For sale:
2001 Dodge Ram Extended Cab Long Bed Cummins Turbo Diesel truck.
Mileage: 89,xxx
Garage kept, well-maintained, with extensive records. Generally used to drive to our camp upstate and for general household chores.

Just added:

• $1,000 tires
• 2 new batteries, alternator
• Front end alignment and front end parts - tie rod ends, Rancho steering stabilizer, etc

Included:

• Jeraco fiberglass cap
• Roof rack cross members
• Tow hitch (Drop Ball NOT included)
• Bed liner
• Trailer brake controller
• Edge Mileage-max chip
• Pillar gauges
• BD Diesel Steering Box
• Wet Okole Neoprene water proof seat covers, w inflatable lumbar support
• Odds and ends like oil filters, Turbo Diesel Register magazine collection

Don't miss this very rare opportunity to own a super low mileage turbo diesel before all the emissions non-sense encumbered the Cummins motor. This truck is turn-key and ready to back up to your trailer, jobsite, or garage. Would be a bomber of a truck for someone who wants to hop up a Cummins.

If you want this truck, email me NOW. It won't hang around long:

outsidezion@gmail.com

Check out a video clip HERE:

See pictures below:

The Bushman

The Bushmen

 

While shivering in my archery stand in the sub-freezing dawn, I acknowledge that the season for bivouacking for 4 and 6 year old boys is coming to an end so, upon my return to the house, I announce to the boys that we are going to backpack into the mountains, build a shelter, and survive.

The house explodes with activity. Since we have memorized entire seasons of Dual Survival, Man vs. Wild, and Survivorman among others, we acknowledge this moment in time is our destiny and the burning fire of barbarism kindles in our bellies.

Ben, age 6, grabs his jacket and camo “Go-Bag” and heads out the door. Jill has to tell him that the expedition only commences after lunch.

Gabe, age 4, is in a panic looking for his Fire Steel (he calls it a “fire start”) and his gloves. I advise that we will only take those items necessary for survival and that does not include his Construction Series Legos.

My lovely wife and soul-mate, who is so very understanding and supportive of the journey boys must make as they strive towards manhood, cooks us bacon, eggs, and potatoes. Fueled by adrenaline, Gabe stuffs huge portions into his mouth.

Jill doles out matchbooks to all and advises that the matches will be accounted for and handed back in upon our return. I’m guessing no further explanation is necessary as to this process of accountability.

We have another moment of panic when Gabe can’t remember where he placed his Bear Grylls pamphlet on “Survival”. He procures it and we study how to make snow caves and animal snares. I remind him that we don’t have any snow.

I pack my kit wondering why I get myself into these situations. Usually, we just camp out in the Adirondack Shelter I made from logs on our property. It has a woodstove. We stay warm. It has a roof. We stay dry. We can see the roof of the house from it. We can bail.

We hike up the field behind our house. I confirm with Ben that we will go so far into the woods that we won’t be able to see the house. It takes a few moments for the enormity of this undertaking to sink in. Ben advises that this will help them get stronger when we really go backpacking. (The boys know that when they are ready, they can join me on real backpacking trips.) Gabe spouts out that this is good training for bear hunting season. They wrestle with how far we will have to hike (we only own 93 acres) and smugly conclude that we will be a “long, far ways in the mountain”. Gabe announces with glee that we will be “in Survival”.

They question why we didn’t bring the four-WHEELER. (They have always emphasized the last word, “wheeler” and I think I rather prefer their pronunciation.) “Because that wouldn’t be backpacking.” Heads nod in agreement. I didn’t tell them that Jill and Emily will join us for a campfire and will bring our cooler and sleeping bags on the four-WHEELER.

Someone asks if I brought a gun. Of course not, I reply. I brought two. We discuss trying to shoot a squirrel with my .22LR Henry AR-7 Survival Rifle which quickly leads to the question of whether it will take down a wolf. I advise that the .22 is for food and the .357 magnum handgun is for everything else. Gabe asks if it can stop a Rhino. “Of course”, I concur. “What about a pack of coyotes?” he asks. Ben proclaims he will “karate chop” the coyotes. With these problems solved, we forge ahead.

Our accession into the forest is marked by the stampeding of thousands of rhinos marching through the crinkling leaves. The boys become concerned that we haven’t seen a squirrel. I confirm that it probably isn’t likely.

Ben advises he is really thirsty. I advise Ben we are only 200 yards from the house. We will drink when we get there. “How much farther?” he asks. Oh, maybe 300 yards. There is gasping and moaning. They bolster their courage when I remind them that I hike all day with a heavy pack so they better buck up.

We find the spot I was aiming for – a small grove of white pines among the hardwoods. The boys drop to the ground, shed their packs, and suck down half their water.

I solicit their input on where to build a shelter. I point out that the dead tree of their choosing, a widow-maker tenuously hung up in some branches, is probably not the most prudent option.

We build a classic stick and debris shelter among two pine trees. The boys mostly want to handle my knife and hatchet. I finally direct their energy into covering the shelter with leaves and pine needles for insulation. Gabe snags my spool of “cordage” on his foot making a tangled mess.

I solicit input on the next step of survival: we have protection, we have water….  “Snares!” Ben proclaims. “How about a fire?” I ask. We build a fire pit. I wrestle several large rocks for the backside of the fire pit to reflect heat into our shelter. The boys are in awe at my strength and capacity. I make a mental note to enjoy the moment as I acknowledge it won’t be long until they are putting me into a headlock.

After an hour and half or so, I am reasonably confident we can survive the night. The boys sit down in the shelter exhausted from the effort. We agree that survival is hard work.

We gather a large stack of wood. I note that I will be tending the fire all night to ensure warmth and comfort for all.

Jill and Emily (and the four-WHEELER) arrive with the rest of our gear and our cooler. Emily provides quite a bit of pink and purple contrast against our deciduous forest survival scenario.

The girls retire to home before dusk and we are left to ponder the lonely and perilous existence of mountain men.

That evening, Jill and Emily baked brownies and watched Snow White together. I asked Emily later what happened to Snow White and she told me with wide eyes that she “got married”. To whom? “Her daddy”. I asked Emily who she was going to marry and she said “my daddy” and smiled at me. (She is totally setting me up for a pony someday.)

It is dark. The boys crawl in to bed exhausted (it’s only 6 pm). The moon is bright and the woods are beautiful. I drift off to sleep. I awake to the boys dancing around the fire. Gabe is in his socks. “Let’s tell stories, Dad!”  I share some of my camping and backpacking adventures. The boys are delighted. Its 9 pm. Gabe’s entire kit is spread around the campfire. The headlamps are confiscated. A piece of flaming rope whizzes over my head. The “cordage” is confiscated. The boys confirm that my “magnum” is handy. In case of bears.

I get zipped into my mummy bag and make sure all air leaks are addressed. I glance at Gabe to see his two sleeping bags are unzipped and sprawled every which way. I angrily unzip and unstuff myself out the bag, zip Gabe into bags, and remind him that if he can’t stay warm tonight he will freeze to death. The atmosphere is solemn for a few moments. Gabe is up out of his bag peering into the night. He hears something. I advise him it’s Kaiser, my German Shepherd. “No! It’s some animal. I see it!” I crawl out from bag again and display my “magnum” and assure him that I won’t let anything get him. Kaiser strolls into the campsite. We crawl back into bed.

I sleep great for an hour. I wake up to tend the fire, shift the sleeping bushmen back into their sleeping bags, and repeat. Gabe’s bag is full of pine needles and leaves. At least he is warm. At 2 a.m., I notice the boys are watching me tend the fire. We enjoy a moment in the cold night air, under the stars, by the flickering campfire.

I awake to a ruckus at dawn wondering why can’t they blasted sleep in for once. Ben has a fire roaring and Gabe is whacking sticks on a log – wearing just his socks and a sweatshirt. Its 28 degrees. “Dad, is it time to make tea and eat our venison jerky?” Apparently, it is.

We trudge to the spring to fill our water containers. The boys are transformed. We are capable and confident men. We make tea. I make coffee. We eat jerky. Well, they eat jerky; I’m left with two small bites. We make hotdogs (we didn’t find any caribou to shoot). We lounge around the fire.

One last project: we must build a snare. We build a whip-snare out of a sapling. Gabe suggests we might catch a “wild boar”. Ben tests it and laughs in glee as his hand is yanked into the sky. The boys look upon me with amazement. Clearly, I’ve moved up a notch from “the guy who brings home the bacon” to someone of much higher esteem.

We trudge back to the house and glory in our hero’s welcome. We are mountain men.

On donkeys and zebras and love.....

 The shocking thing here is not that there are donkeys in my backyard wearing zebra outfits.

No, the shocking thing is that I put up with this nonsense at all.

The fact that we have in our possession two donkeys (the first one was lonely by himself), not to mention two donkeys wearing risqué winter outerwear, is a clear physical manifestation that I will do everything within my power to keep the Love of my life happy and content.

 

What the love of trail running looks like in January

12 Degrees

The Perfect Coffee Mug

The perfect coffee mug* has several inherent, compulsory characteristics, of which bound together synergistically as a whole, offer up the perfect presentation of coffee.

Exterior Color:

Red but not too red. Must be a warm red but not a hot red. Not a flashy red but a confident red. It must be an energizing red yet not a nervous red.

The red color must be consistent over the entire mug including the base and handle.

The red must end distinctly at the appropriate line on the mug’s lip. See “interior color”.

Interior Color:

White but not too white. Creamy yet not cloudy. Must provide a complementary contrast to the rich illustrative visual disposition of the coffee.

The interior color transition at the mug’s lip to the exterior color is critical. The delineation must be crisp yet the creamy white must not violate the exterior mug color nor overstep its domestic boundaries. There must be a harmonizing simultaneity.

Lip:

The lip can destroy an otherwise well-conceived vessel. The lip must present the decoction in a confident yet humble manner and thus must flower lightly at point of presentation yet not dilute or spread thin the jamoca thereby diminishing the pleasure.

Shape:

Cylindered, confident, straight-walled, and uniform. Must feel substantial yet not overbearing – we do not wish to lift weights first thing in the morning. The handle brings the physical and practical application to fruition. It must be uniform in interior space, accommodating of the 4 fingers necessary for stability, and it must not pinch or over-weight any one finger. The overall balance is critical in that we do not desire a quick shift of momentum at a duplicitous tipping point as the mug modulates from the vertical to horizontal stages. (As opposed to mugs with weighted bases that are fine for table-sitting yet undermine the actual existential partaking of the peaberry drug.)

Graphics and Lettering:

Undesirable with one exception: the mug may read “Evista raloxifene HCI”**. Should you have in your possession a mug with said lettering or should you discover such a mug***, you have now come into the possession of The Perfect Coffee Mug****. You have now reached the pinnacle of self-actualization emancipating your morning upsurge in great amity and equanimity as you drink the life-sustaining nectar and wax sagaciously regarding the perfect trifecta of codependency.

*The perfect coffee mug in this elucidation refers to a mug used in the early morning for the day’s first presentation of coffee. This mug differs greatly from a mug used mid-morning or early afternoon and is entirely different than the late-day or evening coffee imbibing experience.

**Reduces the risk of invasive breast cancer in women. Certainly an advocacy we can all support as a world without breasts is a barren world lacking in nurture and comfort for all.

***While it was a blessing to obtain my Perfect Coffee Mug early in life, it is likely that I may never be so fortunate again. While working in her role as a P.A.C. many years ago, my wife Jill acquired the mug from a pharmaceutical drug rep. As Jill is no longer in the medical field and as most drug reps have been banned from proselytizing in the hospitals, I am forced to cherish my mug and to keep it in a controlled laboratory setting while cleansing it but once a year with freshly blossomed daisy petals and purified spring water.

****Tragically, my Perfect Coffee Mugs has obtained several physical indications of injustice as the lip has been chipped in several places. This, perhaps, is indicative of a lack of appreciation from others in the household. It is imperative that we each assume our part in “The Perfect Coffee Mug Awareness Campaign”.

On New Year's Resolutions

Regarding New Year’s resolutions: I think they are lame. Or, rather, I think the illusory, dreamy, and frail milieu in which many offer up their resolutions are lame.

Please understand I am a principled man with a multi-year goal-set underwritten by a pragmatic action plan.

Yet, with each passing year, I become more aware of the pressing tension between that which I control and that which I do not. And I am finding that the aspects of life that I cannot control are heavily weighted. In fact, perhaps the only aspect of life that I can control is my attitude. Charles Swindoll says it best,

 The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company ... a church ... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past ... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude ... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you ... we are in charge of our Attitude.

Thus, my first point regarding resolutions is that we tend to gauge our resolutions on the basis of happiness; that is, the ideology that our resolutions are the ticket to future peace and contentment. Thus, our expectations are false in that if we have not found peace and contentment in our current circumstances, we will not do so in future circumstances.

Next, it seems that if we are truly honest with ourselves, our resolutions tend to be tainted by trepidations of cultural relevance. In other words, we tend to try to shape ourselves based on the perceived expectations of our culture or contemporary peer group. We want to eat better, not because we acknowledge our bodies as a Temple, but because we hope to be affirmed for our Beach Body. We vow to exercise, not to have more energy and to sleep well at night, but to look younger in an effort to validate ourselves among work colleagues. We aspire to the bigger house and the new car in an effort to impress a group of people who don’t even like us.

Thus, our resolutions have little staying power in terms of rousing us to take meaningful steps forward because the resolutions are of no life-impacting consequence.

Lastly, it seems to me that many approach their resolutions much like some who come to me for personal financial counseling. They plop down in chairs in front of my desk with the unspoken expectation, “Here we are! Fix us!” This is despite a decade of poor financial decisions, a lack of understanding of current financial standing, and no idea as to future dreams or goals.

In the same way, the resolution, just like the counselor, can be approached as the crutch or the savior rather than the quantified reality of what needs to be aspired too. By pronouncing the “resolution” to lose weight, we allow ourselves to feel good in taking a perceived action step, however false, and are now able to compartmentalize the remaining aspects of the decision (the painful self-sacrifice) into non-action. Rather than laying out a disciplined life-style agenda such as eating, exercising, time management, budgeting, goal setting and others, we stop at the feel-good resolution stage and we obligate ourselves to failure as defined by inaction.

In summary, please don’t share what you hope to accomplish in 2011. Tell us what you did today. Or perhaps as my wife shared with me, rather than choosing what we want to resolve this year, why don’t we ask God what He wants us to resolve this year?

(Disclosure: The author just purchased P90X from Beach Body! Yet, in 2010, I have lost 12 pounds by rising at 5:30 am to trail run with my wife, by eating a spinach salad for breakfast and oatmeal/ yogurt for lunch, and be setting tangible goals (such as a 25k trail challenge in April http://www.hikerun.com/) and by adhering to training plans to achieve those goals. The P90x gives me a 90 day jolt of motivation, structure, and variety to help me stay fresh and perhaps even help me impress a bunch of people (who don’t like me) with my beach abs! ha)

The Ash Borer Is Coming

The Ash Borer is coming and, according to my forester friend at www.theforester.com, there is nothing anyone can do about it.

The Agrilus planipennis, or Emerald Ash Borer as it were, is thought to have originated in Asia, riding the wood packing material in cargo ships making the long journey to North America where it continues to ravage our beloved North American Ash tree, the tree at the heart of America’s favorite past time. Because of this hardwood’s inherent traits of strength coupled with elasticity, Ash is the chosen wood for the vast majority of baseball bats (and bows, electric guitar bodies, office furniture and others.)

The frightening part, especially to landowners like me with nice stands of middle-age ash trees, is that despite a massive, multinational undertaking involving federal and state governments, universities, conservation groups and private landowners there is no known solution to stopping or destroying the ash borer.

While there are quarantines regarding the transportation of Ash timber, containment is failing miserably. Chemical treatments to affect or disrupt the beetle’s life style are largely ineffective. The EAB deposit their larvae under the bark. When the larvae begin to feed, their “galleries injure the phloem and xylem that make up the plant’s circulatory system¹”. Systemic insecticides must be transported within the tree itself making an already weak tree even more vulnerable much like chemotherapy used in the  treatment of cancer in the human body.

Many landowners have chosen to harvest their ash trees in an effort to hedge some timber value before the worst can happen. This may seem precipitous to some, however, like many landowners, I have lost every last hemlock tree on my land over the past 3 years to the Woolly Adelgid. The Eastern Hemlock is a magnificent tree with a tremendous heritage. Yet, the Pennsylvania State Tree is disappearing quickly to this fluid-feeding insect.

We could continue to lament the loss of the American Chestnut, the Dogwood, the Cedars, the Pines. There is now concern over the Beech Blight Aphid. To lose the American Beech, the exorbitant provider of mast to a diverse order of Pennsylvania woods inhabitants, would be crushing to see as I hike my favorite mountain benches in the Northern Tier.

I am working with our forester as to a course of action on our woodlot, however, the answers are not clear.

Yet, I cannot help but wonder about the socioeconomic forces of globalization that has brought this devastating destruction to our regional ecosystems. I cannot help but wonder if, perhaps, the boundaries of nations have been ordained by a Higher Power. And I certainly give pause over the purchase of more junk from a foreign, cheap-labor market when I imagine the little nasty’s riding in the packaging of my new big-screen TV or designer jeans.

¹http://www.emeraldashborer.info/files/Multistate_EAB_Insecticide_Fact_Sheet.pdf