Not one damn dime

I'd received, while I was in the woods, an e-mail message forwarded, supposedly, from Bill Moyers. I just read it over: it advocated a one-day boycott of all goods on inauguration day as a way to stick it to all the multinationals that are habitually screwing us over. Now, a few months ago there was a somewhat similar e-mail going around that advocated a one-day boycott of gasoline in protest of high prices at the pump. Economists made the point that such a boycott would be pointless: people would simply buy more gas on the day before or after, and the oil companies would suffer no pain at all. Unless people made a legitimate, long-term boycott of gasoline and switched to public or human-powered transit instead- but the e-mail message didn't advocate anything so radical as that. This was my response:

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is probably a hoax, as it has nothing to do with Bill Moyers. In and of itself, however, the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the source doesn't necessarily diminish the worthiness of the idea.

What is problematic, however, is the fact that a one-day boycott of all goods will have little meaningful impact on the retail economy, evil corporations, and their political brokers. Even if this campaign had succeeded in getting a substantial number of people to avoid participating in the economy for one day, peoples' purchases would have merely shifted to the day before or after the "boycott," such that there would be virtually no real effect on retailers. This weekend's blizzard did a much more effective job of getting people to avoid the shopping malls for a day, but because people stocked up and replenished their consumer goods before and afterwards, the net effect is basically a wash.

The idea of the campaign is appealing as a way to strike against the corporations that profit from a constant state of fear, war, and social division. As a one-day deal, however, it's absolutely worthless. If, on the other hand, a few people made a concerted effort to live every day in the sprit of Not One Damn Dime Day, to make conscious efforts to live within smaller means, to pursue local economic relationships instead of abstract multinational ones, then there would be a substantial effect on the big-box retailers, energy corporations, defense contractors, and all the others that reap wealth and power at the expense of workers and the environment.

I've been told (but rarely seen it demonstrated) that war is a time for sacrifice. 1,200 young Americans have sacrificed their lives in this business, but no one, among all of the "support our troops" pablum, is calling for a serious, long-term sacrifice of the suburban American lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that elicits terrorism and balkanization as societies struggle to maintain their identities in the face of an emasculating global capitalist culture. It's a lifestyle that is willing to murder in order to sustain itself.

If you think that this is a war for oil, then you're buying it with every trip to the pump. And if it's a war against terrorism, you're buying it with every Coca-Cola you drink.

I am not Bill Moyers, but feel free to share this with as many people as possible nonetheless.

-Christian McNeil

And, if anyone is reading this who is familiar with the "Not One Damn Dime Day" campaign, I hope that you will share this message, or at least the idea of its content.

The woodstove isn't warm. Neither is winter. Get over it.

A quick post on my way to a week off in the subtropics. I skied out of the Zealand valley this morning in -20 degree sunshine. A beautiful morning, even if it was snot-freezing cold. I weathered fairly well my last week up there, following the MLK holiday weekend. The hut was full with guests on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, but for the last three nights of my stint, as temps dropped below zero, I saw not one other human soul (about other souls seen, more later).

Over the weekend, it was my pleasure to host the excellent people who constitute the AMC's young members group from Connecticut. Also in attendance were a few (not as many as they'd hoped) of the good people of the Maine chapter, which, as my AMC mailings still get sent to my parents' mailbox in Maine, is my chapter as well. I'm not the most gregarious guy, but there really was a good time in the hut while these people were around.

Unfortunately, as temps dived into negative numbers, this was also a weekend for one of the more difficult aspects of caretaking: woodstove diplomacy.

Now, our woodstove operates primarily by means of the placebo effect, for there's little real good it can do to warm a large, drafty building on a mountainside in the winter. With only two or three trees that were allowed to use annually for firewood, we have to ration what fuel we have to burning just a few logs a night, in the evening only. On nights like Sunday, when the hut was full of 98 degree bodies and the steam of their heated dinners, the caretaker will use less wood to conserve for colder nights. Indeed, the hut's indoor temperature was balmy enough for people to strip down to a single layer, which is unheard of, for winter camping. Still, the stove never gets as warm as some people would like it to be, and bearing complaints is diffucult, especially when there's little that I can reasonably do about it. Cutting more trees certainly isn't an option, and by the time guests have arrived at the hut, it's too late to tell them to pack more warm clothing.

Ironically, the best way to deal with daytime temps that struggle to reach double digits on the positive end of the Fahrenheit scale is to get out of the hut and climb to the top of an even colder mountaintop. Last week I climbed Mts. Hale and Zealand in efforts to stoke my internal furnace, and on these expeditions I was reliably warmer than I was on days when I elected to spend as much time as I could reading in my warm down sleeping bag.

I shoved off this morning from the hut right after the 8 AM radio call and was back for this brief stop at Pinkham Notch by 10 am. Next it's on to the Portland "International Jetport", and then to the Houston "George Bush Intercontinental Airport" by the evening (the name of the Houston airport is more pompous by a hair, but Portland's has more pretension, given that it serves mostly small commuter planes from a single homey terminal, and none of its flights are international). There I'll take a trip to the oily beaches of the gulf coast and live it up in my Hawaiian shirt. Yippie kai-yea, git along, yee-haw.

What I'm reading now:

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
I've actually been reading this concomitantly with other books for a while now. Reisner is too partisan to be considered a serious historical arbiter of the facts, but he does present some fascinating and well-researched stories of water exploitation in the American west. It's a long book, but that's because there are so many stories of stunning ineptitude, corruption, and destruction, and Reisner tells them all with an outraged storyteller's flair.

Another day on the job

Today Jon Kennedy, intrepid caretaker of Lonesome Lake Hut, and I fulfilled our biweekly hutchecking duty in fine style. As a condition of the Appalachian Mountain Club's special-use-permit with the Forest Service, teams of two people must hike to Lakes of the Clouds and Madison Huts every weekend during the winter to make sure that no one is violating forest protection regulations- namely, the regulation that there is no camping within a quarter-mile of any hut, nor above treeline when there is less than two feet of snow on the ground.

On Saturday at Madison, we arrived just as a group of five or so well-outfitted fellows were setting up their tent right outside of the hut's shuttered kitchen. Madison Hut is located in the col between Mounts Madison and Adams, and it is less than a hundred yards away from treeline. Why anyone would prefer to camp above treeline beside a locked and shuttered building, rather than in the shelter of fir trees, is baffling to me, but we encountered several groups that planned to do exactly that in a gathering snow storm.

The protagonists on Lion's Head, Mt. Washington.

Today, though, the weather cleared out and gave way to the rare and spectacular phenomenon of a clear, calm day on Agiocochook. Rather than take a long drive and a short hike to Lakes of the Clouds Hut via the 2.5 mile Ammy, we hiked right from our days-off doorstep at Pinkham Notch up over Lion's Head, then across the alpine southern shoulder of Washington to the hut on the south-western slope of the mountain. The Lion's Head winter route is a fun trail to climb, particularly because it doesn't dink around with switchbacks and climbs nearly a thousand vertical feet in a single, nearly straight shot on the northern rim of Tuckerman's Ravine. We got stuck behind a group of eight that stretched above us in a train the head of which we could not see, but it was a fun climb nonetheless, and reached Lion's Head near the end of the morning.

Above the lip of Tuckerman's Ravine, Mt. Washington.

From there we skirted above the Alpine Garden Trail in order to avoid the icy edge of the ravine and in order to climb gradually towards the northern junction of Tuckerman's Crossover, a trail that leads from the western lip of the ravine to the hut. Tuck's Crossover traverses the high plateau on Agiocochook's southern flank, a spectacular alpine tableland. Big cairns for the Lawn Cutoff and Davis Path string across the plain in mile-long paths that converge near Boott Spur. While we hiked across, cumulus clouds filled in the valleys just beneath us, such that the edges of the alpine lawn dropped off into a carpet of undercast.

As a welcome change from the previous day, we found no signs of illegal camping at Lakes of the Clouds Hut, and only one group of day-trippers passed by while we were there. Lakes has an emergency shelter available to winter climbers who are desperate: it's an unwelcoming basement room nicknamed "the dungeon." As with Madison, Lakes is not particularly far from the shelter of treeline, so it's difficult to imagine anyone wanting to stay there in anything but the most hopeless whiteout. On this day, though, we had nothing but sunshine and relatively balmy (about -5 degrees C) temps. We ate a liesurely trail lunch on the drifted snow on the hut's eastern side and bathed in the high sunshine before we returned to Pinkham via the Camel and Boott Spur Trails.

A beautiful day, a beautiful hike. And I earned 8 hours' worth of wages.

What I'm reading now:
Watership Down by Richard Adams.