Mindfulness – Lessons from a Stone

My One Year Foray Into Quora

Edited Version, Uploaded February 4, 2026

I subscribed to Quora for an added something to do while laid up again in the hospital at the beginning of 2024 and during what was to be a long recovery period. I wrote a post or two during my week-long stay and then went a full year before giving it another thought.

As opposed to what I’d always thought of as a reliable question / answer based source of information, I found the platform to be in serious decline. Its algorithms and user interface aren’t exactly intuitive and it took me some time before I figured things out. Like most platforms, including your preferred video streaming services, YouTube, or most forms of social media, you have your daily feed which the site’s AI function serves-up based on individual use. The more you use the site, the more individually tailored your feed becomes. At first, and I have no idea as to what it was predicated on, my feed was all about gun control and heated, foul-mouthed arguments over the interpretation of the Second Amendment. These were the same inane arguments that have had news outlets and their respective liberal and conservative talking heads contesting and plaguing the non-gun-oriented public since the 1980’s. I was appalled by the collective waste of time, particularly because over a period spanning five decades, the only thing that has changed has been the guns, while the primary arguments over those guns have essentially remained unchanged. Big yawn!

After querying the platform to locate the “Spaces”, as Quora refers to them (there are hundreds if not thousands of topics), in which I found interest, I located just ten that resonated with my desire to contribute as a writer. By Thanksgiving of 2025, I’d written several hundred posts or provided what I believed to be necessary responses to inaccurate or less than knowledgeable posts written by others. Much of my writing has been on behalf of proactive wildlife conservation measures and raising public awareness on the state of wild places and wild things and, more specifically, just how close we are to saying goodbye to a profound number of threatened or endangered keystone species, after which entire ecosystems will quickly fail.

Because I’ve cared deeply about “The Environment” since I was old enough to think and reason for myself, I, almost without being aware of it, ventured in, headfirst and was cranking-out post after impassioned post, and response after impassioned response, in an attempt not only to inform but to compel people to “act” and put an end to fifty years of ignorance, inordinate amounts of research (we have effectively been studying many keystone species to death), lack of subject matter education, and worldwide political gridlock. When combining these factors, the end result has yielded almost nothing in terms of the kind of public awareness required to “move the ball down the field” and affect change. After all, in the end, it will be humankind itself that is in serious jeopardy. We simply cannot survive a world without other animal, insect, and plant species in it.

Though I know that the world, very much including this country, is in dire need of much more effective leadership as related to modern complexities, this was my chance to thoroughly engage in getting these extremely important points across, but what I found is that I was virtually alone even within these groups of self-purported experts on the the subject of “environmental conservation”. It was clear that there was a level of caring but it was equally clear that no one was presenting thoughts or ideas as to what to do about the mess we as human beings have created over the millenia or even during much more recent times. Even within this cross-section of “environmentally conscious” people who are trying to do the “right thing”, few seemed willing to become more deeply engaged and hear about the things that are absolutely necessary to turn things around. It seemed more to me like these Spaces were simply discussion forums where people were satisfied with comparing notes and learning more about animals they found to be cute, cuddly, or otherwise intriguing. Mere curiosities. People were attempting to better understand threatened and endangered species and the planet’s few remaining, but forever shrinking, “wild places”, but didn’t seem to comprehend the current state of affairs. Certainly not the grave nature of the circumstances surrounding these species and forever lost habitat due to human overpopulation and encroachment. That for the majority of these special animals, we’re at least thirty years past the point of no return but, even so, we owe it to the natural world to step up and give it our best effort to salvage a modicum of the way the world was for them and other, less threatened species, just one-hundred years ago.

I was overwhelmed and deeply saddened to find out for myself, once and for all, that my “fellow man” is largely incapable of the kind of empathy, compassion, and collective intelligence required to initiate substantive change even while we sit in what has quickly become the 11th hour for most of the creatures that have found their species being referred to as “threatened “, “endangered”, or even “critically endangered”.

I’ve also provided well-thought-out or researched answers to hundreds of questions on all sorts of topics (many of which were outside of my ten chosen Spaces) and was considered a key writer for most of the Spaces to which I belonged. It was fun to challenge myself to see how much I already knew about things like World History, American History, the History of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Viet Nam, and the numerous wars in the Middle East. For many years, I’ve also had a serious interest in the History of War on this planet as a whole. I enjoyed answering questions regarding geography and various cultures as they relate to many different geographic regions. The Cold War is another favorite but, perhaps my most favored subject of all: The American West, with a particular interest spanning the past three hundred years. Late 19th Century and early 20th Century Polar Exploration and Adventure has always struck a chord with me. The areas of Mindfulness, Spiritually (not based on any given , highly specialized religion) and “Advanced Thinking” have also been at the top of my “Conversational Bucket List”. I had the opportunity to engage in answering questions on many of these personal interests and, in doing so, I did a lot of research and learned an incredible amount which helped to round-out my knowledge of many of the aforementioned subjects. Not unlike any internet platform (social or knowledge-based), depending on how you choose to utilize Quora determines whether you find it to be a valuable learning exercise or end up being fed nothing but pure garbage. You must have enough sense to discern what is factually based from that which is derived from the accompanying AI generated posts, answers, and questions, gross misinformation, and what has recently come into play in the form of rampant image fakery and plagiarism.

To become a “Contributor” as opposed to being just one of thousands of passive followers, you are either invited by a Space administrator or owner and required to submit a writing sample, or, you can contact the Space yourself and request to be a contributor and, if that site is still taking on new people, submit your writing sample and wait for a response which took just a day, or two. Many of these Spaces list several hundred contributors, but I’ve found that fewer than a quarter of them actually maintained any real presence on most of their listed Spaces. After a couple of months of feverish writing (I believed in what I was writing about and the subjects were important and well within my wheelhouse), I began to sense that something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite describe it. So, for a time, perhaps as long as six or seven months, I felt a sense of purpose. But at the same time, I’m a uniquely qualified writer and came to it with a broad-ranging professional and avocational background and, though retired, I maintain a very busy life. Therefore, I thought it would be wise to curb my activity to just six hours a week. I could see, quite clearly, that thousands of people had lost themselves to Quora. Many had joined eight, or more, years ago. Others would submit fifteen, twenty, or up to thirty posts in a single day, so it was clear that most of these people (I’ve never understood this about social media) were feeling at least a modicum of gratification from their posts on this megalithic internet platform, where (IMO) any one individual is essentially anonymous. But I learned that this was just another sign of the times and it was likely the same with other popular social media platforms.

In contrast, I did not consider my subscription to Quora to be driven by personal social need, rather, I became a member of Quora, because I enjoy writing and it was as good a place as any to polish my and augment my skills. Writing about subjects that I believe to be important was a bonus. Though I had kept my expectations low in terms of developing any real following, in less than a year (closer to nine months) after I became an earnest contributor, I had received just over 284,000 views of my various writings. If you apply the math, that comes to 568,000 views per year. Not a significant number when compared to some long-time Qurans, but I am confident that if you were to compare a typical post that I’ve written to those of most others, you would find significant differences in writing quality, knowledgeability, substantive content, and obvious, well-intentioned effort. Some of my longer posts more closely resembled an essay on the given subject than a simple one or two paragraph post, so they were invariably far more informational and detailed. But I wasn’t writing for the general public and my subjects were well-defined, as were the audiences by virtue of the Spaces I had chosen. It was much more enjoyable and the collective knowledge much greater in the four or five guitar-centric Spaces I’d joined as a writer (with topics ranging from playing techniques, to learning about the instrument and its history from its beginnings in Western Europe, to contemporary luthiery – the art of crafting fine stringed instruments, to contemporary designs and building methods, to vintage acoustic guitars). On the contrary, it was within the five environmental conservation Spaces that I encountered such a high level of frustration.

I had never intended for my presence on Quora to be any kind of long-term engagement, but for the time I was at it, I felt a responsibility to try to affect change by altering long-held perceptions on issue of wildlife and habitat conservation. I was also on one landscape photography-geared Space and got the chance to post a portion of my collection of landscape photographs taken while partaking in a cornucopia of mountain sports and activities in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West and, much later, here, where I live in Central Texas. Some of the pics I posted were from trips I’d taken while exploring West Texas and the Big Bend Region, including Big Bend National Park, one of the most remote and beautiful places in all of the US. I liked this photography Space a lot for its simplicity…just a place where people shared their wonderful photographs from places all over the world while not out shopping for inordinate levels of recognition or socially-driven “buzz”. Just amateur and professional photographers alike sharing some of their best work and being supportive of one another.

The thing that I did predominantly for my own edification (the part that felt the most gratifying) was in being involved as a primary contributor to the four “guitar-centric” Spaces. For these, I wrote hundreds more posts and answered hundreds of questions on topics ranging from vintage guitars to guitar maintenance and repair, reviewing both electric and acoustic guitars, advanced playing techniques, guitar studio and related gear selection, and encouraging guitarists of all levels with advice based on sixteen years of playing, buying, selling, and collecting guitars . For the most part, I enjoyed contributing to these Spaces and believe that my knowledge was appreciated by many. That bit of encouragement was born out of the feedback I would get from other Space contributors and the greater guitar community on Quora. There are dozens of “Guitar Spaces” on the platform, but I had spent some time looking into most of them before deciding to keep it to just four.

A surprisingly enjoyable example occurred when I answered a question submitted by an eleven year old boy who had been dutifully playing piano to please his gifted piano-playing parents, starting at the age of four. This meant that he’d already been taking his twice-weekly lessons for seven years before a friend introduced him to an acoustic guitar. Not surprisingly, he was smitten! His question was simple but, at the same time, fraught (for me as a reasonably objective person) with complexity.

Unlike most of my responses which came to me quickly while shooting from the hip, this question demanded some serious contemplation and empathy not only for this eleven-year-old, musically inclined kid, but for his ostensibly well-meaning parents. I took the question quite seriously before crafting a response. He had approached his parents not with altogether switching from piano to guitar, but with at least having the opportunity to try guitar while continuing with his, by now, rigorous piano regimen. They laid out a deal for him that said ‘no’ to guitar until he’d completed 8th grade, roughly three years later. That is a lengthy sentence for anyone, let alone an eleven-year-old who’d (from my point of view) already fulfilled his duty if based solely on the demands of his parents. But, unlike most parents of his generation, these were clearly parents who believed strongly that they’d had their son’s best interests in mind (particularly since they were both living any musician’s dream by playing piano as their primary source of professional income).

Hearing a bit about his parents, it was clear that neither of them had followed an easy path to finding success and had probably studied piano all the way through one of the country’s better colleges of music. They were classical players. My response both honored the efforts of the child and his parents while taking a “middle of the road” stance. I believed that these parents were extremely fortunate given the times we live in and, given that their offspring had any inclination at all to learn to play a difficult musical instrument, or was even interested in music with all the potential diversions kids have today.

My advice for him was to go to his parents with an amended plan which would afford him the opportunity to play both and see how that went for a period of one year, with a commitment to both instruments, but instead of doubling his load with more lessons, I suggested that he first see if he could pull it off under his own steam. This would, of course, lead to some “loosening” of the boy’s remaining commitment to piano, so I suggested that he put a ten hour per week cap on his guitar work. If, after one year’s time he was able to make some significant progress with acoustic guitar, he would be able to choose between the two instruments – provided he still had this same desire. The only financial requirement from his parents would be to invest in a good quality, concert-size acoustic guitar. If they do the due diligence, they’ll find that a very good guitar (one that he can grow with) can be had for just under to just over a thousand dollars. His other requirement would be to maintain his schoolwork and grades. Any way you slice it, these next three years would be difficult, but if he was of gifted musical talent, it was within the realm of being doable. I came up with this by telling him the truth: that even if their response was a “no”, continuing with piano for a few more years would not would become an obstacle to his future guitar playing journey, but, more than likely, that additional experience in playing piano and being a student of music will provide a sturdy foundation for picking up the guitar and hitting the ground already running, well ahead of others who are just starting out.

I went so far as to recommend that he show his parents my response as it should be abundantly clear that I stood on firm musical ground when proposing the idea. He contacted me about a month later to inform me that his parents had agreed to his amended counter-offer. He was extremely pleased (overjoyed) that our little plan had worked and thanked me profoundly. It made all the work I’d committed to Quora worthwhile. I am sixty-four with a number of significant health problems that took hold of my very satisfying life about six years ago and, thus, had never really had the time or energy to contribute to Quora in the first place, so, for the last month I have contributed very little. I may pick it up again someday, but I also have a blog and any time spent on Quora has been robbing me of time I’d have otherwise spent on my own “Space”. Still, I have reached thousands of people that I’d have not otherwise gotten in front of. I’m glad that I stuck with it until I found some of its more intellectual spaces and had the chance to write about things I find to be of utmost importance.

Less desirable things that I noticed about Quora, either immediately or over the course of my first few months when I’d begun to submit posts and answer questions with much more regularity. Early on, I’d made submissions to become a contributor to just four or five combined “Spaces” (to become more active rather than being a casual follower). Over time, I subscribed to five or six additional Spaces. I wouldn’t have made written submissions to any of the Spaces I had been following unless I felt that I could be of substantive value. To me, that meant crafting high-quality and interesting posts or fielding questions that were not only in my wheelhouse, but had some real appeal. I’d gone in thinking there would be many meaningful question and answer opportunities with qualities similar to the guitar scenario I provided above, but, across my other Spaces, that level of appreciation for one of my contributions turned out to be quite rare. I did have many positive interactions with other contributors within the guitar and music oriented Quora communities, the “Nature Photography” Space, and there was a Space titled “Into the Wild” which was right up my alley and I found it to be rewarding and supportive. But the wildlife and wild habitat conservation Spaces were different.

What I found to be particularly interesting as well as making me all the more wary of potential negatives which might result in my prompt exit from Quora (I do not subscribe to any other social media platform), the more I explored the site and read the bios of some of the other contributors, the more I began to see certain patterns that I didn’t find appealing within Quora’s database. Some of the site’s members were listed as contributors to as many as a hundred Spaces, yet few maintained any substantive level of contribution to the bulk of their listed Spaces. Not being able to fulfill a reasonable commitment to my chosen Spaces is precisely why I limited myself to just nine, or at times and through direct invitation, as many as twelve. I thought to myself, “What is this, he who dies having listed the most Spaces, wins?! Geez! From what I’ve learned about people in my sixty-for years of careful observation, this sort of thing was an indication of a personality, or types, of which I’d always had difficulty in establishing solid relationships. Thankfully, I am now retired and can pick and choose the kinds of people I associate with.

I was suspicious of anyone who would wish for the “world” to see how “prolific” they were as contributors without actually contributing much of anything (to most of the Spaces to which they subscribed). Even worse, I noticed that some of these same self-absorbed individuals had worked their way up through some of the same Spaces that I contributed to, only I was often selected to appear right alongside them as a “Key Contributor” in the banners of the various “About” pages of my Spaces, either immediately after the usual vetting process or after I had written just a handful of submissions (posts, answers to questions). The difference between us was that I was comparatively new to a given Space while most of these people had been submitting posts for years. The only way that I can figure this is if I’d written just enough high-quality posts to quickly be taken seriously by Space administrators or Space owners. After all, they’re going to want to advertise their key writers, the writers who are most likely to attract more followers. This factors-in as to how “Spaces” are monetized. I still don’t know, in more definitive terms, how or why I was able to move up through the ranks so quickly.

I was thankful for my good fortune thus far (I’d been a subscriber for well under a year). I had somehow managed to accelerate the process of becoming a “known” writing entity within most of my chosen Spaces. By then, just four of my Spaces were dedicated to wildlife and wild places conservation. It was within these particular Spaces where it quickly became clear that there were a number of individuals who had come to know one another (not from face to face human interaction, but virtually, through the Spaces they shared in common) and each of them had purportedly attained some sort of “elite status” through the typically five to eight years of steadfastly submitting posts and ultimately being recognized for their efforts. Most had several million views and came from educated backgrounds, claiming high-order positions career-wise and within their self-described social circles. Put bluntly, I have a strong distaste for this personality type as I had run head-long into it many times in my professional, pre-retirement life. They, and people very much like them often follow a self-made path to go on to become CEO’s or upper-echelon execs for many of this country’s corporations. This is a widely known fact which can easily be found in internet searches on the subject. There were many times during my career where I’d witnessed those with with similar personalities treating their employees in a degrading way, particularly when I had moved into loftier positions where these people had become my peers within the context of corporate structure and culture. There were a number of occasions where I had people coming to me completely distraught to see if I could do something about the “management by fear” atmosphere and regularly occurring condescension and generally poor treatment of the employees who served underneath them. At the risk of being demoted, or worse, I’ve “gone to bat” for employees assigned to me since early on in my career, so I wasn’t about to stop when I became a key player within the corporate hierarchy and had some sway. My management style couldn’t have been any more different than that of those with whom I’d had tenuous working relationships. There was no escaping them and we might even share adjoining offices. I am certain that for others the tension between those offices must have been palpable. By this point in my career, I’d read several books on the subject of sociopathy and had worked with any number of senior managers who exhibited textbook sociopathic behaviors. For me, the ensuing verbal conflicts come down to nothing more than “good versus evil” scenarios and I have had every inclination to take these people down, at least a notch, or two, in the name of the “greater good”. Since I was a kid I have felt a “calling” to defend the weak and oppose the strong and do not recall ever encountering any sort of negative consequence for taking these people on. Needless to say, I felt good about doing so. Additionally, I typically found friends in high places that I didn’t know I had.

This sort of situation has played-out for me several times on Quora but I have not once gone “looking for it). At some point, a number of these people have attempted to sabotage posts I had written with belligerent and aggressive commentary which usually came in the form of questioning the authenticity of what I had written. I had never done the same to any of them, so it left me wondering as to their reasoning. When this occurred, I would typically attempt to respond “offline” and check to see if they had their PM (personal messaging) function turned on. I do. But often, they do not and I am forced to take them on “out in the open” where readers can see the ensuing comments and responses. I do not take pleasure in shutting such individuals down and have learned to keep it short, but decisive, while choosing my words carefully such that I don’t break any of Quora’s “rules of engagement” or be off-putting to the many other readers of the given post. This is a delicate balance but, more times than not, I’ve been able to put the “shutdown” on any detractors I had picked up (not unlike excess baggage) on my journey through Quora. I don’t know why these people feel the need to attempt to diminish what I’d written (or, for that matter, what anyone had taken the time and energy to write) when virtually all of the other comments were positive in nature. I can certainly guess that it has much to do with the personality type that I’ve described. It only leaves me wishing that I could meet these people in person where they don’t have the internet to hide behind. I view them as cowardly and passive aggressive and make those views known in any response that I make. This scene seldom happens anymore, but before I could break free and simply write without counting on some sort of conflict, this happened some six or seven times until I’d finally dealt with each one of them and then it ended, abruptly.

I take absolutely no enjoyment in publicly sparring with such people and it is part of the reason that I’ve lost interest in giving Quora any more of my time. It is the primary duty of Quora’s moderators to squash this type of behavior before it gets out of control. I’m a big boy fully capable of fighting my own battles, but the main reason for my loss of interest in being a contributor on Quora is that after just a year, my experiences on the platform took on a hollowness that is difficult to describe, yet perhaps not too hard to understand. Underneath my seemingly bulletproof exterior (I have heard this many times from people I trust), I’m probably somewhere close to two-thirds introvert and one third extrovert (just enough to get by) which means that spending too much time around other people tends to leave me tapped. In other words, it’s always felt to me like I give far more than I get. The same thing holds true whether interactions are in close proximity, or through an internet connection.

I’ve never quite understood the mass appeal of social media and why it seems that millions of people obtain any sense of gratification or feelings of fulfillment by engaging in it so fully. For me, I had no social reasons for subscribing to Quora in the first place. It was simply an outlet for my writing and when it became obvious that I could not affect the lack of general ignorance regarding threatened and endangered species and tragically and rapidly diminishing habitat due to human encroachment, I felt that I had done as much as I could and further involvement would be a fool’s errand. It was, quite simply, time for me to move on.

My takeaway after a year (ten months in earnest) of pouring insights and knowledgeability into the platform, I had reached a point of diminishing returns and it was clear to me that, I alone, could not make a substantive difference. Considering the times we live in, I wonder now why I thought it would even be remotely possible. I believe now more than ever that by the time most people awaken and realize just how bad things have gotten for the billions of creatures with whom they share the planet, it’ll be far too late to salvage anything and we’ll all be (the good along with the bad) just a hop, skip, and a jump away from our long overdue demise. This statement comes after years of research and careful observation of what has inexorably transpired over the course of my life.

The basis for this thinking is simple (as I have written about exhaustively and told anyone who cared enough to listen), it will take far more time, funding, and concerted effort to make the kinds of changes necessary to turn things around (with enough time leftover) to give the world’s other creatures (creations) the chance they deserve to survive. Many of the most endangered species are high-order creatures which are the very foundation for life on planet earth, and their numbers in the wild are already so few that there aren’t enough individuals remaining to provide a healthy gene pool from which to procreate and, even if every change required for their survival happened tomorrow, it is already past the point of no return for many of them. Without them, there can be no resurrection from the damage we as human beings have already caused. So, the next time you reach for your phone to check your Twitter feed, please think about what you should be doing instead. It’s time to move on.

Backing Down: Not on my Worst Day!

Recently, I was forced to relearn an important lesson, a lesson that originated from within my DNA and reinforced many times over from numerous life experiences. I am sixty-four.

It began innocently enough while my wife was out walking our three dogs on a trail we’ve made that follows our fenceline on all four sides. She came in and told me of a fellow who was mowing the property just across the road. I had just had abdominal surgery to rid me of an undiagnosed infectious mass of fluid that had been growing behind my liver and had hospitalized me several times over the past two and a half years. I was just getting to the point where I could walk around with a cane but I hadn’t been able to walk outside for over a month and was unstable and still in a lot of pain.

Some Context Leading Up to That Day

The surgery I am referring to was the last stop on the train to resolve a serious illness that I had been battling for over two years. To say the least, it was an invasive surgery and involved shifting my organs to look for more infectious material, some of which had to be cut away. I lost a liter of blood and required a transfusion, both things unforeseen in anything the surgeon might run into while being able to finally view the extent of the problem. I did not know how it would have been possible for me to acquire such an obscure illness unless it was connected to an emergency gall bladder surgery that I had gotten several years before.

The gall bladder surgery was performed at one o’clock in the morning, sometime back in 2019, and not by a surgeon qualified to perform that type of surgery. After weeks of trying to get me to go, I was literally on death’s doorstep by the time my wife was able to get me in the truck and en route to the closest emergency room. It was only then that I learned of how bad off I truly was. My gall bladder had turned necrotic and the surrounding area was gangrenous. This led to an advanced case of sepsis. I didn’t know who or where I was and couldn’t name the president of the United States. After that woefully messy surgery I was hospitalized for nine days until my blood was cleared for release. As bad as the surgery and overall experience had been, I was thankful. There was no doubt that they had saved my life. It was my fault that the problem was allowed to progress to such a state.

Not long after returning home from the gall bladder surgery, there had been some signs that my innards were still in distress and my wife called the hospital surgeon’s office on a number of occasions to inquire about the pain and bloating I was experiencing again and was told that those were normal symptoms after a surgery like mine. After six months had passed, the pain had lessened but the bloating gradually continued until it looked like I was pregnant in the week leading up to an emergency, twenty-one day hospitalization in January of 2023. That stay included pumping four liters of nefarious, infected puss from my abdomen and then an “all hands on deck” rush to diagnose the root cause. By the time I went home, my blood had been studied ad nauseum, a cornucopia of cultures had been grown, I’d undergone every type of imaging there is, and still, I remained without a diagnosis. In other words, it was still with me and would be returning.

I was assigned to a lauded infectious disease doctor and went on a two year odyssey to diagnose the problem and, with some luck, save what was left of my life. Sooner or later , this infection was going to kill me, the bacteria were that pernicious. Without knowing where the fluid was coming from, there was no way to stop it from leaking into my abdomen inviting another round of infection and accelerated fluid buildup requiring three more trips to to hospital to chase down the infection and drain the fluid. At one point, I was married to an external fluid drain (an ugly bag and a catheter) for four months. There were three other drain installations but for just one to three months. During this time but unrelated (I think), I was diagnosed with high-grade bladder cancer. For the cancer, it’s been sixteen months and three surgeries and I’ll be in treatment for what looks like some time to come. It looked good for seven months, but I’d been told of its return just days before the incident.

It is all of this that I was carrying on my shoulders that day.

The Incident

Effectively, I had been unable to attend to our country home and property for about four years. For a perfectionist who’s always taken pride in taking care of my things, I’d begun to lose my mind. Because we have three wonderful dogs and an inordinate number of rattlesnakes on our Central Texas property, my biggest priority is in keeping the grass cut. If I don’t get to it in a few weeks, the brush begins to take hold and the native grasses will grow to three feet. It had been over a month since I’d been able to mow it with the field mower. I was about to bust with anxiety over not getting to it. But I’m the type of person who’s grown highly accustomed to doing virtually anything and everything myself. If you live in a subdivision, mowing isn’t that much of a chore, but on four acres of Texas brush country, it can be. You need the appropriate (expensive) equipment and there are lots of potential hazards to pay attention to.

I asked Genie to run over and see if the guy had time to swing by to discuss our place when he was done with his current job. I had a pit in my stomach and I hadn’t even spoken with him. It was in the heat of the day and there’s no way I could hobble around and show him everything. The main thing was whether he had a mowing setup that could handle tall grass and undulating, somewhat rough terrain. Though it looks pretty when mowed, it’s not a golf course. His equipment checked out and, since I knew he didn’t have insurance for his one-man business, I asked him “If you’re out there and you somehow have a failure with your equipment, does that come out of your pocket, or mine?”. He said what I was hoping he’d say, “Mine…I would never…”. Since I couldn’t show him the property and the potentially now hidden obstacles, I showed him pics of the various sections of the property so he could see what it looked like just after a mowing. This is where he grumbled something like “I don’t need to see no stinkin’ pictures”. I quizzed him on it and, in an aggravated voice said “I’ve been mowing for ten years” and yada yada. I told him that “that had nothing to do with it and that he’d realize the relevancy after he mowed over one of three old, six inch stumps obscured by the now tall grass…stumps that I had pointed out clearly”. He grumbled some more as he walked towards his truck. I almost put it to an end there. He sat on the tailgate of his truck wasting time. I said, ‘do you want the job or not?” He said yes but that he’d first have to run the few miles down the road to get gas. It was 99 degrees and I could see the signs of heat exhaustion creeping up on him. I suggested that, since he’d just done that job across the way that I’m sure he was feeling the heat and probably pretty tired and that he show-up in the morning, fueled up and ready to go. I asked him again for a price, either a not-to exceed or an hourly rate so I could figure out how much I was willing to spend. He got in his truck to get gas and said he’d give me a price when he got back and drove away.

With the surgery and ridiculously painful recovery, I hadn’t been out in the mid-day heat (approaching 100 deg that day) and I could feel my strength waning, but I think I was the better off between us. I went into the house to wait and it was right at an hour when he got back from gassing-up just three miles down the road. I didn’t mention it, only asked for a price. He still didn’t have one so, without wanting to over-expose myself with this guy, I offered to pay him $120 for three hours and we’d take a look and adjust things if necessary. I showed him my rig and said that it takes me between three and four hours to do the whole property. His machine had a heavy duty deck and actually had the same engine as mine.

After two and a half hours he came back and loaded his machine before we did our agreed upon walk around. He said he was done and had been out there for five hours. This wasn’t the first bald-faced lie I’d heard that day. No one had ever been brazen enough to look me in the eye and expect me to acquiesce to such a lie. That was it. My patience, which had already been tested to its absolute limit that day, left my body and I felt something very powerful take its place: immediate and unadulterated adrenaline-assisted anger. He’d already been speaking to me in a much louder, more aggressive tone for the past twenty minutes. I kept my tone cool and unflustered, with each word being spoken firmly and measured in terms of not elevating the sound of my voice to match his. I kept my wits and readied myself for what was coming. “That’s the third of three seriously bad lies you’ve told me today and all I want from you now is to pack up your shit and get the fuck off of my property…NOW!” He approached me so that his face was no further than six inches from my face. He started to scream something and no sooner than his spittle hit my face, I shoved him so hard that he barely stood, backpedaling at speed to keep from falling until he slammed into the open driver’s side door and crumpled to the ground. The distance from where I shoved him to where he now lay was between twelve and fifteen feet. I don’t know where that power came from. It was a power I had known during my more youthful years but power that shouldn’t have been there before the stitches from my surgery had been pulled and I was still half out of it from the immense abdominal pain which remained. At first, I thought I might have opened the surgical wound or tore an abdominal muscle, but there was no time for that now. I heard “I’d come right back at you if you didn’t need that cane and hadn’t just gotten out of the hospital!”. I replied “don’t let that stop you!” He threatened me by saying “I should go home, grab my gun. and come back and put some holes in you!” I laughed and said “try me! Or, how ‘bout the one that I’m sure is in the glove compartment of your truck, eight feet away.” This is one of the poorest counties in Central Texas, and both open and concealed carry are legal here. You can bet that people of all persuasions either have a gun on their person or, if they don’t plan on being far from their truck, there’ll be one under the seat or in the glove box. He didn’t respond but just sat there, propped up by his truck door huffing and puffing until I walked over to him “Now, unless you want to continue, I told you to get the fuck off of my property!”, but, I added “I don’t ever want to see you out here again, you dumb son-of-a bitch!” After getting into his truck, I gave him $140 because it was hot, and he was very hot, and I was still happy to have the mowing checked off my list for a week, or two. Plus, temporary emotions aside, it was the right thing to do. If he had finished it, I had planned on giving him $200, which is the amount he said he would have changed as he peeled out of our driveway, flipping me off and screaming obscenities as he went. This was a sixty-eight year old man acting no differently than a four year old. Somewhere during the scuffle, he yelled “twenty years ago, me and some brutha’s used to kick serious ass on white boys like you!” I had not wanted to bring race into the conversation, so I let it go unchallenged. But I couldn’t help myself from laughing in his direction.

After all was said and done, I went inside only to have my wife castigate me for “losing my cool”. I told her that I wouldn’t consider myself a man if I hadn’t. My insides were churning over what had just happened. She hadn’t been able to hear my voice but had heard his as she watched from the front door. I said “that ought to tell you something.” When he got so far into my personal space, yelling at the top of his lungs, that by itself was enough for me to legally defend myself. He obviously didn’t realize it, but getting that close to me had put me at an advantage and being up against my chest gave me numerous options and some strong leverage. The danger had grown to be imminent and there was no more time for thinking, only acting by giving him the hardest shove I could muster in the condition I was in.

As a younger man, even into my fifties, I’d had more confrontations than I can count. A few were pretty serious, but, because of my back problems and health issues like I just described, my body has paid a steep price and I had lost more than half of my strength and mobility. For an athletic, forever on the move, and well conditioned guy, this has been very difficult to handle. There is no way to describe what your body and mind go through in the seconds before an imminently dangerous encounter with another human being. Every fiber of muscle is receiving all the adrenaline your adrenal glands can pump out. Primal chemicals are released from your brain and mind and body come together in a vastly heightened state, so much so that it would be impossible to not react with all the resources you can render. For me in my condition, I had no choice but to hold my ground, dispense with the cane and repel this person, hopefully hard enough to put an end to things and “defuse” the situation. It had been a long time since I’d experienced that kind of adrenaline rush and it felt damned good to feel so alive and in control! I actually told him as much and thanked him for his contribution.

After things settled and the house quieted, I told my wife that I was proud of the way I handled myself and wouldn’t change a thing except for listening to my gut during those hours earlier and asking him to leave before he even got started on the job. This was the lesson I was reminded of that day and will be my only regret from the day of the incident. After collecting herself and hearing me out, my wife apologized, said that she was proud of me, and thanked me for protecting our home and family, particularly in the condition I was in. Our family is comprised of she and I and our three wonderful dogs, whom I’m sure would have been only too pleased to have gotten a piece of this guy. All I had to do was call out to my wife to let them out. They would have heard the entire thing and been chomping at the bit the entire time. It never occurred to me because I’m sure I was wanting to keep them out of harm’s way. If there were a time for him to go for a gun, which I am certain was just a reach across his seat away, that would have been it.

What is that old expression, “all’s well that ends well”. That’s what it had boiled down to. Of course, it crossed my mind that he could very well show up at any time only this time it would have been with sons. buddies, or both, But, in the course of our not-so-friendly dialogue, I had left him with something to think about, and that was that nothing would make me happier than for him to come busting through my front door on the darkest of nights. He knew damned well that I’d be lying in wait with my own arsenal and dogs at the ready. I never mentioned having guns of my own. That wasn’t necessary. Everyone in these parts is well-armed. On top of that. I grew up around guns, hunting, and shooting. We were taught to never let-on about the family guns, even to good friends. There was no reason to and it only provides fodder for that information to fall into the wrong hands and gives those of the criminal sort a reason to break in and steal what you’ve got, and what they want. In the 70’s, long before people would do anything to get their hands on prescription drugs, gun theft was the root cause of many a break-in.

It’s over now and with any luck, I will never again have to deal with such an event. We live a quiet, extremely rural life and I intend to keep it that way.

How Do You Feel About Hunting and Hunters?

First Written in Quora

A “Trophy-class” Bull Elk Bugling
inspiredpencil.com

In Colorado, during the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s, though I was engaged in all sorts of mountain sports, the season I looked forward to the most was hunting season. I was able to get an early start on my hunting life having grown up in Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York state, where you can begin your hunting journey at fourteen, as long as it is supervised by an adult. You are free to go about your business alone at sixteen and you could hunt both archery and rifle during separate seasons during the same year. When combined, as an “Adirondacker”, I could hunt for what amounted to two months each fall. During my time there, the seasons were each about a month long. This is the way it was (at least during the seven years (from age 14 to 21) that I hunted there, and for many years thereafter. The state managed Adirondack Park’s 2.6 million acres are comprised of both state and private lands under a policy designed to make a “Forever Wild” zone well distant from the much higher populations located farther south, and, of course, the population centers of New York City and Long Island, and, to a lesser extent, the Albany area and it’s two “Sister Cities”. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (ENCON) and the Adirondack Park Agency APA) managed hunter populations in the Adirondacks and ENCON alone managed the rest of the state’s hunting units, which varied greatly in hunter numbers throughout the state’s very different hunting regions. I learned by following my father’s size thirteen footsteps up and down some of the most rugged country in the northeast. For my dad and me, archery practice began in June or July, preparing for the season which opened in September. Rifle practice took place throughout the year and was not limited to a few days or weeks leading up to the season, which began right after archery season had concluded. Rifle shooting was just another part of life and we were always prepared for that year’s window of hunting opportunities.

After college, I followed my dream and landed in Colorado, where I would spend a good part of the next thirty years. Colorado is an “either-or” state, meaning you have to choose between archery and rifle seasons and cannot hunt both modes in the same year. If I had to choose overall, it’d have been archery because it’s nearly a month long versus the five to nine day allocations depending on which of the four relatively short rifle seasons a given hunter elects to hunt. Even nine days wasn’t enough time to satisfy my annual needs. So I began a schedule of two years of archery followed by a year of rifle. As I neared the halfway point of my hunting career, I made the switch to archery only and these seasons would go on to contain some of my best hunting memories.

But things changed significantly over the course of those three decades and by the time I reached my late forties, I was coming full circle with my thoughts and feelings about the sport. I can’t speak as knowledgeably about the other Western states other than to say that some are managing their big game animals, namely, deer and elk, better than others. There are simply too many tags being sold in Colorado and far too many hunters in a given game unit at a given time. Because of this, the gene pool for elk on National Forest lands has gotten weaker every year and continues to worsen. You can see it in the size and antler growth of many four and five year old bulls and the mature bulls are getting fewer and farther between in some of the most popular units. With such a huge shift over three decades, Colorado has become the Pennsylvania of the West. Too many small, ratty looking deer with ticks all over them. Ticks in these kinds of numbers are a bio-indicator, a foreboding sign of a tragically weakened ecosystem. I lived in PA for two years and never had any interest in the kind of slaughter that takes place there every autumn. Since the state is so populated with infrastructure such as roads and four lane highways every few miles, a good fraction of the deer get pushed out of the woods only to become roadkill.

For Colorado to recover, it is imperative that a rotation, not unlike those used on crop lands, be enacted for game units to be “rested” for a period of several years, with the units having the poorest health getting preferential treatment. Some adjustments need to be made to the availability of deer to be hunted, increasing the numbers of licences sold in many units with burgeoning deer populations. It’s become a complicated problem, perhaps one with which the newly released wolves can help once they’ve become established. But, because Colorado is the most populated state to have launched a wolf recovery program, we need to treat them with kid gloves and keep our heads about us if the program is to be a success. Only time will tell, but, based on many years of personal and intimate relationships with various parts of the state, I don’t see wolf reintroduction in Colorado as being viable, given how little space there is between populated areas.

At 64, with a weakened body due to several life altering illnesses, I haven’t been able to hunt in the manner I enjoy for several years and will reluctantly say that my hunting days are over. With things being as they are today, I wouldn’t want to hunt anyway. Perhaps armed only with a good camera and certainly not during hunting season. One thing is for sure, Colorado’s elk are in need of some radical policy changes, even if it comes in the form of a more limited income stream for the state. Though revenues from large numbers of hunters have at least been partially responsible for keeping Colorado’s smaller towns on the map, the deer and elk need to come first for a while.

Encountering a bull elk such as the one pictured while hunting on public lands (BLM, National Forest), in Colorado, has become an extremely rare event due to far too many hunters (as allowed by the vast number of hunting licences sold by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife) which has resulted in chronic herd mismanagement and the highly inordinate numbers of elk taken during Colorado’s hunting seasons. Put simply, it has been the short-term value state wildlife officials have placed on the huge sums of money put into state coffers at the longer-term expense of the well-being of the state’s elk (and deer) populations.

High Country Cabin Near Minturn, Colorado

Originally Posted on Quora

Circa 1997 Canon Digital Elf 3.2

One of Colorado’s more obscure backcountry skiing destinations, this cabin is located about twenty miles from the historic mining community of Minturn, Colorado. Four friends and I made the nine mile ski into the cabin for four days of fun and fellowship. It had been snowing on and off throughout our stay, making for some prime deep powder skiing. We skied all day everyday and were ready for some hard earned rest.

We hadn’t seen the sun in three days and, just as we were headed out (you can see our telltale single file trail), it magically cleared as if the snow gods were bidding us goodbye. I looked over my shoulder and waited a moment before snapping this pic. It was cold and sunny for the ski-out to the trailhead and our awaiting vehicles below.

Recent Information on the African Wild Dog (AWD)

Originally Posted to Quora

According to the site Enviroliteracy, the following screenshot shows number of the African Wild Dogs (AWD’s) remaining, as of March of this year, to be around 7,000 individuals with just 1,500 listed as adults.

The key to understanding the relationship between being formally listed as endangered (the AWD made the ICNU “Red List” list twenty-five years ago) and attempting to predict how long a given species has left in based solely upon scientific research, the most important of which has to do with the minimum number of breeding pairs required to maintain a healthy gene pool (for that given species). Obviously, no one can be certain but studies have indicated that the number hovers around 300.

Science has already spent decades researching endangered species of all kinds, with more research going into some than others. “Higher-order” mammals, whether sea or land-based, seem to get the most attention. It makes sense that we would be the most concerned about the creatures with which we have the most in common. Social behavior, language, habitat, overall intelligence, and other characteristics. This research has led to a much greater understanding of the creatures we most respect and admire. Because they are generally at the top of the food chain and would be the most harmful to the ecosystems surrounding them were they to disappear, endangered predators and species that are strong bio-indicators garner the most attention. Though not as heavily studied as certain bears, tigers, lions, wolves, whales, and some porpoises, the African Wild Dog certainly warrants ample consideration. The ecosystems in which they are found and the other creatures within them would topple, creating a domino effect and many other species would be brought to the brink of extinction, or worse, simply disappear not long after the demise of the AWD.

There is more pressure than ever on those of us who truly care to redouble our efforts such that more people around the world join the fight to protect existing AWD habitat and push for the creation of additional habitat by funding conservancy programs to procure lands which are adjacent to the patchwork of existing protected areas and national and state run wildlife preserves. The concept is already at work in other parts of the world through organizations such as the Nature Conservancy. The point is is that there are real world mechanisms in place to acquire additional lands on behalf of endangered species. I don’t see why, with appropriate funding, the same concept can’t be put use in parts of Africa where the AWD still has a toehold. Perhaps it’s already happening and I’m just unaware of such doings.

I wake up each morning with an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach with grave concerns for this planet and its inhabitants knowing in my heart that it may already be too late for turning things around. There really isn’t much time remaining for the world’s most endangered species, twenty, perhaps thirty years. But then I have a talk with myself over a cup of coffee and realize once again that we’ve got an immense obligation to threatened species everywhere and that no matter how bleak things may look, we must have the resolve to fight our best fight and if it should come to it, go down swinging.