OVER THE PASS

Oh, I'm over it, all right -- I'm in Dubuque!

That's right, Iowa. Sitting in Dubuque on a Sunday afternoon listening to the lawn mowers. . . in fact, there hasn't been a moment all day when I didn't hear lawn mowers, except while I was gone for an hour or two around noon.

Those lawn mowers give me the creeps, kind of like the way an escaped galley slave would feel at the sight of an oar. I remember those long, hot Maryland afternoons -- no, whole weekends! -- spent subduing the grass. And the bushes. And the trees. And then cleaning it all up. Those wide expanses of green come at a price, you know. There is something to be said, though, for walking across the cool green suburban grass in your bare feet. . . (yeah, like "CHIGGERS!")

It's different here in the suburbs. Driving back to my sister-in-law's house a little while ago, I came up the hill and found the street completely blocked by a howling mob ofmaybe 50 or 60 kids having a giant water-gun battle! Being a good sport, I advanced cautiously toward the throng, expecting to be surrounded and drenched (not a bad thing on a hot, humid day). Being Iowa water-gunslingers however, they lowered their weapons, got out of the way, and let me pass without even a tentative wetting of the F-150's flanks. I actually felt a little disappointed, as in, "gee whiz, why don't they wanna play with me?" The truck, having experienced only 2 or 3 rainy days during the last six months, was especially sad. If anyone had known, I'm sure they would have given us a good compassionate soaking.

For some reason that may make sense before we're done, I'd also like to mention an hour I wasted once many years ago while teaching English as a second language (ESL) to a group of mostly Middle Eastern students. After reviewing a long list of vocabulary words having to do with temperate natural features like forests, rivers, parts of trees, and assorted furbearing animals, I asked each student to describe his or her own country in turn. It was slow going at first, but the exercise broke down completely when I called upon a fine young man from Abu Dhabi (one of the Arab Emirates) who'd just finished a year of school in the U.K. He hesitated at first, then said, in heavily-accented English,

"Een my cone-try we haff only sahnnd. And -- how you say -- leezards. . ."

Everyone back in your seats now? Good!

The point is, if there is one, that we all come at life from our own perspectives that rarely change unless we're sufficiently challenged or provoked. Whether we're talking about juvenile behavior, green growing things, the ground under our feet, or even computers, we all have a certain way of looking at the world and have a hard time grasping any other way to do things.

My wife's niece went off to college last fall with a brand new grape-flavored iMac named "Audrey," and several times she or her parents (very smart, highly educated, generous people) have told me that Audrey has a nasty habit of freezing up a lot. Since I was the one who told them that the choice of an iMac for college was a "no-brainer," I naturally feel a modicum of responsibility for Audrey's foibles and have repeatedly delivered the usual incantations of visiting Mac support sites, trashing prefs files, running disk utilities, and reinstalling software. Perhaps some of these things were done once upon a time, but the last thing I heard was that Audrey still freezes up frequently, and that "we haven't done any of those things you told us to do." Oh.

These are some of the best people in the world and I love them dearly. They like computers and use them all the time for word processing, playing games, communicating by email, and surfing the Web for fun and information. I guess they just don't like to fuss with them or puzzle them out. There must be millions of users who feel that way, too. You either love to tinker or you don't.

I'm not a real geek, by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been known to stay up all night getting something to work the way I think it should. Fortunately this rarely happens anymore with my Macs -- I've learned the incantations and the little rituals -- but I can't really rest with anything that isn't working right, whether it's mechanical, electronic, digital, or emotional. I'm bound to fret and fiddle, it's just the way I am.

The other night I carried the iBook over to the bed to show my wife some digital photos I'd just downloaded, and she noted with some distress, "You're frowning! Why are you frowning?" The question was quite understandable, as the images were lovely to behold, so from her point of view everything was just fine. But I was irritated and perplexed: the pictures were showing up as NikonView JPEGs instead of QuickTime files as they had when I'd last used the card reader on my 8600! Why were they different this time? I couldn't figure it out, hence the untimely frown. (Ah, but I did, eventually!)

And now we come to the reason you've been scrolling past pictures that have nothing whatsoever to do with Dubuque or any of the other things mentioned so far. We've been climbing a rhetorical pass, you see, and now we're at the top: these shots are all of places I saw while on the way to the top of a particular very real place, La Veta Pass in southern Colorado. Once you're over the pass, you come down out of the mountains and hit the wide open spaces. When my wife and I drive from New Mexico to Iowa to visit her family, this is where we get dumped out onto the plains, so to speak. The picture below shows what we leave a few miles past this point.

The mountains are my home how, so the Maryland-like green of this Dubuque neighborhood looks very different to me now than it did the last time we were here. I don't have grass to cut any more, and a lawn without rocks, chamisa, sagebrush, or prairie dog holes looks just a wee bit dull. Big whoop, you say. But there was a time a few years back on a trip out West when I found the dust and dryness disconcerting. I still do, to some extent, though that diminished when we rediscovered sweating as we rolled into the humid air of the Midwest the other day. And then I noticed that the sky was different. The blue doesn't come all the way down to the horizon! I'll bet it doesn't where most of you live, either, and I'll also bet that like me, you never noticed. But now I'm used to that kind of razor-edged horizon, so coming up here was a case of "hey, where'd it go?!"

Good Lord, I just disproved my earlier point!

Perspectives do change, perceptions are mutable. This is kind of confusing but loads of fun: it all depends on where you're planted and how you grow. I mean, you never know. Maybe my ex-student has learned to appreciate oak trees and squirrels. Maybe eventually someone will play with Audrey. Maybe I'll get rich and stop worrying. Maybe Charles W. Moore will like OS X. :-) For that matter, maybe I will. I had absolutely no opinion on this until I read the other day that I wouldn't be able to use custom icons any more. ("WHAT? How dare they!")

So head on up over the pass once in a while and see what's on the other side. Already just 48 hours in a comfortable, air-conditioned hidey-hole with a full refrigerator have given me a new appreciation for clean, smooth surfaces and the American Way. As our hero says below,

Are we having fun yet? Quite possibly. The iBook is a joy to travel with, the Nikon works, my wife is happy to be "in the bosom of the family" once again, the Ford gets a new set of shocks tomorrow, and before you know it we head back over the pass in the opposite direction (whew). . .

I don't really know what's going on, but at least I'm not bored!

John H. Farr edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM. His Zoo Zone shows what can be done with animated GIFs and a lengthy period of suspended belief.

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November 20, 2008