Refreshment

   Photographs from the White River, a tributary to the Salt River in Arizona.  This area lies on the boundary between two Apache Indian Reservations.  We made this trip on the 4th of July, 2019.

     We had some "interesting turns", as the old Jeep had a fuel issue, and we ended up stranded coming out of the canyon the river forms. But the residents of the White River Apache Reservation were gracious as we resolved the situation.  One very nice gentleman helped us get much closer to the rim before we had to give up and call the tribal game & fish officials for assistance. The initial gentleman who helped us had his elderly father along for the ride, also a Lutheran.  [Later addition:  when the father passed away, the son who had helped us contacted us about funeral information, since we are all in the Lutheran world.]

Walking, American Style

An American author for this Fourth of July, from one of his lesser-known works:

"He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river... 

No wealth can buy the requisite leisure freedom, and independence which are capital in this profession... You must be born into the family of Walkers...  the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called... but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day... " 

 ---Henry David Thoreau in "Walking", from the Atlantic Monthly, 1862.  

     Like many high school students, I was assigned Walden to read. While it suited my temperament and interests, I ended up purchasing a book of Thoreau's work.  In it I found this "Walking" essay and a separate account of a trip he made with his brother, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  I ended up preferring both of these to Walden.