Jonathan Neufeld Outdoor adventure photography and mountain life

That’s right, in a sudden and strange turn of events I ended up at home late Saturday night. We managed to finish up all the work we had, or passed it back to the people that gave it to us and we were told to come home as soon as possible. Since we had another navigator in for training there were four of us in Bismarck, and only three seats in the airplane. I think we can all see where this is going, someone has to take a commercial flight home; and in this case “someone” turned out to me. Now, I know you are thinking “That’s cool, you get stewardesses!” to which I would calmly tell you that they don’t like being called that anymore, and should one do that in mid-flight one would probably end up with scalding hot coffee somewhere one would rather not have it. Which would naturally bring you to your next point “at least you get drinks and snacks on the flight.” Now, we all know the classic “big-bag” of peanuts jokes and I will save us the anguish of going through them all here. I suppose the last point of mention would be “at least you get patted down at security” and really, there is no argument for that. Especially when it is by a balding Scandinavian fellow named Bjorn.

Honestly, I’m not making any of that up, I got frisked in North Dakota!! I showed up nice and early for my flight (which was at 6:36pm, the other guys having flown home around 1), and was subjected to Baggage Inspection. In case you haven’t flown out of the Police State now known as the USA this demeaning little ritual involves the aforementioned short Scandinavian fellow (though I hear there aren’t all short) placing your carefully packed and itemised suitcase on a stainless steel table in the middle of the terminal and donning latex gloves. Then he opens it up and rifles through it, looking for contraband citrus fruits, forks, and any sort of small mammals you might be trying to smuggle back to your homeland. If they find no mammals they proceed to swab the suitcase, and its contents, for gun powder and gunshot residue. I don’t know if it is common terrorist tactics to practise shooting in their underwear, but it seemed like a real enough threat for Bjorn to swab mine.

After my underwear was cleared through security I still had an hour or two before my flight left which I figured I would spend sitting on some grass and maybe reading a little. I wandered outside of the terminal, rather peeved about my security experience, and having no idea how much worse it would get. I was sitting cross legged quietly keeping to myself when a security car drove right up on the only stretch of grass in a 6 mile radius, the man rolled down the window and calmly asked me what I was doing. I figured it was obvious, but having learned from past experience that being smarmy with cops is a bad thing I said “waiting for a flight” instead of “sitting on grass” which was the first thing that popped into my head. The security fellow, who appeared to be a tall Scandinavian fellow, nodded knowingly and said “you can’t sit there.” I put my book down and looked around seeing: grass, shrubs, the tall Scandinavian fellow, and off in the distance the control tower. Looking back at Mr. Security I asked him “why not?” With a straight face he answered that it was a “Special Tower Area” and that since my underwear was still under GSR (gun shot residue) examination I wasn’t allowed to sit there. With a sigh I heaved myself up, turned down a his offer of a ride, and lumped back to the terminal.

Inside the terminal I again met the Bjorn, my short Scandinavian friend. I, rather courteously I thought, showed up early for the second Security Screening and since they had the time they gave me the “thorough” check. This started innocently enough with me placing my backpack, laptop, shoes, wallet and boarding pass into the X-ray machine. Then I got to walk through the metal detector, I know we have all done it and had things beep but I was really good, nothing beeped! This didn’t deter Bjorn though, he motioned me over and wanded me down. The wanding-down takes place behind a glass barrier which gives one the illusion of looking out from the inside of a zoo cage as the other passengers go by and are clearly thinking “wow, i wonder what he did!” The wanding was nearly over when it beeped in my belt buckle, no biggie right? “He’ll just move on”, I’m thinking… Nope, not so! I had to open my belt as he wanded me again, once again beeping on the buckle, held roughly 15cm in thin air in front of me. “Good good” I’m thinking “almost through security”, nope! Bjorn puts the wand down and proceeds to frisk me, in the region of the belt-buckle-beeping!

Wow! I have never been handled so by a stranger before, it was uncomfortable and demeaning and totally public! Remember though that this is now Police State USA where we can’t question authority since in the world of with-us or against-us this makes us clearly in the against-us category, a category that no one wants to be in! So what did I do when this stranger handled me in such a fashion? I am ashamed to say I did nothing. What could I do? Nothing, these people have absolute control, absolute power to detain people and investigate suspicious activities while the ordinary traveller has no right to question this “authority”. In this world where rhetoric wins out over common sense, terrorist are everywhere, and fear mongering is on the front pages of every newspaper and the top story of every news cast we have become powerless. It is rather ironic that in the “Defence of Freedom” and the “Protection of Our USA” that a police state is slowly creeping over the nation. Will we be so scared that in the “Defence of Freedom” we lose all our freedoms so the Government can keep us safe? I sincerely hope not.

Wow, that turned into a bit of a rant…

I deleted this entry, it isn’t really fair to anyone mentioned. It was mostly me blowing off some steam in a reasonably public place. I don’t feel good about having it up here anymore though. There is still plenty to keep you entertained though.

Jon

So today was nice and cloudy, rainy to be sure but excellently cloudy and afforded us a precious day off after a long stretch of working 24hrs a day. Yesterday was much the same, sans the rain and about 10 degrees hotter but I still had some catching up and data shipping to do so it wasn’t quite a free day. Today though was great.

I decided to take a little spin around town and the first place I ended up was the tourist information booth. These things are a god-send, firstly you can get maps there for free instead of $5.95 at the gas station, secondly they have tons of, you guessed it, information! So the lady gave me some info booklets and a map or two and then handed me this pamphlet for New Salem Sue: The World’s Largest Holstein! I am not afraid to mention here that I actually laughed out loud when she handed me this pamphlet, I mean seriously! Not just The worlds largest cow, no no, they were specific! The World’s Largest Holstein. So I got back in my rental car ( a grey Blazer with XM satellite radio, very cool!) and checked the map she had given me; it was only 35 miles to New Salem. I raced back to the hotel, grabbed my camera and set out on the open road.

I arrived in New Salem in short order, it was classic Small-Town-America. Gas station by the highway and a semi-paved road through the rodeo grounds leading to the rest of the town. As soon as I turned onto this semi-paved road I could see her, standing majestically against the looming grey grey sky. Her nostrils flared out, her horns menacing, and her veiny udder bursting with fresh North Dakota milk.

that’s right, like something out of a western, a statue standing tall and proud on the hillside! I drove up the muddy road, through the rodeo grounds and up the hill parking near her massive hooves. I grabbed my coat and leapt from the car, camera in hand and burst out laughing! It was just so silly! This massive cow standing guard over a small mid-west town and attempting to bring in some tourism.

She was erected in 1974, standing 38ft tall and 50ft long, weighing in at nearly 12,000 pounds! This is one massive cow! As an even better kick, the local highschool is The Holsteins “as a tribute to the areas dairy industry.”

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Sue is placed on a hill overlooking the town and I thought I would share some of the territory she guards, here are some average ND landscapes.

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After visting Sue I wasn’t quite ready to head back to the hotel so I took a little spin through the countryside. It was a nice drive, really quiet, lots of aggriculture, as one would assume. I went through such illustrious towns as Glen Ullin, Elgin, Heil, Leith, and my two personal favourites, Lark and Flasher.

Who knows what tomorrow might bring? There is still Ft. Lincon and maybe they have a giant grasshopper or something!

We arrived in Bismarck this morning after a false start at leaving Fort Wayne. I got up at 5:30 to finish packing so we could leave at 6am, but just before 6 I got a call from the navigator saying that the weather in ND sucked so there was no rush. Wicked! I went back to bed; only to be woken up in a half hour becuase the weather had cleared off and we had to leave NOW NOW NOW!!! So, we are now in Bismarck NorthDakota, it seems like a good little town so far. It is about 60,000 people large and we are in a decent part of town, close to the airport but not *too* close with lots of restuarants around us which is good because we dont’ have kitchens anymore. Well, in honour of us moving I have updated my Journey map again and here ya go.

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Well, that should make it easy to remember where I am and where I have been. I think I’ll go grab a nap though since I am feeling rather sleep deprived.

Well jus a quick update here. We are all done here in Indiana and are moving on! Tomorrow’s stop is Bismarck North Dakota, after that we have work in Spearfish SD and Mineapolis MN. Right now I am up working on some data from Baltimore MD that the guys flew today, and I need to get it done before we leave tomorrow morning at 6 am! So, I had better get back to work and I’ll update again from North Daktoa.

The urban life has a lot to offer: sights, sounds, the constant steady hum of activity that tells us we are surrounded by other human beings. Cities offer a plethora of culture, art, cinema, theatre and architecture that varies from one city to the next. One can find anything in the city, whether it is a late night taco craving, early morning coffee or any number of dark-alley options. But what have cities given us? Our late night taco cravings can now be satisfied in the blink of an eye, we can get a thousand different flavours of coffee at any time of the day and we rush from one thing to another. The trouble is that everything is “now”, no one is willing to wait for anything anymore, indeed why should we when we can get burgers in less than 30 seconds and oil change across the street in 10 minutes? Why should we force ourselves to sit at a table and converse with fellow humans while we wait for meat to be shaped and cooked and adorned with condiments when we don’t have to? The reason is simple, because in waiting we allow ourselves time to enjoy the world around us, we allow ourselves time to see the things that matter in the world around us. Have you ever looked at an old car, say something from the 60s? Did you notice that there are no cup holders in cars from the 60s? Today we get our coffee and our breakfast and we rush off to work in a blaze of activity. Think about this for a second, people didn’t drink coffee while driving back then, they would get to where they were going, and then have their coffee.

When we moved into cities we slowly strangled our connection to the natural world. Sure, we have parks and “green spaces” but they are usually surrounded by highways and skyscrapers and smog spouting factories. Very seldom do we get to enjoy crystal clear silence. When was the last time you truly heard silence? Seriously. The last time you couldn’t hear traffic, or an air conditioner, or the radio, tv, computer, printer, cell phone, or alarm clock in the background? When was the last time you saw a shadow cast by the light of the moon?

Without our connection to the natural world we are in danger of forgetting where we come from, we are in danger of forgetting the part we play in this interconnected web. Would we dump chemicals in the streams if we had to survive off the fish from them? Would we fill the air with smog if we knew what it was doing to our lungs? Would we clear cut so fervently if we knew how much oxygen each tree cleaned, if we thought about the habitat it provided or if we could see the erosion prevented by the roots?

This Earth has existed for thousands of millions of years and we humans have been on it for a few hundred thousand. We are but a blink in the eye of time when we consider this, and yet we turn our back on the world outside cities claiming everything we need is in the city, our tacos, our art, our cell phones, our lives. How can we ignore that which has existed for thousands of millions of years, how can we callously destroy that which sustains us; and how can we know any better if we never leave our cities?

Have you ever been flipping through channels and said to yourself “Hey, thats the same point in this show where I came in last time this afternoon” well, its a fun and worthwhile experiance to be sure. That said, it is even better when the movie in question is Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision which is badly scripted, acted and budgeted, not that I am feeling judgemental of course.

I went and got some groceries again today at Meijer, a store I don’t particuarly like. It is very Wal-Martish and it gives me the willies buying food at Wal-Mart. Another thing that gets under my skin is their lack of hand baskets, they only have wheel carts. To be fair they have small ones and large ones, but the small ones are still far larger than a hand basket. The reason this bugs me is when one is using a larger wheel cart one will buy more because it isnt’ hard to move it all around the store and there is still plenty of room in the cart. With a basket one buys less becuase it fills up and starts to get heavy. So, I am postulating that the store (yes, The Store, as if it is it’s own entity) knows this and did away with all hand baskets which subconciously causes people to buy more.

I am also thankful that in the world in which I live I have time to think about “problems” like this, rather than where my next meal is coming from or where I am going to sleep tonight.

Here is a map I whipped up today showing all the places I have been with work since I started here in the summer of 2003.

That looks like a lot of places to me, and I have no doubt that there will be plenty more as time wears on! Where have you been? US map courtesy of these folks.

I was going to do a Canadian one, but it just wouldn’t be as neat. To date I’ve spent 241 days working the US and only 22 working in Canada, thoughI suppose I could cross off three whole provinces for that. I wonder if we could swing a contract in Hawaii, that would rock! (c:

In the interest of continuing my streak of posting recycled items here is something from Dilbert creator Scott Adams

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Sometimes my brain ties together things that are better left alone. Here are three things I’ve thought about recently:

- Microchip designers often embed microscopic messages on the surface of the chip as a way of signing their work.

- DNA has a lot of “junk” parts that don’t seem to have any function.

- A lot of people think evolution is obviously “designed” by someone.

I wonder if any cryptographers have looked at that junk DNA to see if it’s a message from the designer. I’m guessing that it’s a code that says something like, “I am Kaloopah, from the star system Nebulon IV. I have sent this evolution program into space as my eighth grade science project.”

I imagine that a few thousand years from now, when scientists have learned to manipulate DNA, we’ll be launching evolution programs into the cosmos, programmed to seek any planet that has the right environment. The rocket will land and spill its primordial goo, programmed with evolutionary preferences such as gender, eyeballs, limbs, mobility, and the urge to sit in cubicles while complaining about coworkers.

Evolution on that new planet would be programmed to develop over a few billion years to resemble us, obviously, because we’re spectacularly vain, so we’d write the DNA program to turn out that way. There’d be no point in going to all that trouble just to create the Giant Chipmunk Planet.

This doesn’t answer the question of who created the original aliens. But I suspect that the only way time can be infinite is if the past connects to the future like some huge Mobius strip-wormhole kind of deal. All you need to make this hypothetical system work is people like us who evolve and create new planets, who in turn evolve and create more new planets, until time loops back to our past and we get created again. In other words, we’d HAVE to evolve to the point where we could create a new planet or else we wouldn’t exist in the present. Freaky, huh?

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Anyway I hope you enjoyed that. There isn’t much going on here these days, today was cloudy and I managed to get totally caught up on everything that needed doing. The next few days look cloudy too, so that is good too.