After trying to get started on the road again, some rodent damage and other issues had me staying in San Diego for another month before hitting the road again. Ultimately, I decided to spend some time filling out my 14 days allowed at Ward Mountain, enjoying the stars and scenery.
San Diego and Around
It seems this whole travel thing is started off really slow for me. Some of the slowness has me looking at plans ahead and trying to make many decisions. In the time since my last post at Ward Mountain, however, I have mostly been engaged in maintenance annoyances. A rat got up into my engine while camping at Mojave National Preserve earlier in the year, and it chewed through a wire for the outside air temperature sensor. This left all of the safety features, cruise control, etc. turned off while I was driving until I got it fixed. I ended up getting insurance involved only for them to argue the cost below what they were willing to pay anything for, so I paid for it all, although cheaper.
Shortly after getting the car fixed, as I was preparing to get back on the road, I developed a toothache. This was a tooth I was aware of issues with but was biding time for money. I ended up having to pay for it to be taken care of anyway, unfortunately.
It feels a lot as if I am just getting onto the road extremely slowly this time. I do not like it very much, I guess, but I am also not particularly upset about it. I find myself just trying to live with the experience and see how it plays out.
Ward Mountain Redux
As things finally left me able to hit the road again for a while, I decided to head back to Ward Mountain in Nevada. I had only spent a few days up there before, and I ultimately decided to hit a total of 14 days all said. I stayed some in Las Vegas for resupplies and beginning to look at some future steps.
For the most part, I just hung out and enjoyed my time at the campground, chasing around chipmunks in the day and the small mice at night. I swear the chipmunks started to play a game with me where they would try to sneak up behind me and run away the second I moved the slightest in their direction.
While there, I took some small hikes around the trails the lead off the campground, mostly staying among the pinyon pine and juniper trees. There are significantly larger hikes available than I did while I was there, and I hope to go back in the future and explore the area a lot more.
The campground host was very friendly while ensuring everything was clean and all guests taken care of while I was there. He decided that because he kept seeing me outside working on my laptop all day, he needed to take me off to explore. We went to the top of a hill one day to look over a large open pit copper mine. Another day, we went up one side forest road that a lot of people were boondocking along, and also up another hill to view over Ely and another part of the mine. I am not a big fan of this kind of mining, with the massive tailing pond they had to build a dam to contain, let alone just ripping up an entire mountain.
Probably my favorite part of camping at 7000+ ft in this corner of the world is the sunsets and night sky. Even as I was pretty close to Ely, this part of Nevada has some of the darkest night skies in the contiguous US, and most of this part of Nevada is at higher elevation, going even more so up into the many mountain ranges. Being a desert, clouds at sunset are often brilliant for reflecting the reds and oranges of sunset, and clear enough at night to allow view of the stars. The result is brilliant skies at sunset and brilliant showing of the stars at night.
Ultimately, my time came to be up at Ward Mountain, so I headed on. I have been putting in some work looking at what I am doing with all my things in a storage unit and how I want to do my whole nomad thing in the future. I will post about that in the future as it is figured out more.
For this post, Ward Mountain was a really great time, and I hope to go back. I noticed a lot of people coming through for one night on reservation and taking off, just using it as a layover. I guess being just off the Loneliest Road in America has that effect on a place.
Reading
In the time since my last post, I have been doing a lot of different reading. I will try to limit how much I say about what, but I want to give myself some reaction while they remain on my mind.
After reading the first parts of Hegel and Schopenhauer, I decided to go back and read Fichte, but ultimately, I just stopped with all of the idealism and adjacent and went all the way back to Descartes again.
Before going back to re-reading, I decided to read Octavia Butler’s Earthseed (fiction) books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. It is kind of a trip because the way the books talk about the constant change of things is really familiar to my rules, and these books terrifyingly get some ideas about what is happening in the US today quite right.
I also read Charles W Mills’s The Racial Contract, which I really enjoyed for its exploration of how many things are often done to uphold “the racial contract”. Utilizing the social contract theories going back to the enlightenment, some of the book really fulfills my desire for a response to the kind of white supremacy I complained about during my first read of the enlightenment literature. It is a brilliant book.
At this point, a friend suggested reading Harari’s Sapiens and discussing it. I was not really a big fan. It seemed to chase after a kind of popularized version of evolution that gets more wrong than right and leaves me with some philosophical disagreements about unity and diversity, for example. In reaction to this, I immediately re-read Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which has a strong critique against many evolutionary perspectives of culture while seeming to coincide with my understanding of evolution better somehow. Then I read Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, which I found really, particularly refreshing for how evolution actually makes any sense in trying to look at humanity in this way, challenging some of the same linear evolution ideas that Graeber and Wengrow critique through another lens.
Then I tried to pick up Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion again, having previously read the first 2 books. I made it through the third before being too bored to go on.
Then I finally read Camus. Everyone has done absurdism a dirty with me. Camus talks about suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus and murder in The Rebel, but they both do not do a good justice to what Camus has to say. Simply living in an absurd world is also about the shallowest version of Camus, and I find myself more interested in his ideas of how defiantly choosing even an absurd life suggests valuing all life. He makes me think of Machiavelli when it comes to violence, and an absurdist interpretation of some of Machiavelli would be hilarious and interesting. I also read The Stranger and The Plague, both of which I found really interesting. The Plague could have been therapy to my soul during the initial days of the COVID pandemic, and it still kind of is in the shitstorm it continues to be.
I tried to read Agrippa’s Three Books on the Occult Philosophy, but I only made it through the first book before being bored and moving on.
I tried to re-read a little Boehme, but decided I didn’t care for the word games of mysticism, really. So I re-read Descartes, and then Spinoza’s Ethics, a collection from Leibniz, Hume’s Treatise and 2 Enquiries, Thomas Reid’s Inquiry, and George Berkeley’s Treatise. As I type this, I have started reading Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Clearly, I am about to re-read Kant again. And then I think I’ll re-read some Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and so on. I have been tempted to add some Plato and Aristotle but haven’t yet. I might. I might pick up Montaigne again. The whole point of this excursion into re-reading these guys has been interesting. I get a different side of them this time than my initial reads.
Final Word
Regardless of how August plays out, I have some larger travels planned in September that should be interesting. In the interim, I am working to prepare more long-term arrangements. I really want to spend more time exploring Nevada than I have ever had a chance to in the past. There are a lot of really brilliant campsites across the state, many of which were out of my reach in my initial travels. Infrastructure has had some improvement, but having satellite internet and better tools for making it out to and staying out around the state are even better.
May a slow start lead to a long adventure…