the good life on good friday

 I love to travel the world through google maps.  At first search the town fills most of the screen and you really can't tell where you are then as you hit the minus key it's like you are ascending in a hot balloon and more stuff comes into view.  Wasilla for instance.  Wasilla?  And then Anchorage and that bay within the bay and the lower lip of Alaska as it merges into the mainland.  Palmer and Wasilla appear to be almost exurbs of Anchorage along the Matenaska(?) river which drains into Anchorage's bay.  Oh and that river appears to come straight from a glacier!  How cool is that?  Very cool that's how cool.

But Paxson, now you are really getting into it. You go northeast through what appears to this tenderfoot to be a huge marsh, and there is some higher ground which is called Paxson Mountain and I guess the crossroads where Beagles dove for pearls.  The bus from that excellent book and movie, Into the Wild, was likely just a bit further north on the other side of Denali National Park.  Which by the way Trump tried to change back to Fort McKinley.  God those evil short orange fingers were everywhere.

Was Paxson near the intersection of Denali and Richardson highways?  The highway cabins appear to still be there but the filling station is closed.

See isn't the institution wonderful?  An eye opening tour of The Last Frontier, a little research into the origin of pearl diving for dishwashing, just to make sure I had it right. a reflection on a pretty good movie that I would recommend that Beagles watch it since it took place right in the backyard of where Beagles washed dishes, well an Alaska backyard, and a reflection on that awful orange man who, now that he is far away for the nonce does not make my blood boil the way it did not so long ago.

I am going to differ on one point about Beagles's account of the rise of civilization.  Agriculture preceded the domestication of animals.  You are not going to have a bunch of animals in a pen and only then wonder how you are going to feed them and one guy says to another, "Hey, let's invent agriculture," and the other guy says, "Great idea, but we better hurry up because these animals look hungry."

And that was Hobbes who said that life was nasty brutish and short, and he was talking about life in the the seventeenth century in which he lived, and you know those philosophers, they will say anything.

As for life in hunter gatherer days, short certainly, perhaps brutish, but nasty, not so much more than it was in the seventeenth century or in our current times.  As Beagles himself knows hunting is less nasty  than grubbing in the ground.