84 - 5-year reflections
Date night, Solar Panels, Music of the Spheres, and the first 5 years after the PCT
As I grow older, it seems that whole weeks fly by in the space that used to be filled by only days. This week went by in such a blur that I found myself with a sore neck and not much memory of what had happened.
One thing I remember clearly was date night. As newly-minted members of the vaccinated elite, my wife and I enjoyed our first indoor dining experience in over a year at a delicious Thai restaurant in downtown San Rafael (Thai food runs deep in our relationship—our first date was at another Thai restaurant down the street, and the rehearsal dinner for our wedding at yet another on the same street). Then we walked down to the Rafael, a beautiful old-timey theater reminiscent of the Works Progress Administration and Gilbert Stanley Underwood. We were curious how attendance would be, post-pandemic, and walked in with a little trepidation—even with our fully-activated vaccines, I think we’re all a little gun-shy about crowding together in large groups. We needn’t have worried; we were two of five people in the theater.
The movie, Nomadland, was a potent slow burn. Frances McDormand delivered a devastating performance as Fern, a widow displaced from her home by the closure of a sheetrock factory who finds temporary jobs around the country while living out of her van. The movie does a fantastic job of showing what a nomadic life has to offer, with all of its fullness and its difficulties. You can bet that I saw more than a few parallels with backpacking and thru-hiking.
This week in Intrinsic:
Pacific Crest Trail - 5-year reflections
Solar Panels on California’s canals
How Music informs Physics
PCT - 5-Year Reflections
This year will be the fifth since I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.
When I reached the Northern Terminus on a freezing October morning, I worried that I had squandered the four and a half months I had spent on the trail. I had expected big changes, but I felt like I was pretty much the same person I had been before the hike. Where were the grand self-realizations? Why was I still so anxious and uncomfortable all the time? That first year back from the trail was rough. I struggled with depression and anxiety, unemployment followed by a job I hated, and the loss of my dog.
Five years later, I can see that my life was permanently altered by the PCT. I hadn’t noticed at the time because most of the changes were small but highly charged. By themselves, they were difficult to see, but over time they realigned my thinking and changed the way I see myself and the culture I live in. Here are a few of the lessons that have stuck with me.
Articles
Why Covering Canals with Solar Panels is a Power Move
It’s one of those ideas that’s so good that it seems ridiculously obvious in retrospect. “Shuttling all that water around requires pumps to make it flow uphill; accordingly, the water system is [California’s] largest single consumer of electricity.”
HT James
“About his theory of relativity, Einstein said: ‘It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.’ He claimed that no scientist thinks in terms of equations. Einstein said that he sometime thought in images, sometimes in musical architectures.” As a bonus, check out this delightfully strange composition mentioned in the article, the Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World) by Kepler himself.
Quote…
“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
That’s all for now, thanks for reading. Feel free to leave a comment or write me back, I love to hear from you.
Warmly,
Nick