No matter how many Septembers roll by I am still impressed by the poignance of the end of summer. I overheard somebody say that many of the rafting companies have just shut down for winter. They are big business on the Arkansas River, here at Buena Vista, CO.

Hiking along the Arkansas River the dogs and I accreted a camp follower, a chubby golden Lab. From time to time he stepped off the hiking trail and went down to splash in the river. It's something that even a dog-hater has to admire--not just because the Lab looked so pleased, but because he was so perfectly in his element, doing what he was meant to do.

What about us? The booby-trap in that question is the word, meant, which implies a deist approach, if not a blatantly theological one. But actually I wanted to approach it from a sociobiological point of view.

Watching that dog made me think of a pastoral life in the Basque country. You can hardly blame me for that since I am in the Colorado high country hiking and mountain biking with my dogs. Wouldn't a shepherd's life be more natural than a corporate cubicle existence in a large metropolis?

Now the booby-trap is the word, natural. There is nothing unnatural about large social organizations: they are based on human intelligence, language, and social cooperation. These are all natural attributes of homo sapiens.

But modern life is unnatural in the sense that the physiology of our bodies and brains have not adapted to modern life. We have the same bodily "hardware" (including the brain) that hunter-gatherers did. Only our customs and ideas--our cultural "software"--have changed.

Just imagine the bodily changes of a 100,000 years of evolution in a corporate cubicle in a large city. At the very least there will be noticeable changes to the human mouth, lips and knee caps, which adapt our species better to daily life in a bureaucratic hierarchy.

The lifestyle of a full time RVer can be seen as an anthropological reversion to a more "natural" lifestyle. I got interested in the subject of pastoralism and nomadism and am still reading up on it.

Speaking of booby traps I had a scary encounter with an old mining shaft near Leadville recently. Scary for me--comical for anybody watching it. These things freak me out. I crept on my hands and knees towards this Evil Portal and extended the camera out over the edge, with the flash on, trying to see just how ghastly it was. The photos were all flops--guess that my hand was shaking.