Driving to Salt Lake City – the fastest way – involves getting to Highway 80 and mindlessly blasting east for two six hour days. The first leg of the blast is driving north thirty miles to San Francisco, then, getting serious, we turn right, go through the Coast Range in the general area of the Sacramento River delta , across the Great Central Valley, into the Sierras. It is a trip I have done hundreds of times and watched it urbanize a little bit each year.

Now, on this trip, we pass through the Sierras, past Reno, into and through the Humboldt Sink to Winnemucca, Nevada; mostly in the dark as is our way. Two thoughts keep reoccurring to me as day fades into night, Nevada is underappreciated and everyplace is a long way from Coastal California.

We spent the night in Winnemucca Nevada in an unmemorable motel after an unmemorable dinner served by a young Mexican woman with impeccable, accent free, English which, she said, she got from reading a lot. The next morning, we drove east for 124 freeway miles to Ely Nevada for breakfast.

We are on Highway 80 which very roughly follows the California Trail – of Donner Party fame – which, itself, was following the Humboldt River as it flows west into the Humboldt Basin. The Humboldt River is the largest River in Nevada and it flows for about 250 miles across the top 1/3 of Nevada.

Elko is an surprisingly wonderful little city – OK, very little city – that features the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering each January and has over a hundred street murals. The Poetry Gathering is sponsored by the Western Folklife Center and, by all accounts, it is terrific. And I say that in all sincerity.

After Elko, we are back on the road again.

As we drive through Eastern Nevada, we see several bridges over the highway that seem to go from nowhere to nowhere. I think that is the point, they are wildlife corridors that allow migrating – or just curious – animals to cross the highway. Increasingly, humans are starting to realize that this planet has not been put here for us to destroy.

We are starting to realize that we are not the only worthy animals on the planet. Some people even believe that all life is valuable – and I count myself among them – and needs to be considered when making decisions, especially infrastructure decisions. In Los Angeles they are now building a wildlife corridor over the I5 connecting the isolated Santa Monica Mountains to the wildness of the San Gabriel mountains, essentially because the Santa Monica Mountains mountain lion population is genetically isolated. The estimated cost is 90 million dollars and it is inconceivable that, twenty years ago, any official agency would have even considered this.

We pass through West Wendover Nevada where people coming from the east get their first chance to gamble and then Wendover Utah where people can’t gamble. Then we drive past the Bonneville Salt Flats where we had expected to watch some very dedicated hotrodders trying to break various arcane speed records before they were rained out. From Bonneville, it is a long straight haul to Salt Lake City, arriving in the dark.

It didn’t start out that way. Our first plan was to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats where the Southern California Timing Association would be running high-speed trials and then go north to Glacier National Park and Montana’s Bitterroot Valley for the fall color. Then Bonneville got rained out so it was just Glacier the Bitterroot Valley and then they got smoked out by the West’s increasingly nasty wildfires. Michele suggested we just go to one of our favorite places, the Escalante Canyon area, and stay at the Boulder Mountain Lodge.

Then we decided to add Salt Lake City since all either one of us have done is drive through Salt Lake on our way to someplace else and it is a big city. The fastest way to drive through Nevada to Salt Lake is on Highway 80 which is also the least interesting drive but it is interesting enough so that’s the plan.

Lithops is a genus of succulent plants in the ice plant family, Aizoaceae. Members of the genus are native to southern Africa. The name is derived from the Ancient Greek words λίθος ‘stone’ and ὄψ ‘face’, referring to the stone-like appearance of the plants. Wikipedia

A while back, I’m not sure how far back but during Covid, Michele bought a Lithops from Anthropologie. They are really fun plants but I didn’t think it is hot enough or dry enough here for them to thrive, but they did. And now they are blooming. Life can be grand.

The free people of independent Ukraine! And that says it all. Just four words, but how much is behind them today. the opening lines of s speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky marking Independence Day.

August 24th is Ukraine Independence Day. Exactly six months before the 2022 celebration, on February 24th, Russia attacked Ukraine, so this August 24th also marked the six-month anniversary of that attack. Probably not by coincidence. On this anniversary, it is hard to not comingle the two anniversaries. Actually, that Ukraine still exists is astonishing. All the Intelligence experts predicted, way back on February 24th, that Ukraine would be swallowed up by Russia in a matter of days. Not only did Putin’s attack fail to obliterate Ukraine and weaken NATO as he promised, but both NATO and Ukraine have become stronger.

To mark both occasions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a speech that I think is terrific. It is short and I highly recommend it. In the speech, he points out: “During these six months, we changed history, changed the world and changed ourselves…And the whole world learned who Ukrainians are. What Ukraine is. No one will say about it anymore: it is somewhere over there, near Russia…We started to respect ourselves.”

Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian poet I only know of through hearing him on NPR, said that Eastern Europeans have a morbid sense of humor because they are powerless, caught between two great forces, The West and Russia. That certainly seems true in the case of Ukraine. The photograph of the commemorative stamp set, above, is an example: the original stamp commemorated Roman Hrybov, the Ukrainian soldier on Snake Island who said “Russian warship, go fuck yourself”, the new set shows Hrybov without the ship (because the Ukrainians sunk it with two homemade R-360 Neptune anti-ship missiles).

Every August 24th, Ukraine has a Russianesque Military Parade, this year, the parade was a stationary “parade” made up of wrecked and captured Russian equipment which Zelensky pointed out in his speech “The occupier believed that in a few days he would be on parade in our capital’s downtown. Today, you can see this “parade” on Khreshchatyk. The proof that enemy equipment can appear in the center of Kyiv only in such form. Burnt, wrecked, and destroyed.”

While Ukraine is growing stronger, it is taking a terrible beating in this war as shown in this photo essay in the New York Times. But, I think Ukraine will win for lots of reasons. More than anything else, war hardens opinion, war eliminates nuance, war builds resolve. I remember seeing a recording of Zelensky visiting the Donbas front just after he had been elected. Nine soldiers had just been killed in the ongoing low-grade conflict and newly elected President Zelensky was clearly rattled, saying that the Donbas was not worth any more lives. Now he is a war president and willing to have that many people killed every day to take back the Donbas. But War President Zelensky also wants Crimea back and he seems to be willing to pay for it in additional human life.

I think that Ukraine will win because they have to. If Russia losses they go home, if Ukraine losses they cease to exist. That is a big motivator.

Ukraine’s army is way better than Russia’s. They have younger, more innovative leaders: Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyiare, is 49, and the Russian Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, is 67. That is a big difference in a war which is a 24-hour-a-day seven days week job. Not only are Ukraine’s soldiers more motivated and better led, but they are also better trained and they are becoming better equipped.

Being better equipped also ties back to the first point. I keep reading, usually by the same pundits that predicted Ukraine wouldn’t last ten days, that, by winter, the West will grow weary of supporting Ukraine. I think those pundits have it backward. Those countries now sending equipment to the Ukrainian Army have a vested interest in Ukraine winning, a vested interest that increases as the war goes on. Biden doesn’t want to lose to the Russians on a national and personal basis and the longer this war goes on with the Ukrainians showing they can fight Russia, the more important to the West is a Ukraine win. Weapons that were deemed too provocative in March are now being sent to Ukraine on an almost routine basis. I expect that, within a year, we will have equipped Ukraine with the Patriot Air Defense System or maybe, even the more advanced MEADS system.

When this war is over, and someday it will be over, Ukraine will be closer to Europe not only militarily but also it will be closer to Europe culturally and financially. It is already happening. As destructive as this war has been and will be, I think Ukraine will win and be better off after it.

It feels like the end of summer even though it is mid-August and I think that is because the Amaryllis belladonnas – pink ladies – are blooming ahead of time (they used to bloom in mid-September). Still, it has been a lovely summer here on the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains with clear skies and the temp hovering about 80°F, plus or minus – today, the 15-day projection for max temperature is 84° 77°, 77°, 77°, 78°, 75°, 74°, 75°, 77°, and 77° – glorious except that it is dry, too dry.

A couple of days ago, we were having a cocktail at the end of the day, sitting on our deck, watching the quail and doves, and a couple of chickadees. They were eating some seed I’d thrown on the ground when something startled them and they all took off at once with a thrashing of wings. As my eyes followed the flock of mixed birds heading up and to my right, something streaked down and to the left. Fast! I bearly caught the flash of striped feathers as it banked hard right, rolling on its side like a fighter plane flying down Star Wars Canyon. 

Then, stillness. The silence broken only by a chattering that sounded somewhat like a squirrel.  

  A couple of minutes later a harrier hawk casually flew over to us, landed on the back of a chair, and started complaining – we think complaining about Precious Mae but it is hard to tell with us not speaking hawk – and then he/she/or it flew up to the edge of the roof to complain some more. Michele caught it on her phone.