WolfeNotes.com

Moran Point, Grand Canyon

Here’s the verse that many USA! USA! USA! Springstein fans forget:

My old man worked twenty years on the line
And they let him go
Now everywhere he goes out looking for work
They just tell him that he’s too old
I was nine years old and he was working at the
Metuchen Ford plant assembly line
Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion hall
But I can tell what’s on his mind:

Glory days yeah goin’ back
Glory days aw he ain’t never had
Glory days, glory days  ~~~~ Glory Days (Bruce Springsteen, 1984)

He does the same thing in songs like “Born in the USA” and “My Home Town” – crafting the song in such a way as to allow some listeners to draw the exact opposite meaning of the song. That’s why he’ll never live up to the bold legacy of a Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger.

[Update: 10/13/17 – Expanding upon exactly the point I was driving at above, the NY Times review of “Springsteen on Broadway” describes various “masks” and “contradictions”, and calls him out for “revisionism”. Springsteen even calls himself a “fraud”. Read the whole thing. ~~~ end update]

crossing the Escalante River

There’s mosquitoes on the river
Fish are rising up like birds
It’s been hot for seven weeks now
Too hot to even speak now
Did you hear what I just heard? ~~~ The Music Never Stopped (Grateful Dead, 1975)

Colorado River, at Moab Utah

Left school with a first class pass

Started work but as second class

School taught one and one is two

But right now, that answer just ain’t true. ~~~ Ride My Seasaw (Moody Blues, “In Search of the Lost Chord”, 1968)

Star Valley, Wyoming – Bridger-Teton National Forest, 6 miles south of Freedom Wyoming

Im reluctant to write this, because there were so few tourists and summer homes of the rich and famous (we wouldn’t like it to become like Sun Valley), but the finest clear streams with turquoise pools, prolific wildflowers, and scenic hikes I’ve enjoyed on my trip so far were in Bridger-Teton National Forest in the Star Valley Front. Of those, the most spectacular was Strawberry Creek Trail! (of course, I forgot to bring the camera – but below is a view from my dispersed campsite at the bottom):

The hike up to Trout Lake in the Northern Cascades was a close second –

And here’s a different spectacular Trout Lake, just below Lizard Head Pass & Wilderness, Colorado:

Here’s a highlight from Rocky Mountain National Park:

Lovely spot on the Salmon River in Idaho:

How about the Snake River:

The hike above Cutthroat Lake in the Northern Cascades was brutal – I didn’t make it out and back and turned back as the brutal sun hit the trail at 11 am:

But Blue Lake, in Northern Cascades was very easy walk in:

We camped and had our own beach in this spot on the Skagit River – as all sorts of RV’s sped by at 60 mph, rushing to pay to jam into an RV ghetto in Cascade National Park:

O’ man river,
Dat ol’ man river,
He mus’know sumpin’
But don’t say nuthin’
He jes’ keeps rollin’
He keeps on rollin’ along.  ~~~~ Paul Robeson version, 1936

Glory Days.

Corporations Have Bought Public Interest Groups

Round and round and around we go, where the world’s headed nobody knows.
Great googa mooga, can’t you hear me talkin’ to you, just a
Ball of Confusion that’s what the world is today. ~~~  Ball of Confusion (The Temptations, 1971)

Chris Hedges has a must watch interview with Russ Mokhiber:

How Corporations Have Taken Over Government, Nonprofit and Regulatory Agencies (Video)

“All the checks and balances—from press to public interest groups to criminal prosecutors—are slowly being cut back,” investigative journalist Russell Mokhiber tells Chris Hedges in a discussion about corporate crime.

Watch the whole thing, especially my NJ friends who know exactly how this corruption works.

Because I’ve witnessed this first hand many times over the span of a 30 year career in a State environmental regulatory agency and non-profit environmental groups, and have been documenting, speaking, and writing about this same corruption for years – and have paid a huge price for doing so – I felt compelled to submit this comment below. Who knows, maybe some intrepid journalist out there will break a sweat and do the research or just Google the work I’ve done already (and I can’t even escape it on the road – see this Trust For Public Land scam):

Dear Chris – right in your own backyard, the State of NJ, corporations (and corporate dominated Foundations) basically created the model of funding “legitimate” conservation and environmental groups to control their agenda and advocacy over 2 decades ago.

The cancer has proliferated today to such a degree that it is brazen – openly celebrated as “partnership” and “stewardship” and “sustainable development” and “watershed management” (all these slogan are frauds designed to mask the corruption).

Take a look at the funding and boards of NJ Audubon Society, Sustainable NJ, Trust For Public Land, Nature Conservancy, NJ Future and Rethink Energy NJ. Look also at The Dodge Foundation (Chris Daggett), PSEG, NJ Natural Gas, WalMart, and the Wm. Penn Foundation.

Even individual billionaire’s, like Peter Kellogg, have bought NJ Audubon to promote commercial logging on public lands and land management to promote hunting (“young forests” and “forest stewardship”).

NJ Audubon even has a “Partnership” with Donald Trump!!!!!!

A guy named Mike Catania, previously with an NGO land conservation group, even formed his own corporate consulting group to institutionalize this corruption. When I outed and criticized him, he took down his own 10 year report that documented all the corrupt deals.

The same financial corruption has infiltrated Rutgers and other NJ universities. Take a look at who is speaking and leading the next “Climate Change” conference at Rutgers, for example. Note especially where it is being held, at corporate Duke Foundation led by “entrepreneur” Mike Catania.

I’ve been documenting and writing about this corruption for years.

As a result, my Foundation funding was zeroed and I was basically driven out of the state and am blackballed. I’m living in a van.

Do a word search on my blog, Wolfenotes.com for links to all the documentation.

BTW, using State DEP funds to muzzle critics is rampant as well – check out “conservation” groups that get grants or funding from NJ DEP or US EPA, including American Littoral Society, Clean Ocean Action, all the local “watershed” and land preservation groups and NY/NJ Baykeeper,, NJCF, PPA, etc

A Visual Evocation Of Cold War Madness

[Update – scroll to bottom, below photos]

The photo above is the Diamond Creek fire (taken on 7/27/17) I took on the border of the Pasayten Wilderness, seen from Hart’s Pass in spectacular Okanogan National Forest. Started by a campfire!

[Update: for a disturbing analysis of fire, climate change, and forests, read “The Late Great Whitebark Pine”. I’ve seen all this happening now in many western forests, and conditions now are drier, not wetter as projected, so actual conditions may be worse then predicted.]

I watched for hours as the fire generated an enormous mushroom cloud – I thought this might look like a miniature version of what a nuclear bomb would create. Here’s a broader view:

Then I read the interpretive sign: the Slate Peak Lookout tower on the top of the mountain was intended to be an Air Force radar station.

During the Cold War hysteria – currently being revived – the US Air Force wanted to monitor for invading Soviet bombers.  They actually blew off the top of the mountain – take a look, Dr. Strangelove!

The military also built the road to the top – here is USFS description of the history “A Little Off The Top” (is it legible?) And the USAF radar station was never built.

Aside from the evocative Cold War irony, read this assessment of that road, from “Dangerous roads – the worlds’s most spectacular roads”. Having driven that road, I completely agree.

We spent the day engrossed in the fire cloud and camped up top.

It got colder and windier as sundown approached. I had to put on winter hat and coat.

We hiked up to the lookout tower at sunrise.

It felt like treading on the edge of the earth – with the wind gusting, I felt like I might just blow away. It was an unsettling landscape, to say the least.

Despite the spectacular beauty, we began the white knuckle drive down as soon as we got back – I didn’t even make coffee.  Take a look:

[Creepy End Note: I brought some books along. I just re-read “On The Road” – and in checking Kerouac’s biography this morning from the fine Carnegie Library here in Port Townsend, Washington, I noted that he spent a few months as a fire lookout on “Desolation Peak”, which is nearby to where the photos were taken.

[Update – Kerouac let his “beat” mask slip exactly once in “On The Road”, in a serious passage that is highly revealing as to the underlying reality that heavily influenced the “beat” alienation and rejection of social values.

And that reality is the bomb.

Here’s the passage, in the final chapter, where the road takes them to Mexico. It explains everything: (emphasis mine)

… They [the Sierra Madre Oriental] had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.

Update #2 – 8/5/17 – here’s a good essay that makes the same point: “On The Beach”

(note: that book and “On The Road” were both published in 1957, the year I was born.)

Can’t Get Away from NJ Bullshit

Lake Pend Oreille (Idaho)

I had to stop along lovely Lake Pend Oreille when I saw the sign for “Pringle Park”!

As I was having a yogurt snack, another coal train roared by:

How many folks reading that fish consumption advisory sign connect the problem with that coal train?

Hard Times

Down and Out at the (closed) Libby Hotel

Ironically, the main drag through Libby Montana is named “Mineral Avenue” –

A very sad place, but I felt compelled to visit.

The above photo captures the essence of a devastated downtown, a place that Chris Hedges has called a “sacrifice zone”.

NJ angles on the asbestos disaster in Libby can be found here and here.

Not much more to say.