(A 1919 advertisement for Dr. Frank Crane’s books said, “Nine years ago Dr. Frank Crane was scarcely known outside of a small circle. To-day he has a million friends. And these million friends are happier men and women to-day because of this friendship. They occupy a higher, finer place in life because of it.” Dr. Crane stepped away from his Methodist pulpit to become one of the most-published inspirational columnists of his time. We are starting our weeks be recalling his writings).
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
The New Year is here. It is inventory time. Let us look over the stock of habits, ideas, and relationships we have accumulated the last twelve months and clean up.
The New Year’s resolution is a good thing. Why drift along, the slave and plaything of our unmanaged desires and of our accidental circumstances? Why not be our own master and live one year like an intelligent human being?
Examine your habits. Lop off the bad ones. Free yourself from any ways you have fallen into that make you lazy, unhealthy, miserable, and disagreeable to other people.
Determine this year to be master of self; that you will control your thoughts, regulate your passions, and guide your own deeds; that you will not let events lead you by the nose.
Resolve to be happy. Remember Lincoln’s saying that “folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
This year you shall not neglect your friends. They are too valuable, as life assets, to lose.
You will adopt some system and stick to it, knowing that nine-tenths of our irritation comes from lack of system.
Lay out a course of study. No one is too old to learn. Resolve to give some time each day to reading some helpful book. Cut out the trash.
Resolve to keep an account of all the money you get and of all you spend. You may have tried this many times and failed. Never mind; you are still alive and have the chance to try it again.
Save. Put a certain fraction by of all you make. There’s no friend like money in the bank.
Son’t spend any money till you get it. Don’t go into debt. Beware of buying all those things you “must have,” for you mustn’t have anything until you can pay for it.
No alcohol this year. Let your body rest 365 days from this poison and see how you feel. Don’t get into a moral fever over this. Don’t “try” not to drink. Just don’t drink.
Resolve to take that daily exercise.
Eliminate worry. This year make up your mind to fret over nothing. Adjust yourself to facts instead of getting into a stew over them. If a matter can be helped, help it; if it cannot be helped, forget it.
This year resolve to keep discord out of the house. Nobody can quarrel with you if you do not quarrel with him. Say to yourself that you will not once…speak crossly to your children; that you will not say one unkind word to your husband or wife, and that you will keep agreeable…
This may be the last year you will have. Make it a good one.
You know how you ought to live. At least, you think you do. And if you do as well as your own judgment tells you, it will be an advance.
This is old-fashioned advice. But happiness is old-fashioned, and life. There is no new-fangled way to be content.
And learn this of wise Marcus Aurelius:
“To change your mind and follow him who sets you right is to be none the less free that you were before.”
Also: “The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.”
We’re going to start something today and see how it goes.
In prowling through old newspapers seeking out tidbits of Missouri Capitol history I have frequently run across columns called “Four Minute Essays” by Dr. Frank Crane, a long-time Methodist minister who died in 1928. He was a believer in positive thinking long before native Missourian Dale Carnegie started writing about How to Win Friends and Influence People.
One hundred years ago he compiled many of his columns into ten small volumes. Although there will be instances where some of the syntax is antiquated, his thoughts seem worthy of being put back into circulation in our times. We’re going to try to offer one of his essays each Monday with our regular entries later in the week. Here’s the first one.
PRINCIPLES
Principles are the deep laws underlying life.
Just as gravitation runs through every particle of matter from sun to sand grain, just as electricity pervades all things, and chemical affinity works always and everywhere, so there are certain laws that eternally operate in events and in men’s minds.
That honesty is the best policy, that courage is power, that practice brings efficiency, and that truth eventually prevails over error, are just as evergreen and exceptionless as the forces in dead stones and planets.
The first business of one who would succeed is to find out these principles, his second business is to believe in them, and his final business is to entrust his whole career in them.
A fool believes in a principle when he sees it works for his good. A man of sense believes in principle when he cannot see. The very essence of faith-power is that it works in the dark.
The real man believes most of all in honesty when it is plain that to lie would profit him; believes most of all in cleanliness when the allurements of uncleanliness make their strongest appeal; believes most of all in the power of good to overcome evil when men most clamor for the false remedy of cruel retaliation.
The man of principle steers his course by the north star; in storm and fog he goes straight on; he is an ocean-goer. The man of shrewdness and expediency is a coaster and explores the deeps at his peril.
One gets the good out of a principle only when he is convinced that it is invariable. Behind it is the eternal will of the university, which cannot be fooled, tricked, or dodged.
Rooted in principles life grows stronger and more majestic every day; the years harden it; failures fructify it; the windy blasts toughen it; Junes fill it with flowers and Octobers load it with fruit.
Take stock of yourself. Are there some big things you utterly believe in, and by them govern your days? Out of those things shall grow your happiness and your usefulness at the last.
Do you think everything has exceptions? Are you straight or crooked as occasion dictates? Do you say, “It all depends?” Are you an opportunist? Do you simply act as your judgment decides in each case? Do you think the end justifies the means; that is, that your little mind is clearer than the omniscient mind?
So you do that which is EXPEDIENT or do you do which is RIGHT?
If you have no principles you are but the chaff which the wind driveth away.
For some, it’s an honor. To others, it’s an insult when an animal is named for them.
For Prince Charles, the word that a tree frog had been named for him (Hyloscirtus princecharlesi) was an honor (or as he might say “honour.”). He has worked to protect tropical rainforest habitat.
As far as we know, President Trump has not found it tweet-worthy since his name was attached to a creature by a British company interested in environmental issues. The company paid $25,000 in an auction for the rights to name a legless, blind, tiny burrowing amphibian from Panama “Dermohis donaldtrump.”
If you think we are going to offer some clever comment about that, think again.
But apart from scientific names involving famous people, we don’t often hear of regular animals being named for people in the news or historical characters very much. At one time it was a pretty proper thing to do. In fact, Lucy Wales, who ran Columbia’s first school for women, used to take her students to the county fair and have them discuss the famous people whose names were carried by the livestock on display.
A fellow named Ed. H. Smith, the former publisher of a newspaper in the small Livingston County town of Chula, once suggested that Missouri needed a law restricting the right of Missourians to name animals for prominent people. He wrote to the Chillicothe Tribune in 1909:
I don’t know how to frame a bill, but I am going to try to tell you in my weak way what I want and give you a few reasons why a law of this kind ought to be passed. Now, you will notice at this time of the year the papers in small towns and even in cities like Chillicothe are full of advertisements of breeding stock. Fine horses—Belgians and Percherons—and big mealy-nosed jacks, Herefords, etc. These are all noble animal, and I know full well what these splendid new breeds are doing for old Missouri. That’s all right. What I object to is the names they give these animals. It don’t look quite right to name a jack after a senator without his consent. At any rate it don’t hurt the jack or the senator, but there is something unpretty about it.
Suppose now, I was sent to the legislature and Jim Raney would name his bull calf Ed H. Smith and print a lot of bills with a picture of the calf and say (our) names under it. How would I like it? I tell you, Mr. Editor, about half the fine breeding animals in the country are named after celebrated people. There was a rooster at our poultry show named Herbert S. Hadley. A man up by Chula has a pig named Carrie Nation. I tell you where the greatest objection to this rural nomenclature comes in. And when I am done you will be of my opinion about this matter.
Comes now a man to your print shop and wants a horse bill printed on manila cardboard. This bill contains a description of the splendid horse and his pedigree, which reads as follows: Jos. Cannon was sired by Grover Cleveland, dam Ida Tarbell, she by Hod Scruby, dam Mrs. Langtry.
Now, you print them bills with good job ink and this man tacks one on a telephone pole in front of Swetland’s drug store. Suppose now, the next day there is an eruption of Shalehill at Utica, and Chillicothe is buried five hundred feet deep with ashes and limestone and shale and lava, and sandstone and hell fire and brimstone. Two thousand years from now comes a band of geologists from some big university and they did down to find old Chillicothe. They strike the top of a telephone pole and follow it down. They find this bill tacked to it and quit work at once. You get. They have made a find. They have founds something that upsets all ancient history they have ever learned. All over the land the school children have been taught that the Scrubys were a fine old English family in no way related to Grover Cleveland and Ida Tarbell’s name in all histories is written Miss. School marms all over the country will say, “my goodness gracious,” or words to that effect. Millions of schoolbooks will have to be destroyed and new ones printed. family histories and biographies will be knocked galled west. You know it. So there you are. You see what I want. I can’t frame the bill but don’t you think Fred Hudson and Hod Scruby ought to take it up. They are more interested than I am.
I don’t think anyone will ever name a clay pigeon after me. It is altogether an unselfish motive which prompts me in this matter, and a bill like this preventing any one from naming their breeding animals after our great men, ought to pass with a whoop. I rest my case.
Joseph Cannon was an Illinois congressman who was the Speaker from 1903 until 1911, the longest-serving speaker until another Illinois congressman, Dennis Hastert, eclipsed him. Grover Cleveland is the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms. Ida Tarbell was one of the biggest names among muckraking journalists of that era. “Hod” Scruby was Horace P. Scruby, the state representative from Livingston County at the time. Mrs. Langtry was the famous actress Lilly Langtry. Fred Hudson was the state senator representing the county.
The issue Ed Smith raised so long ago isn’t something we confront much today. But animals often show up in our editorial cartoons, sometimes bearing names of our leaders, sometimes representing broader themes.
Wonder when President Trump will comment on the Panamanian amphibian.
There are few things more lonesome than a baseball diamond in the winter.
And winter can come early.
A few times a week I drive past a ball diamond next to Missouri Boulevard in Jefferson City, vacant already for a couple of months since the end of youth baseball. Sometimes I’m out near Binder Park, west of town, where I played a lot of games and left one of them in an ambulance. They are lifeless in the cold, gray light of autumn and soon, winter.
Slow pitch softball. I was reduced to playing slow-pitch softball on those diamonds, all that was left after fast-pitch ball dried up—and, to be honest, after age and the middle-age spread settled in. I had played a lot of fast-pitch ball on the in-town diamonds. But when slope-pitch is all that’s left, it’s at least something related to baseball and that’s what keeps people going to the diamonds and doing things the real players in Kansas City or St. Louis do, or imagining they’re doing them.
There is something intrinsically wrong with girls and women playing fast-pitch softball while men have deserted the challenge of the sport so they can slaughter something lobbed their way. Perhaps there is some misguided testosterone-fueled belief that thinking a guy hitting a lobbed pitch a long way is impressively masculine, especially among the young (who should be playing fast-pitch and leaving the slow-pitch game to the old, fat guys who have only that game left to keep them mentally young).
You want to see good, hard, competitive softball? Don’t watch the men and boys play in what once were called “looper leagues.” Go watch high school and college women’s softball. That’s a GAME!
Busch Stadium now has joined Kauffman Stadium as one of those lonesome places. The Cardinals, a boom-and-bust team all year long, went bust big-time against the Nationals this week. Quite simply, they proved they are the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players.
But both teams have some young guys who will be a year more mature next year, ready to hit thirty points higher, perhaps more likely to lay off sliders that ate them alive this year. Both teams have some veterans with possibilities yet. Both teams have some veterans we shall not see much longer, maybe not even next year.
Next year. It’s the promise that helps us survive the lonely days ahead.
Maybe our clubs will play more interesting baseball next year. And more consistent ball. And better ball. Maybe the young guys who were too often strikeout-bait this year will be on the base paths instead of back in the dugout more. Maybe the older guys have at least one more solid season in them. Maybe it will occur to someone that batters beat the shift by hitting the ball away from it instead of trying to hit the ball over it.
Maybe the batters won’t watch the first pitch strike go past them. Every time.
This year our teams had 2692 hits between them. And 2825 strikeouts. But they hit 372 home runs. Some people look at those numbers and argue they are what makes baseball boring.
The Cardinals, down by three in their last game, put men on base late and what was it the announcers were saying on the tube? “The tying run is at the plate.” Or “the leading run is at the plate” as if that batter’s job was to put the ball into the hands of a fan rather than the glove of an outfielder.
About the only thing more boring than waiting for lightning to strike is sunbathing.
Lightning didn’t strike for the Cardinals in their four games against Washington. David Freese wasn’t at the plate—in fact, he retired a few days ago. Maybe he can throw out the first pitch for the Cardinals’ home opener next March.
We talk baseball a lot at the YMCA three mornings a week. By “we” I mean three or four or five folks who can talk and pedal at the same time or talk and walk on the elliptical machine at the same time. And every single one of us was so dratted tired of watching batters take the first pitch, hit into the shift, and strike out.
The Royals struck out 1,405 times on the way to a 103-loss season. The Cardinals struck out even more often—1,420 times—but somehow won 91 games.
Twenty-eight hundred and twenty times, our major league hitters failed to put the ball in play. They failed to put it in play 133 more times than they succeeded in doing so. The Cardinals scored ten runs in one inning without a home run in the last playoff game against Atlanta.
Put
The
Ball
In
Play.
Make the other guys field it and throw it. Anything can happen. Nothing happens when somebody walks back to the dugout from home plate.
Put the ball in play and the home runs will come. In between them there will be something interesting to watch.
We pretty much agree in those conversations at the Y that it’s better to have somebody hitting .245 who makes the other team handle the ball than it is to have somebody hitting .245 who occasionally is a lightning bolt but otherwise lets the fans get a good sunbath.
So the season is gone. The big parks and the little diamonds are growing cold. The lights are off. The concession stands are closed. The seats are empty—whether they are the aluminum bleachers at Binder Park or the luxury suite seats in Kansas City and St. Louis.
One day a week there is something called football. A couple of days a week there will be basketball or hockey. For a lot of us those are just poor substitutes.
Eventually it will be February again, a short month and by the end of it there is baseball again. And the young will rise up and the old will fade away. Soon the young will be old.
But the game never ages. We do. It doesn’t. It will sustain us through the bleak winter until that time it can mesmerize us or drive us crazy again.
But next year, please: Don’t always let the first pitch go by. Don’t try to beat the shift by hitting into it. And for Heaven’s sake, learn to put the ball into play.
—-about the half century since men first walked on the moon. The five or six percent of you who supposedly still think it was a Hollywood-generated hoax can leave the room now. Or maybe not.
Only twelve men in the entire history of mankind, however far back you consider that history to go, have seen our earth in its entirety with their own eyes. Only twelve. And, assuming you are not among those who think Hollywood had computer generated special effects far advanced from what they were showing the rest of the world, or whether you think these twelve were looking at a ball or a pancake, what the twelve unanimously agree they saw affected most of them for the rest of their lives.
The first three to see the full earth were not those on Apollo 11 but those who had flown around the moon the previous December, the crew of Apollo 8.
The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times on Christmas day, 1968 about what that view could mean to those of us too small for Borman, Lovell, and Anders to see from their great distance.
Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth. When the earth was the World — all the world there was — and the stars were lights in Dante’s heaven, and the ground beneath men’s feet roofed Hell, they saw themselves as creatures at the center of the universe, the sole, particular concern of God — and from that high place they ruled and killed and conquered as they pleased.
And when, centuries later, the earth was no longer the World but a small, wet spinning planet in the solar system of a minor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy in the immeasurable distances of space — when Dante’s heaven had disappeared and there was no Hell (at least no Hell beneath the feet) — men began to see themselves not as God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama, but as helpless victims of a senseless farce where all the rest were helpless victims also and millions could be killed in world-wide wars or in blasted cities or in concentration camps without a thought or reason but the reason — if we call it one — of force.
Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante — that “first imagination of Christendom” — had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. “Is it inhabited?” they said to each other and laughed — and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space — “half way to the moon” they put it — what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. “Is it inhabited?”
The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
There was that hope in those often ugly days of ’68. And now, fifty-one years later—–?
It’s graduation season, the time when hundreds of thousands of young people will be leaving the family nest bound for college, the military, or independent grownup life.
They’re empty or near-empty vessels who will be filled with life experiences that might make them entirely different people in thirty years than they are now. When they return for class reunions they will find with the passing years that are less a class and more a diverse community.
Kelly Pool, the former Centralia newspaper publisher who was the Secretary for the Capitol Commission Board that oversaw construction of the capitol lived to be ninety years old. Eventually he was editor emeritus of the Jefferson City Post-Tribune and wrote an entire newspaper page of reflections and inspirational thoughts each week for many years. In late 1943, he looked at the way people respond to the “youth will be served” slogan and found many people didn’t agree with it—although thousands of “youngsters” were fighting World War II. But Pool argued the old saying is true and “more and more the world is coming to recognize the power and grandeur of youth.”
The world is young—always will be,” he wrote. “Youth will has always been in the vanguard,” he said as he put together a list to prove his point:
Alexander conquered the world at 26.
Napoleon made all Europe tremble at 25.
Cortez conquered Mexico at 26.
Alexander Hamilton led Congress at 36.
Clay and Calhoun led Congress at 29.
Henry Clay became speaker at 34.
Calhoun was secretary of war at 35.
Daniel Webster was without peer at 30.
Judge Story was on the supreme court at 32.
Goethe was a literary giant at 24.
Schiller was in the forefront of literature at 22.
Burns wrote his best poetry at 24.
Byron’s first work appeared at 19.
Dickens brought out “Pickwick Papers” at 24.
Schubert and Mozart died at less than 35.
Raphael ravished the world at 20.
Michelangelo made stone to live at 24.
Galileo’s great discovery was at 19.
Newton was at his zenith when only 25.
Edison harnessed lightning when only 23.
Martin Luther shook the Vatican at 20.
Calvin wrote his “Institute” at 21.
(“Judge Story” was a reference to Justice Joseph Story, 1779-1845, who is best known as the Justice who read the decision in the Amistad case. John Calvin as a post-Luther Reformation thinker and pastor whose writings led to the formation of Presbyterianism.)
All of which, wrote Pool, is that “our boys and girls should not let the precious hours of their youth be wasted. Begin early to make your mark in the world, and drive hard to become one of the youths who ‘will be served.”
J. Kelly Pool continued to write his “Kellygrams” pages each week for the newspaper until shortly before his death at the age of 90 in 1951.
A new product came on the market in 1920. The Band-Aid (registered trademark symbol is supposed to be here) became so popular that its name has become a generic term for anything that temporarily solves a problem.
Missourians will vote on a gas tax increase in a few days and I’m going to vote for it because I am part of the problem the proposed tax increase seeks to temporarily solve.
My car’s dash tells me all kinds of stuff including the cumulative fuel mileage since I bought the car in 2014. This is the way it looked yesterday.
Another “screen” told me that I have driven this car about 63,000 miles. In all of that driving, town and highway, summer and winter, short trips to the grocery store or longer trips to, say, Nashville or Indianapolis, this car has averaged 25.4 miles per gallon, pretty good for a 300 hp car that can hit 60 in a little over five seconds.
This car replaced one that got 26 mpg, tops, on a long trip. Obviously I don’t burn as much gas in this newer car as I did in the older one making me one of those who doesn’t contribute as much in gas taxes with the present car as I did with my previous one. But I drive the same roads most of the time and cross the same bridges most of the time as I did with the previous car.
I am, therefore, one of hundreds of thousands of the people on our roads who are the collective cause of our Transportation Department’s long decline in financial ability to operate our highways.
As a good and responsible citizen who prefers not to replace his shock absorbers anytime soon or fall through a bridge floor, I’m going to vote to increase the tax on the gas I burn.
Frankly, it’s kind of a chicken way to go about it—a ten-cent increase that’s phased in during four years so the percentage increase is small enough that it won’t be too painful to the parsimonious Missourians who have been told for a couple of decades now that it’s okay to think state services and programs can get by on less and less and less and less because the people know better how to spend their money than the government does.
But the potholes and the patches have become such an inconvenience to motorists that maybe they’ll decide the government really can make better use of 2.5 cents than they can.
But this is only a band-aid. Only a temporary solution. A good friend is a reason the gas tax isn’t a long-term solution to the problems with our transportation system.
My friend recently bought a Tesla 3. He likes it a lot. He’s had it for about a month and has not put a single gallon of gas in it. (Anybody who buys gas for their Tesla might be planning on setting the thing on fire.) Tesla claims drivers can get 310 miles out of a full battery charge but battery technology is moving quickly and when a 500-mile battery car hits the market at a reasonable price, watch out.
Even 310 miles isn’t bad. We’ve been told Teslas come with a directory that can be called up on the big cockpit screen and shows where there are chargers—such as these we saw the other day at a fast foot place in Limon, Colorado. It’s like of like the printed directories that came out in the 1970s when a lot of people started driving diesels, showing them where there were gas stations with diesel pumps for cars.
You’ll notice there’s a Tesla like the one my friend has that is getting a re-charge while the driver is inside the Limon restaurant enjoying a casual cheeseburger or something. Tesla says it has 1,359 Supercharger stations with 11, 234 superchargers like those in Limon. Plug in for thirty minutes and you’re good for another 170 miles. That gets you to 480 miles with a lunch stop on the way.
Tesla is quickly getting competitors and that means prices will become more reasonable and that means more of us will be paying zero gas taxes before long. I have thought that each of the last two cars I have bought would be the last completely gas-powered vehicles I would own. A Tesla, by the way, will get to 60 in about half the time my current car does.
So a ten-cent gas tax increase (spread through four years) is only a band-aid. It’s going to take more than a Band-Aid to permanently assure our road system doesn’t go back to gravel. We hope those who formulated the ten cent (after four years) gas tax increase are thinking about what comes when tens of thousands of motorists don’t use gasoline or diesel fuel at all.
I’m going to vote for the band-aid. The four-year phase-in means it’s flesh-colored so it’s not so noticeable.
This is the old home place. It’s changed quite a bit since my folks left it a long time ago.
We think they lived here. The story has gotten kind of foggy in the last three million years or so. The old home place actually could be in one of several places in Africa. Cousin Lucy, for example, was living in nearby Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago.
This is Oldupai Gorge. “Oldupai” is a Masai word. This place usually is called “Olduvai” Gorge because a German butterfly hunter named Wilhelm Kattwinkel stumbled on this place in 1911, and asked the Masai people who live in the area what the place was called. They thought he was referring to a plant that flourishes there, the Oldupai, and he misunderstood what they said and furthermore mispronounced it and the gorge has been stuck with Olduvai ever since..
That’s the Oldupai plant growing outside the museum. The more formal name is Blue Sansevierra or Sword Sansevierra. It has a tuxedo-formal name but let’s just leave it at being a Sansevierra plant. The old timers such as Uncle Nutcracker Man used it for all kinds of things, much like a more modern people in this country we erroneously call the Anasazi used Yucca plants.
The Masai have used it for clothing, or thread for sewing. They use it to fix problems with leather products. They make the fibers of it into rope. It’s also good for baskets and roofs. And bandages. In fact it has a natural antiseptic quality. Almost fifty years ago one of the scientists working in the gorge used the plant for a natural bandage over an injury. It worked so well that he went into pharmaceutical research with it. And cattle like it during the dry season.
Oldupai Gorge is a thirty-mile long feature of the Great Rift Valley—as some call it—which is an area of tectonic activity that eventually will produce a rift deep enough for water to flow into it, splitting this part of eastern Africa away from the main continent. Don’t worry about it. It will happen long after you have been there and have returned safely.
The Leakey family, starting in the 1930s, found fossils here that started to rewrite the human evolutionary record. They found in soil layers about three-hundred feet deep four kinds of hominids, each showing an increase in brain size. In related levels, they found increasingly sophisticated stone tools.
For a few minutes we were face to face with old Uncle Nut, as we like to call him. He originally was named Zinjanthropus boisei. Well, we don’t know what his contemporaries called him, assuming they had names for each other 1.84 million years ago. The Leakeys gave him that name and then they changed it after deciding he was part of the Paranthropus genus. He gained the nickname “Nutcracker Man” because he had small incisors and large molars that led the Leakeys to think he fed on grains, nuts and seeds. Later studies have revealed he lived on grass and leaves.
How do we know that Uncle Nut should actually be Uncle Grass? A Smithsonian article in June of 2012 says there was another Paranthropus genus in another part of Africa. And an analysis of the fossilized teeth of Paranthropus robustus, who lived in South Africa suggest he was the one who ate hard foods. Chemical tests of robustus’ enamel, indicates as much as sixty percent of their diet was fruit and hard-shelled nuts. Imagine that—there’s enough food residue on those teeth after almost two-million years that scientists can figure out what their diet was.
Uncle Nut, P. bosei in scientific terms, had a bigger jaw and the biggest molars of any hominid found up to 2012, indicating that species was a strong chewer. At the time, eastern Africa was open grasslands and woods, much different from southern Africa. But Uncle Nut’s molars don’t have the pitting one might find in animals that eat hard objects. Carbon isotopes from his teeth also show as much as 77 percent of his diet was sedges and grasses. The study of the teeth also indicates the area of Oldupai Gorge was quite a bit different from the arid area it seems to be today.
So Uncle Nut was a vegetarian, a trait that hasn’t crossed to this particular possible descendent in the millennia since. This possible descendant is a confirmed carnivore. If there’s going to be pizza, let’s make it a meat lover’s pizza.
To be clear, we call him “uncle,” but he might be more of a cousin. Some scientists say the Paranthropus genus is an offspring of Australopithecus, the line that they think led to Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens, which is us.
Frankly, I don’t see much of a family resemblance in the pictures at the museum but as time went by and as his descendants and contemporaries moved throughout Africa and then later into what we call “The Holy Land” and ultimately into northern Europe or along the Mediterranean seacoast—and the rest of the world—they gained some new looks.
Now, we realize some who read this chronicle disagree with the whole evolution thing. That’s okay. But Nancy and I have let National Geographic analyze some of our spit and our DNA shows we might have had some relatives in common with Nutcracker Man or at least some of his contemporaries.
Things are pretty up-to-date in ancient Oldupai or Olduvai Gorge. Power lines are not strung across national parks to reach this place. Tanzania is big on what we call alternative energy. Hydropower. Solar power. And wind. There is oil but it’s under some areas that are too precious, not to mention too dangerous, for drillers. And we hope it is always so. If the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge had some of the critters lying in the grass that we saw in the nearby Serengeti National Park, there would be no controversy about drilling for oil there as there does not seem to be, so far, at Oldupai. It’s not wise to drill for oil in an area where the drillers are considered food.
Just before we headed to Africa, I started reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He writes that at least seven different kinds of Sapiens eventually evolved from areas like the Gorge. But we, Homo sapiens, have survived and we’ve done it by eliminating the others. We have been the lone human species for the last twelve-thousand years and that, he says, has left us arrogant but uncertain.
“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
A group of Homo sapiens gods from a place their kind call Missouri looked down into an ancient gorge that day, the place where Paranthropus bosei ate grass and leaves in what they call Tanzania, African-Americans many generations removed visiting the old home place.
There were three zebras munching on the grass outside our patio on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater on our last morning in Tanzania. Monkeys frolicked on the sidewalk as we walked to the lodge for breakfast. And we realized after two weeks of civilized travel in dangerous places what an amazing adventure we had had. And it is likely we would never return. But we took a lot of pictures that we will look at time and again because—–
Well, because we were someplace magic, I guess. That might be the closest we can come to describing being in another world, one that wasn’t a human world.
Imagine being in a place so sublime that you can sit on your patio after dinner and watch what we were able to watch.
It doesn’t take long to realize why Serengeti National Park in Tanzania is called “The Last Eden.” But dangers lurk in these places. Not long after we got home, we saw a news article that a tourist at a park where we watched zebras and gazelles graze was killed by a hippo. We were told that the hippos came around our sleeping places in that park late at night to graze. They are very territorial and surprisingly quick. We were in a boat on a Kenyan lake one day and we made sure we kept our distance.
So did the hippo.
Visit all the zoos that you want to visit, but until you have seen the broken line of hundreds of families of approaching elephants stretching to the horizon on your left to a similar line headed to the horizon on your right, these elephants crossing the road twenty yards in front of you, you have not seen elephants.
Until you see a black line in the distance and realize it is thousands of migrating Wildebeests, you cannot imagine the Great Plains in our country as our ancestors in covered wagons saw buffalo. Nor can you imagine the grasses of that era until you have gazed at the grass of the Serengeti that extends as far as you can see.
See the giraffe in a zoo and you have not seen a giraffe until you see a half-dozen of them gliding in their awkward dignity across an open area, nor can you appreciate the magnificence of these creatures until you walk past one of them munching on the leaves of the tree over your head as you head to your room from the dining hall.
And seeing a lion in its zoo “habitat” is not really seeing a lion. Peering into the tall, tan, grass trying to differentiate between what is grass and what is fur, listening to it eat and then watching something of powerful grace emerge and walk away, perhaps with a dismissive glance toward you, that is seeing a lion. But it’s often hard to see them, and that’s the way they like it.
For most of us, zoos are where we can appreciate these animals. In some cases, zoos are places where these animals have their greatest hopes of survival as species and we should appreciate the people who want to make sure we see something more than skeletons of extinct animals in our natural history museums.
But friends, if you ever have the opportunity to see them where they really live, save your money for however long it takes to afford the trip, and take it. We signed up for a Central Bank Classic Club tour, knowing we would spend hours in an aluminum tube high in the air, sometimes so crowded we couldn’t stretch out our legs all the way, hoping our tray tables didn’t cut us in half because a dolt in front insisted on lowering his (or her) seat back all the way. We knew we might get little sleep, would eat microwaved food (which isn’t all that bad) and snacks and might get to watch a movie to help pass the time. More than seventeen hours on three flights each way, and vehicle travel for two weeks that often made us dearly appreciate seat belts might be discouraging to some. But every inconvenience was worth every penny—and then some.
We endured the worst roads we’ve ever traveled to get to some of the most magnificent areas we have ever seen. (Come along with us for several minutes on a stretch of road that led to one of our lodges. Understand that our guide, James, did an excellent job making our ride as smooth as possible by swerving all over the road to minimize the beating we were taking). It is worth noting that the tires on our vehicles were TWELVE-ply radials. The tires you and I drive on our tame Missouri roads are four-ply. Some of our party who wore the wrist-bands that measure how many steps are taken in a day (10,000 is considered healthy) were seeing numbers beyond twenty and thirty-thousand. One even got a reading of 42,000—because of the daily bouncing, twisting, turning and grabbing the OS handle in our Land Cruisers. At the end of the day we could understand how tennis shoes feel after they’ve been through the clothes dryer. We were surprised when we got home to see that we had each lost about five pounds although we had eaten well.
But, oh, my goodness. The things we saw—some of them things that are disappearing in the wild.
The rhinoceros is under dire threat from poachers who are killing them for their horns that are ground into a powder and sold for high prices in some countries because of the belief the powder cures cancer or hangovers or improves virility or produces a cocaine-like high. This is the only time we saw rhinos and these were white rhinos. We saw no black rhinos because they are considered critically endangered and only about 5,500 are known in all of Africa.
Marvel at the trees, the Acacias with their leaves that seem to grow as clouds over the top branches, but also with thorns similar to the thorns on our locust trees—a reminder that in the wild, beauty and danger often are the same. And sometimes it’s not the thorns that are the most dangerous things in those trees.
No, we did not get out of our Range Rover to go stand under the tree to take this picture. On trips such as these, we worship the telephoto lens and the high-megapixel camera. In fact, we worshipped them more than 3,500 times, probably and we worshipped the big memory card when we got home.
But the eaters and the eaten are facing uncertainty. The National Geographic we bought at Downtown Book and Toy after our trip had an article about Kenyan farmers who were crowding the habitat of the magnificent creatures we saw poisoning the animals who were there in the first place to protect their crops and livestock.
Did you know that you can tell if an elephant is right-handed or left-handed? Yep. And that leads us to the difference between the elephants we saw in Africa compared to those we would see if we ever go to India. African elephants such as this fellow (and we were a safe distance from him, too), both male and female, have tusks. Asian elephants don’t all have tusks. Those that do are males. About half of the Asian lady elephants have tusks but they don’t have any pulp in them and they’re called tushes, a word that has a different meaning in our country. something else.
Yes, the tusks are weapons against predators. But they’re mostly used for foraging, or digging, or stripping bark off trees or just moving things out of the way. And you can tell if an elephant is right-or-left handed (tusked?) by checking which tusk is shorter.
We saw the “Big Five,” the animals the big game hunters most covet—Lion, Cape Buffalo, Rhinoceros, elephant, leopard—throughout our safaris although we saw the rhinos only that one day and leopards were elusive. We didn’t start seeing them until our last couple of days. We saw them from a safe distance, too, and we wouldn’t have seen them at all if our guides and their trained eyes didn’t spot them for us.
Leopards like to take their food up a tree to eat it. Otherwise a lion will take it away from them, we were told. We knew we were in leopard territory when our guide pointed out the horns of a former gazelle dangling from a tree branch.
And if we needed any reminders that the furry friends at home are related to these beautiful, lethal, creatures, this one reminded us that a cat like this, awakened from a nap and ready for action, acts just like our lap-warmer at home.
Okay, that’s enough for this edition of the summer vacation slide show.
Find a way to do what we did. Find a way to explore cultures and economies and habitats far different from ours and witness some animals who dismiss you as long as you are in your vehicle but who will gladly and quickly kill you if you step outside.
Sunrise. Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. 6:55 a.m. July 23, 2018. It is a winter day in Kenya, according to the animals who float above the animals below.
There is no time in nature; there is only light and darkness. There are no calendars, no seasons in nature; there is only instinctive behavior driven by heat and cold, dry and wet. There is no war in nature; there is only those who eat and those who are eaten—and all ultimately fall into the latter category.
But it is not the lion or the leopard, the angry elephant or hippo or rhino that is the most dangerous animal in those places. Only the most intelligent of nature’s creations—and therefore the most dangerous of nature’s creations—divide the world into measurable segments called time. Only the most intelligent—and most dangerous of nature’s creations—apply names to places, to the cycles of heat and cold, dry and wet, define the world around them in terms of beauty, and declare war on each other and sometimes on nature itself.
There are a few places in the world that prompt such reflections by the most intelligent and dangerous species. And those places are endangered by these most intelligent creatures who long ago abandoned an understanding that nature is a place for living and have accepted the idea that it is, instead, a place for having.
We have returned from places to which our fellow species have bestowed names: Aberdares, Naivasha, Nakuru, Masai Mara, Amboseli, Tarangire, Ngorongora, and Serengeti and in this and succeeding and perhaps irregular entries we propose to tell you about them.
But being part of the most intelligent and most dangerous species imposes a challenge because these places must be absorbed as much as seen. In the end, we suppose, there is a desperate hope that our species will—before it is too late—understand that we need places where there is no time, no seasons, no names.
There were times when we realized we were seeing some things reminiscent of what the a-westering pioneers in our own country might have witnessed when crossing the Great Plains and its high, tan, grass more than 150 years ago. The wildebeest migration was under way, their numbers blackening the horizon as the American Bison must have blackened our horizon then.
In our recent travels, we have gone from cities so crowded, so deadlocked by social and economic structures, so stifling of life itself, places with no horizons, to places where the heart may expand in a seemingly limitless world. Our species needs places where we are not forced to live inwardly but where we are free to fill national lungs (a phrase that originated with former Missouri Senator George Graham Vest when he defended Yellowstone from a plan by the federal government to let private commercial interests develop the area).
One of our group asked one of our guides in Tanzania if the country had natural resources it could exploit to build its economy. “We have oil,” said the guide. “But we prefer to leave it underground where it belongs because refining oil causes wars.” Tanzania uses hydropower, which supplies a lot, but not enough, of its electrical needs. It is extensively exploring development of biomass, particularly in agricultural areas, and it is aggressively moving toward the use of solar power, not surprising in a country with 2,800 to 3,500 hours of sunshine every year.
We stayed in lodges with limited hours of electric lights and limited hours of hot water because generators are used; no power lines are constructed across these lands. But these lodges had seemingly unlimited numbers of employees who walked with us between the main building and our rooms to keep us from crossing the paths of the animals who freely roamed the area: the giraffe along the walkway, the zebras and the antelope and the monkeys that roamed freely in our presence. And especially the hippos that came out of the water late at night to graze near our rooms.
In Tanzania and in Kenya, at least, there are some who realize some places are more important to the national character and to the future well-being of all species than what is beneath the soil. All of us need to see these places. And if our arrogant intelligence will let us learn from these places, perhaps we will learn there is an innate value to us in them that once lost can never be regained.
We are the smartest and therefore the most dangerous of all animals because we can think in abstract terms. Instead of communicating to others of our species, as the wild creatures we saw communicate to their own species, “Lion, run!” we are able to think, “Lion. What a great trophy,” or “Rhino. Horn. Better Sex.” Or “Land. Resources beneath it. Lions and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeest are dispensable. There is money here.”
The ancient scriptures tell us that God gave man dominion over the earth and all of the creatures created earlier. And they tell us that man and woman lived in harmony with those creatures—until they ate from the tree of knowledge and in doing so destroyed Eden. But they became the smartest animals.
There are too many who do not understand there is a difference between “dominion” and “domination.”
Domination is an excuse. Dominion is an obligation. Domination is a rationale for selfish and uncaring consumption. Dominion is a responsibility to save, to preserve, to create that which is lasting and which touches the spirit. Domination is short-sighted. Dominion is a long-term understanding that we, the smartest animals, cannot survive in ignorance of and disrespect for the land that give us life.
Domination is a destructive narrowness of immediate gratification. Dominion is an understanding that there are, as Aldo Leopold wrote, “things in this world more important than dollar signs and ciphers.”
If you trust your fellow intelligent species to accept Leopold’s words, you have no worries. Otherwise, do what we have done. See it before it is too late.
