For much of this rainy June I’ve been out-of-state on family affairs, including a work week with cousins, brothers and a sister to convert an old garage, circa 1899, into a bunk room at a family cabin (also circa 1899) in Colorado. There are 12 of my generation as part-owners of this single-season, log-cabin that we use for a base for hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and 9 of us made it out to contribute a day or a week or two, to the rehab.

The work was akin to an old-fashioned barn raising. We tore off the haphazard front wall, replaced screened window openings with real windows, and replaced a makeshift door that hadn’t fully closed for the past three decades. We added plywood sheathing (a concept our forefathers had skipped) and covered it with half-inch rough-sawn spruce siding, stained a color I’d call ‘dark rustic cabin’ that blended into the natural setting. As the 18’x20’ garage only had three trusses, we reinforced those inadequate rough-sawn 2x4s with 20-foot 2x6s, cut to length and added half a dozen more, at 24-inch spacing, with supporting ties on a V to the ceiling. Because the roof line was built with a swale at the end, each trim board had to be measured and cut on a new angle, and, of course, nothing on the old garage was square. We got most of three walls completed, saving the fourth wall (and other projects) for next summer.

We also built a patio, with a 30-inch high stone wall 12-feet off the front door in a rectangle to hold 3 tons of a gravel-dirt-clay mix that packed down firmly with a rented compactor, over which we put almost 3 tons of sand and two tons of two-inch think red sandstone slabs to create the patio surface. Trucks got the material close, but we moved 16,000 pounds of material via wheelbarrow for the final 50 yards. Workdays started with a 5:30 coffee hour, breakfast and a 7 a.m. start. Most days we knocked off at 4:30 p.m. to play horseshoes, talk and relax before a family-style dinner. For the first five days of my first week there, I never ventured further than the 60-yards from the main house to the garage… it was that captivating, fun and worthwhile.

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What I didn’t miss was the mayhem of the news cycle.

To recap, after a four-month war of choice in Iran, Trump called it quits in a humiliating retreat. Iran is in a much stronger position than before the war with control over the Strait of Hormuz, China comes out the clear winner, and America’s military was embarrassed by a poorly defined strategy and a leader completely inept at crafting any deal that doesn’t benefit himself. Not only did Trump concede a military defeat, but he’s agreed to help secure $300 billion for Iran to help it rebuild and dropped the oil embargo that had been in place for the past 14 years (since 2012 under President Obama) — thus giving Iran the wherewithal to become a stronger presence in the Middle East. Spin it however he wants, most Americans surely can see that Trump’s capitulation was a very bad deal for America and America’s allies, which now view America as a security threat rather than savior. America’s image as a world leader has tanked.

Peeling paint and algae-green water in Washington, D.C.’s Reflection has been an apt story to illustrate the corruption and cronyism of this administration — with Trump trying to put the blame on non-existent vandals. The obvious culprit was shoddy work via two non-bid contracts worth $17.4 million to two of Trump’s supporters. That was followed by news this week that Trump and family have accumulated $2.2 billion in his first year back in office — mostly through extortion of television news and social media platforms, inappropriate gifts, and huge sums gained from crypto-plays over which he has influenced public policy.

America will also likely be doling out money to help Venezuela recover from two earthquakes that have wreaked havoc and killed over 1,700 people. Trump has his hand in their oil till, and the consequences will be harsh if he doesn’t pony up — most assuredly with American tax dollars. Speaking of which, news reports in June reinforced that American taxpayers are also paying for the bulk of the East Wing demolition and rebuild, just as they paid for the border wall — projects that Trump once said would be paid through donations, not taxes. Another broken promise, another lie, but no one bothers to count them anymore.

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One of the joys of being away from the news cycle was the opportunity to read other things… books, mainly, and to talk with other family members about gems they were reading. One such gem was recalling Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. A lodestar for the environmental movement, Leopold’s essays still ring true today as do key passages of the foreword Leopold wrote in 1948. The foreword speaks of land as community — a tenet we all should embrace with reverence. Enjoy.

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.

“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

“These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.

“…Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

“These essays attempt to weld these three concepts.

“Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias. But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to tum off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

“Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.”

(Italics added. Written from Madison, Wisconsin, 1948.)

Angelo Lynn