One summer I squatted on a maritime pier on Puget Sound. I can't say for sure that it was meticulously legal. I was awakened in the middle of night, not by the town cop's knock on my door, but by the bellowing horn of a huge tugboat that had pulled up in the middle of the night.
I quickly got dressed and staggered around on the pier, still half asleep. The crew was changing shifts. The tugboat's job was to escort football-field-sized oil tankers to a nearby refinery. My eye was drawn to the huge ropes that lashed the tugboat to the pier. I studied the knot, which seemed vaguely familiar from my days in sailing clubs.
Compare this to paying $30 a night to sleep on a 15 foot wide concrete pad. The next day you go to the office and see the standard display of tourist brochures: oh look! a guided tour of a cheese or candy factory.
At my present boondocking campsite on the east side of Chino Valley, AZ, I am enjoying watching the macho equipment roll in to build another power line.
Have you ever thought of the technological miracles of the 1800's: the conversion of mechanical motion into electricity, and thence into so many things? A day before this was discovered, a Jonathan Swift could have satirized it as silly scientist-stuff, 'turning sunbeams into cucumbers.' A day after, it was boring. Thanks Misters Faraday and Tesla, and all you others.
People of a few generations ago went through far more fundamental changes than us. What have we experienced besides the irruptions of cable TV commercials and internet Google ads!?
My poor little 3/4 ton cargo van looked so petite compared to all of the equipment rolling in. The first morning here, a caravan of Caterpillar-colored ground-chewers rumbled by, equally spaced, and preceded by a tanker truck that hosed down the dirt road, like a drum majorette preparing the way for a marching band.
This crane thing had a weird, Tyrannosaurus Rex effect. Recall that famous scene in Jurassic Park:
And so, off the power goes to the complacent, affluent home-dwellers of Prescott, who have never given a thought to what their standard of living is based on.
