Month: January 2026

January 28th, 1986

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Geez, it was forty years ago.

I’ve told this before.

I was tapping a keg of Bud. Tom was swamped behind the bar. The Sterling Inn was packed for lunch early that day and even Patti, the manager’s wife, came down from the nine rooms upstairs they rented out to travelers so that she could help on the floor. Her husband, Mark Roy, moved from maître d’ to waiter to give me a hand. The entire wait staff and kitchen staff showed up to work.

Normally the Inn was subdued, a quiet whisper no matter the number of patrons. It was an upscale restaurant with a pricey menu and listed as one of the finest in New England by Yankee Magazine. The head chef, Al Roy, had studied in France, and his specialty was duck. Dave the “other chef” who was always on duty and who normally never came out of the kitchen where he made steaks, haddock, and duck, wandered at some point into the lounge area.

“Did they go up yet?” he asked in his thick central-Massachusetts accent.

“Not yet,” I said as I placed lunch in front of a couple at a table nearby. Tom called me over to tap a keg. The entire place was buzzing, almost loud, everyone talking and laughing. Half the customers were friends or relatives of Christa McAuliffe, and they were there that day with the rest of us, with the rest of the country, to watch the now mythical and beloved teacher ride the Challenger into Space. When I did get a chance to hear the announcers talk about what the crew was doing at any given point, I got goosebumps. I’d followed the Apollo program and had been an avid fan of space flight since I was a kid, as were many people my age. But this was different. A civilian–a teacher at that–captured the attention of the country.

Christa grew up about thirty miles east in Framingham, and taught in Concord, New Hampshire, about an hour and a half away. This was a time when the nation followed her progress from applicant to astronaut, and her enthusiasm, energy, and warmth engulfed everyone. Back in Massachusetts, she was as beloved as the Red Sox, and it seemed everyone suddenly “knew” her. But on this day, the place was packed by her true friends from Framingham who swamped stories or bragged to us about the times they had with her “back in the day.”

Back at my house just down the reservoir my bags were packed and a friend from Pennsylvania was flying in a few weeks later to help me move to Hershey before my own travels were supposed to commence. But on that day I was a native of Massachusetts, and the young teacher’s ambitions and plans for her students after her return inspired us like little had for quite some time. This was the Reagan years, and the world was being beaten by constant life-altering events like the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, the verbal battle between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Mexico City earthquake, and more. But then just after the New Year after months of buildup and anticipation, Christa and the rest of the crew, including Commander Francis R. Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, Mission Specialists Dr. Ronald E. McNair, Lt. Col. Ellison S. Onizuka, and Dr. Judith A. Resnik, along with Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis, moved us all into a place of hope. We were literally and metaphorically taking the stagnant thoughts of the nation and rocketing them into another place entirely. No one was not affected by this.

I wrestled with the keg with one eye on the television behind the bar as the Challenger lifted off the pad and cheers filled the place, and a few tables grabbed their pre-ordered bottles of champagne.

Patti: That doesn’t look right.

Tom: What happened?

Patti: Something is…

deafening silence in the place.

just absolute silence. Then comments to justify the explosion, like it was just a “bad angle of the booster,” or it “did that last time too,” until NBC commentator Tom Brokaw said, “The Challenger appears to be a fireball…”

and someone screamed.

And I don’t remember hope like that in this country since then

Do not, do not, please do not skip this video: The Challenger Preflight, and “They Were Flying for Me” by John Denver, and Reagan’s memorial words

January 24th, 2026, 10:33 pm

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
yesterday

I have chosen to be present.

The river is icy tonight; not frozen at all but frothy on the whitecaps, foam along the sand. The sky was clear last night adding to the bone-chilling air, and the stars and planets filled the horizon. Tonight, however, it is cloudy, low dark clouds heavy with snow and eventual ice as a storm approaches, one like we have never seen before, so we are told. This is, this is not, a metaphor. Yesterday morning the sky and the bay seemed one, both calm, a mirror, still, complete peace, and the blue of the sky and the blue of the bay were only interrupted by a white cloud stretching across both. Tonight the water is rough, choppy, the spray stings the skin, and standing outside too long is dangerous, deadly.

Nature does what she wants, as well.

A soft sound came out of the woods earlier, rustling but heavier. I thought it was a deer at first, or the fox who visited the other night, or perhaps the racoon family which lives in one of the trees behind the shed and spends much of their time under the shed. But it wasn’t. A cat came out of the brush and sat on the icy stones and stared at me. I tried to coax her to the porch, but she simply meowed and moved away. I followed briefly but that only chased her further, so I retreated inside remembering my own cat who died some years ago and who, when he wanted to come inside, would leap from the front rail to high up the screen door to look through the thin windows at the top. When he saw me get up to go to the door in the back, he’d leap back to the porch, run around the house and slide inside. The cat earlier looked a little like him, a grey tabby, but this one had too much white. For a little while I was fine in the encompassing world of the cat in the driveway, and I felt such peace to be so present.

There will be Ice tomorrow. Again. So before I went inside, I stood for a moment in the chilly air and listened to the silence stretching far across the river and the bay, far inland as well, through the woods and into the night. No marches here tonight, no protests, no threats. No starving children waiting for medical care in Gaza or homeless in Ukraine, freezing. No unpredictable folly, no disparaging comments, no ridicule or mockery or distasteful gestures. No needless deaths or poor excuses, no narcissistic nonsense, no impatient though warranted commentary from allies. We live in a world now where no one is reading opinions unless they already agree. Heather Cox Richardson is preaching to the choir. So is Fox news. ICE shoots at will. The president acts without restraint. Congress doesn’t act at all. The news stopped covering the Epstein Files, Venezuela, the bombing of boats in the Gulf, the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, the impending shutdown, the redistricting debacle, the purchase of the Supreme Court justices. I can’t breathe.

I’m moving on, maybe longer than planned. Across the pond and then the river and far out beyond the Norris Bridge up river I heard geese approaching, their honks growing in volume and number, until they scattered about and landed in the fields and the ponds and the shoreline, hundreds of them, more, and they quieted down so that only a few calls could be heard and after ten minutes or so it was quiet again, the water choppy forcing them to find the sand, and other than that, just the silence of a heavy sky about to snow.

I have spent mornings here for three decades and no mornings are the same, the geese or ducks or herons and me, the rising sun, the setting sun, the hole in the sky of the moon, and we, it, are never the same. It is the same in the Uinta’s, the Catskills, the Blue Ridge, the same in the fields of Neunen, the trails throughout the Commonwealth, Nogales, St Petersburg, the Mala Strana, the Sahel, the Lofoton’s, the same silence, same presence, the same sense I never want to leave. The peace that comes when you know you have no need for yet more change.

I am fine here, at the water, or there, in the hills, or down along the clear endless coastline with water moving in and then away, completely oblivious to the mayhem, the seeming end of a republic. I am fine in a state of unknowing, cousin to the ostrich, brother to the deceased, though still here just the same.

And it occurs to me tonight as the streets of Minneapolis are aglow with the burning fires of defiance, and the world is ridden with anxiety because of one demented mind, that I have always been this way, along the Great South Bay, the Allegany, the canyons in Arizona, and the central New England hills where kettles of hawks kept me company on clear summer nights, not so much avoidance as control, predictability and allowance. I could so easily disappear to the east of Tangier, to the west of Coos Bay, to the North of Minnesota where if we focus on what we should focus on, is exactly where the light gets in.

So I have chosen, as well, in the spirit of Shen Yu, to only experience what I choose to focus on.

“If I disappear, look for me in moving waters”

–Robert Redford

Misfocused: An Open Letter to the News Media

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To the Media:


Stop covering President Trump’s daily activities and decisions. We are numb to their predictability and redundancy. I could write the next ten days’ headlines concerning his knee-jerk presidency and be pretty close. We know seventy-five percent of Americans disagree with most of his current obsessions, including Greenland, Iran, and Venezuela. They are concerned about affordability, a word Mr. Trump apparently thinks was only recently invented. They are concerned about housing prices and the cost of milk.

Do this instead: Cover congress. Obviously, most of them have gone silent since they know that to suffer the wrath of Mr. Trump is to risk unemployment, perhaps even an investigation, but not if all of them all at once stand up and say, “No more.” Report about that. Ask them the questions instead of the president. Ask congressional leaders if they agree with the possible invasion of Greenland and the likely subsequent chaos at the United Nations, in NATO, and the inevitable explosion of prices for everything from Europe, and make that front page top of the hour news instead of comments from Mr. We’ve Heard it All Before. Ask them how they feel about the president’s threats to invade Iran if they continue to badly treat the protestors while he defends ICE’s motives, including shooting a woman in the face as the agent called her a “fucking bitch.” Ask congress where they stand on that matter. Find out why they are not proposing bills with an overwhelming majority to avoid veto that state any action by the military must be approved by Congress. Ask them if they are aware that their constituency has ceased liking the president’s actions to the point of a supermajority. Make it front page news that in this republic that the overwhelmingly majority of actions taken by the president are only possible because of either their approval or their silence. Don’t let them be silent. Don’t let them avoid the truth. Expose their cowardice at supporting anti-American policies from the American president because they’re afraid of losing their civil servant job.

Make it clear that the American public lays the blame for all of this at their feet, and every single morning be at their doors asking them again, and again, how they are letting him get away with his unprecedented weak-minded plans. Remind them that when a bully’s disciples refuse to go along with the demands and threats, the bully stands alone and inevitably folds, and his supporters will move quickly behind someone else to stand in unity. Then, in the form of a question, somehow tell them that if a handful of republican leaders stand against the president, they will likely suffer childish ridicule and adolescent belittling, followed by a public shaming and a loss of office. But if a majority of them stand against the president, if they all decide that enough is enough, their followers will abandon Mr. Trump and stand behind them, even if simply because they don’t want to appear to go down alone.

This is psychology 101, but you are too misfocused on the hype and vacuum created by the president. Make it your mission to control the conversation since you have from Edward. R Murrow to now. And today’s headlines should no longer begin with “Here is what the president did today.” It must begin, “Here is what congress did not do today.”

Today I Discovered

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I’m thinking of doing a kid’s show. Maybe an adult show but as if we’re kids. I’m not sure; I just thought of it when I started typing just now. But it could work.

I’ll call it Bob’s Log House. or Bob’s Got Way Too Much Time on His Hands.

I’ll play a song for all the seniors as we sit in a circle around a bowl of Cheese-Its and a few bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and I’ll play “Today,” or “This Land is Your Land,” or “I’m All Out of Fucks.” A bowl of gummies to share, perhaps.

And then we can have a special guest. Someone to explain Medicare, or someone to explain K-Pop. And there will be questions and I can move from person to person like Phil Donahue, and tilt my head slightly as if my follow-up question should be carved in marble for its brilliance. Then we’ll give the guest a BGWTMTHH t-shirt and coffee mug. It’ll be great.

Like SNL and other shows, we can have a News Update, and I could comment on what’s happening in the news, in Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, and, of course, Greenland. I’ll keep the information as valid and accurate as possible, but since it’s my show I might toss out the occasional declarative observation, such as, “Apparently the President is attempting to get away with as much as he can in his first two years since he knows once the GOP is voted out of congress, he is fracked.” Or, “The Bills look good to beat the Broncos this Sunday.” I’ll keep it light, of course.

And I’ll finish each show with a stroll outside to the river; it doesn’t matter what the weather is since the weather was here first and I’m just passing through, and sometimes we need the storms and winds and rain to remind us we can still feel something, that all of the emptiness we constantly sense from others, slips out of our mind when a crisp wind comes down the Rapp and tightens our skin. And we’d walk to the river as I and whatever special guest might join me–sometimes my son, sometimes Kevin from next door or Wayne from the village, and maybe sometimes artist William Clarke or Governor Abby Spanberger–walk quietly until we both toss out short comments about what we discovered today.

Like how I just learned that if you take the pit of an avocado and slice it up, boil it until the water is dark, then let it become lukewarm, it is a powerful pain reliever to rub on your joints and skin, better than the emu stuff even.

Or how in Switzerland it is illegal to own just one guinea pig, or that Australia is wider than the moon (and way wider than the Mississippi), or that a shrimp’s heart is in its head, or how Romans used to drop a piece of bread in their glass before raising a glass, hence, to make a “toast.”

I have more. And you will hear them if you watch the part of the show where some guest and I walk to the river and mention that the shortest regional flight in the world is on Loganair and goes the entire 1.7 miles from Westray to Papa Westray, Scotland, in about 90 seconds. People will love this segment and it might make BGWTMTHH a viral hit.

And it’s educational so I could have gotten a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but they’re gone so I can point out in that quick segment the irony of the defunding of the CPB because a tiny tiny tiny fraction of NPR’s budget comes from the CPB; the vast majority of that money was going to local NPR stations to help fund local programming, so now those shows are being cancelled, but the stations have to fill the time with something and since they pay one fee for NPR no matter how much or little of it they use, they are filling in the empty local timeslots with MORE NPR. So that DJT in his effort to get less NPR by defunding CPB, is helping to spread the bass-heavy, treble-absent voices of America. Who doesn’t love irony. I could have an Irony segment where I sit on my porch eating bacon and talk about irony.

I will never run out of material.

Like how when someone is cremated, the eyes vaporize. They just, well, vaporize. And I can’t shake that one. I think of all the beauty in the world, all the fields of the Netherlands with windmills and canals, and the dusty trails of West Africa, or the village streets of Mexico, or the rivers–all the rivers–and the tears from unbearable sadness and unforgivable laughter, and the idea that the eyes don’t so much burn up as much as they vaporize like a tissue tossed on a firepit that lifts into the air, into the darkness, its light fading quickly, and it is again part of the air and the world. That. That the eyes vaporize. Maybe I’ll end one of the shows on that, and the picture can fade out to quick images of places that are too beautiful to look at sometimes, and the faces of people who live inside my soul.

Tune in, my friends, for the new Netflix show, “Bob’s Got Way Too Much Time on His Hands.” Coming soon.

SPECIAL EDITION: BOOK LAUNCH DAY

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January 4, 2026:

Announcing the release today of Curious Men: Lost in the Congo. Order by tapping the link below the video: Thank you for supporting independent presses and artists. Many thanks to Kim, Bill, and Jacquie, and everyone else at Madville Publishing.

Here’s a video about the writing of the book, the living of the book, and the time that has passed:

ORDER FROM AMAZON BELOW BY TAPPING THE COVER:

OR ORDER DIRECT FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Madville Publishing

Life is Beautiful

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

It is January 3rd. Again. Spins around every winter, and over the last few years it seems as if we dropped a few summer months, maybe some weeks in October. Because it is January again, and my chances of reinventing myself are growing fewer.

Like anyone else, I would do a lot of things differently, especially over the course of the more recent years. But I can’t. The best I can do is start now, and keep starting. As many times as it takes.

Because, honestly, life is beautiful, but we insist on talking about the ugly. And as Confucius pointed out: Life is easy, but we insist on making it complicated.

Much peace my friends.

If I had my life to live over

by Nadine Stair

*******
If I had my life to live over,
I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.
I’d relax, I would limber up.
I would be sillier than I have been this trip.
I would take fewer things seriously.
I would take more chances.
I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers.
I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would perhaps have more actual troubles,
but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who live
sensibly and sanely hour after hour,
day after day.

Oh, I’ve had my moments,
And if I had it to do over again,
I’d have more of them.
In fact, I’d try to have nothing else.
Just moments, one after another,
instead of living so many years ahead of each day.
I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere
without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat
and a parachute.
If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over,
I would start barefoot earlier in the spring
and stay that way later in the fall.
I would go to more dances.
I would ride more merry-go-rounds.
I would pick more daisies.