We tend to believe we grew up in normal circumstances.  We’re not always right, but our home lives usually seem normal to us.  As we grow older, we learn that our view of normalcy doesn’t match our friends and colleagues view.

To me, it is normal to share my backyard with a grizzly or two every year.  Likewise it is normal not to have venomous snakes underfoot.  Neither situation is normal to folks living in North Carolina or Florida. So with this sort of concept in my head, I looked at an article on Real Clear Science “Four Reasons Why Our Solar System is Really Weird”.  

Now that’s kind of the difference between Newtonian physics and Quantum.  If we look at the universe, most of it kind of lacks air – it’s essentially vacuum.  Newton’s normal world had air – but the rest of the universe doesn’t.  Here are a few excerpts from Real Clear Science – and I hope you will read the whole article.

“Only one other known system, Kepler-90, contains as many planets as the solar system, according to The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia,” Harry Baker wrote for Space.com.”

NASA explains “Our Sun is a little unusual because it doesn’t have any friends. It’s just one Sun surrounded by planets, asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets. But solar systems can have more than one sun. In fact, that’s often the case. More than half of all stars are in multiple star systems. That means the solar system has two or more suns in it.”

Yellow Dwarf in the System. Our sun is what’s called a G-type main-sequence star, more commonly known as a yellow dwarf.Jupiter is the juggernaut of our solar system, with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets combined. The simple fact that our solar system hosts a gas giant of this size sets us apart, says astrophysicist Sean Raymond. Just 10-15% of Sun-like stars have one.

Edward Stahl shared a bit about his early days with the Forest Service.  This segment starts with his elevation to the Supervisor’s office in Libby.  I hadn’t realized that Stahl was a seasonal – I never met a Forest Service seasonal who wound up with a mountain named for him.  It looks like he was responsible for the route over Dodge Creek to the Yaak.  The whole story is at npshistory.com.

I was laid off October 1st and met a party from Eureka and joined them hunting goat at Bowman Lake. We had an early snowstorm and crossed the range to Eureka via Yakinikak and Grave Creek. This trail traverses the locale described by Ernest Thompson Seton in his story, “Krag, the Kootenay Ram.”

My vacation at Eureka had just ended on January 1, 1907, when I received instructions to report for duty to David Kinney at Libby, Montana, Supervisor for the Kootenai National Forest. (Glen Smith, Roscoe Haines, and I.)

We built a Ranger cabin near Pipe Creek, twelve miles north of Libby, that winter. Bill Doak, our neighbor, had been purser on a steamboat that plied the Kootenai River between Jennings, Montana, and Fort Steele, British Columbia, in the late ’90’s. It takes some stretch of the imagination to believe a steamboat could navigate the Koontenai. Two steamboats were wrecked on the same day in the rocky canyon north of Jennings. Boat traffic was discontinued about 1901.

In the spring I was sent to Gateway to cut trail across the Purcell Range, to the Yaak River via Dodge Creek. I bought two matched black ponies and packed to the base of Yaak-Mountain, crossing the Kootenai on Mills’ Ferry, located in British Columbia.

A Frenchman named Solo Joe was placering near the summit of the Purcell Range. He warned me that if I ever ran across a trapper named Olson in the Yaak River District to mistake him for a mountain lion and shoot him. If I had followed Joe’s advice it would have saved a lot of misery. But I never saw Olson. He was crazy. “Dingle on the bean,” Joe said. Olson had once set a bear trap in the trail for Joe. A year later Ranger Raymond wrote the Supervisor at Libby to have an officer pick up Olson as he was dangerous. The Supervisor, a new man from the east, kidded Raymond for being afraid of Olson but took no action. Two of Raymond’s laborers on tail work, upon going to their homestead for the weekend, met Olson coming out the door. He said he had called to borrow some soda, but he had put strychnine in the sourdough can. One man died that night but the other one survived. Their names were Todd and Hensley. Raymond took Olson in and he was placed in an asylum, where he later died.

It was a lonely job cutting trail until a man named Cody was sent up to help me. He was the best all-round woodsman, packer and horseman I ever met. He had two half-broke horses loaned to him to break for their use. He did not agree on the route I picked for the trail so I told him he could move over to the western slope and cut trail where and how he chose, which he did. We met on weekends to go for supplies.”

I was looking at American Digest and there was an article about Home Depot with its training material on privilege.  I think the first time I heard about privilege, it was another white guy telling me about my white privilege.  Not his white privilege, but mine.  He was an Ivy graduate.  I’m a cow college graduate.  Somehow, just looking at race-based privilege didn’t seem to be packing it

I thought I understood white privilege.  I don’t want to be another race – I’m comfortable in my pigment-challenged hide.  I’ve known some Asian colleagues who were equally comfortable with their privilege.  I have the idea that being white provides me a little more opportunity, to succeed or to fail.  I don’t have the idea that white privilege is the be all and end all in our competitive world.  I might be able to dress out of Muhammed Ali’s closet – we’re about the same size – but my white privilege could never match his abilities.

The Home Depot training material stresses that “If you’re confident that the police exist to protect you, you have white privilege.”  I’m not really sure about being confident that the police exist to protect me.  Frankly, I’ve encountered police that were more concerned about their own safety than protecting professor Mike even when I was escorting my daughter and her friend through an educational facility.  I think Bob Dylan got it best – “the cops don’t need you, and, man, they expect the same.”  If I have to be confident that the police exist to protect me, my white privilege is a low rate privilege.

Modern medicine does not often restore youth.  Surgery and chemotherapy kept me on the green side of the grass when I was hit by colon cancer – but came at a price in physical fitness.  This year, I discovered that the Opthamologist fellows can return a large portion of youthful vision.

I went in with the MD’s orders to check for diabetic retinopathy.  The damned diabetes came along with struggling through chemo – and type II diabetes is definitely better than dead.  No complaints, and no diabetic retinopathy.  That was good news.  On the other hand, cataracts (I knew that was there) and the onset of macular degeneration.  The macular degeneration diagnosis set me back – that was the cause of my father’s blindness.  Still, analysis conquers fear – by the time Dad was my age, he needed to get off the road.  He didn’t – but he should have.  My macular degeneration has just started at 72 . . . and I made the decision to go for lens replacement surgery as soon as possible. 

It’s wonderful.  I was still testing a 20-20 vision with glasses – but the best I can describe the cataracts is as scratched, mud-spattered glasses.  Seeing my world again with youthful vision is a wonderful thing.  I had lost the distinction between nearby treetops and the mountains that form my horizon.  It’s back.  Trees on distance ridgelines are distinct, no longer blurring into a single mass with their neighbors.  Deer at the edge of the forest are easily seen.  I can identify the little diving ducks in the air, when I am too far away to hear the whistle from their wings.

There is an iridescent flash from the raven’s black feathers as he banks in the sunlight.  The white from the bald eagle shines through the Douglas fir as he flies between trees in areas where a month ago he disappeared.  I recall the improvement in vision that came with my first pair of glasses – now the improvement is there when I remember to take the reading glasses off.

It’s not the only miracle of modern medicine – my grandmother was bedridden after a broken hip, so I see hip replacement surgery as miraculous.  Three times arthroscopic knee surgery has taken me from the crippled category to ambulatory.  But this lens replacement is the surgery that returns youth.  Will it last?  With the onset of macular degeneration, the answer is an obvious no.  That isn’t a problem – I have a new lease on vision.  I know that lease will one day expire.  I am enjoying what I have.