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Posts Tagged ‘outdoors’

Sanford and Son was a classic creation by Redd Foxx who was not only a comic genius but a man ahead of the curve. The reuse and recycle mentality of Fred Sanford may have been a little off the wall but this was a character who did not have to have the latest and greatest to be happy. Other people’s trash was his treasure and he managed to scrape by, happy to live in his loosely organized junkyard. I have a kid just like Fred Sanford. His idea of a good time is to hop in the truck with me whenever I have a load to haul to the county waste facility. He is fascinated by what others throw away, always coming up with ideas of how to give a second life to items that catch his eye in the white goods and brown goods dumpsters.

Junkyards are fascinating places, like galleries that reveal a culture. But archaeologists will tell you that if you want the real anthropological scoop, digging through the detritus of a landfill is far more revealing. Unlike a junkyard of mostly metal and plastics, the full range of organic materials in a landfill can more accurately decode a culture. What people eat, read and wear are pretty powerful indicators of their preoccupations. Apart from interpreting the shifts in our culture, there is the terrifying environmental revelation: It takes a scary amount of time for our trash to disintegrate.

I have a son who will drop his Wii Wand in the wink of an eye if I mention I am making a trip to the dump. I shouldn’t wonder at his response since I know that his favorite TV Land show is Sanford and Son, the sitcom in which spotlighted life in a junkyard. This boy of mine has garbage in his blood. He is always grousing at me for disinterestedly driving past people’s furniture rejects that are out on the curb for collection. When I stop to think about it, I realize this fascination holds a lot of promise for his future. Landfills and waste management are all forefront environmental issues that will require his generation to be scientists and creative thinkers like none before.

A walk through a metal and plastic bone yard like Fred Sanford’s lot,(aka junkyard) is an antiseptic experience when compared with a visit to a landfill site. Archaeologists, those people who like to dig, haven’t skipped a beat when it comes to exploring the mountains of refuse we are building in this country. Like forensic sleuths, they don face masks and take samplings at various depths to draw conclusions about our history over the past century. Shreds of clothing, newspaper and food packaging tell a lot about how people live their lives. But there are other thought arresting environmental conclusions these archaeologists share with us.

Riding a horse on a trail ride is one of the most pleasurable activities you can do to experience the great outdoors, but horses are not all the same. I discovered that the Paso Fino horse is one of the best horses to take out riding. Its ride is pleasurable to a level that could be compared to eating ice cream on a hot summer day as a young child. It gave me a feeling of pure joy when I rode this horse, and it is primarily for one reason, its steady gait.

In case you don’t know, a horse’s gait is the way that it moves. In determining a horse’s gait, you look at the pattern, speed, positions, and the sequence of steps that a horse takes while it is moving. The Paso Fino is special in the fact that it has a unique pattern of foot movements that give it a very smooth ride. You won’t see this horse bounding its rider up-and-down as it moves.

The cadence of the Paso’s 1-2-3-4 gait is distinctive as the horse effortlessly glides to its destination. It is almost like military precision when it takes its strides. I liken it to the riderless horse of presidential funerals. To be riding a horse that moves like this is akin to feeling like royalty.