the pole that designates the “end” of the foul line in the outfield must be at least 325 feet. That means that one baseball field (and we’re not talking about a professional field here), taking into account the area of the outfield, the bleachers, and whatever other miscellaneous space is required, covers about 160,000 square feet, which is roughly equal to 3.67 acres. That means that between Washington DC and Chicago, there are 668.5 acres of baseball fields. That’s just over a square mile…and apropos of nothing. Just an interesting point, because the other day I got distracted from my ball field counting by a large circular structure that we passed over, which turned out to be the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, otherwise known as Fermilab. What I was seeing was the Tevatron Ring, which is the final stage of three that accelerate subatomic particles to 70% the speed of light in pursuit of a better understanding of the fundamental nature of – well, nature. This is the place where atoms are split, and the resulting wreckage is studied to develop a better sense of the origins of the universe, among other things. It also gives us a better understanding of energy and what it really, truly is. (I should also point out that this is where the Bottom Omega Baryon was discovered, as we all know. I have two in my basement, just in case.

Scarcely a half-hour later we were overflying the vast green expanse of Iowa, and far below I saw wind turbines – hundreds of them, spinning slowly. A little research when I got to my hotel informed that Iowa produces a remarkable 4,000 megawatts of power from its wind farms, and that number is expected to increase as the number of turbines and the efficiency of the blade arrays increase.

Flying into Omaha, I was shocked to see the destruction caused by the flooded Missouri River. After overflowing its banks it spread out like a chocolate blanket, engulfing everything, leaving nothing but the tops of silos and the roofs of farm houses showing. A few minutes later I was shocked to see a highway disappearing into the flowing water. The two sides of the road just disappear into the depths, and it’s pretty easy to imagine that the constant flow over many days has undermined the submerged roadway. It will no doubt have to be completely rebuilt.

Several years ago, I read a wonderful book by John McPhee called “The Control of Nature.” As I photographed all of these things, I couldn’t help but think of that marvelous book, in which the author describes the many ways in which humans have futilely attempted to - well, control nature. He talks about vain attempts to change the flow of Icelandic lava, and to change the course of the Mississippi. What I witnessed through my D3 viewfinder in that short 90-minute flight was interesting. First I saw a place where we attempt to break matter into its component energy parts so that we can understand it. Then, I saw how we create energy by harnessing wind so that we can use it. And finally, I saw the devastation caused when the natural energy of a river, despite all efforts to the contrary, rebels against our attempts to control it. In the battle of hubris against nature, nature wins every time.