Lessons Learned

I knew I'd learn all sorts of Interesting Things in the High Sierra, and of course, I did. The first is that you meet the most wonderful people doing this kind of thing. People from all over, from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of interests and skills, who know they have this one thing at least in common. We bond and share stories and laugh a lot ~ and then we part and will probably never see each other again.
   Here are a few of the other things I learned:

• The leaf of the thimbleberry plant (upper side) makes the best toilet paper. Of course, one's standards for this sort of thing are quite different when one is miles from the real thing.
• Motion sickness can be cured in the long term! It's called vestibular rehabilitation therapy. This article is a basic overview of the illness with all the usual ideas, but check out the exercises at the bottom: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/summerhealth/speed-away-from-travel-sickness.htm
• Now, one person we met told us that the difference between scat, dung, and feces had to do with the eating habits of the "originator"(!), as in, scat came from carnivores, dung from herbivores, and feces from omnivores. I looked it up, however, and could find no confirmation. It seems that all those words (and more) are basically synonyms. Still, here are a few fascinating factoids I found along the way: http://goafrica.about.com/b/2012/03/19/dung-showering-and-other-poopy-facts.htm
• A mule has a donkey father and horse mother. It can't reproduce. The offspring of a female donkey and male horse is called a hinny, or hinney. It looks a lot like a mule and is also almost always sterile: http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/h/hinny.htm
• This was something I came across in a book I'm reading, which I took with me to the mountains. In French, a colporteur is a door-to-door salesman. It struck me because of the similarity to the name of the popular singer from the 1920s through '50s, Cole Porter. Apparently, his name, though, was the product of the surnames of both his parents, Kate Cole and Sam Porter. His story, which I didn't know at all, is actually very interesting ~ and doesn't leave one with a very good impression of him: http://www.coleporter.org/bio.html
• As usual, I find some of the most remarkable things in the most circuitous fashion. Completely by chance, we met a lovely French family that was staying in a nearby campsite. They mentioned an area of Southern France called Le Drôme, so I looked it up and came across this YouTube video, part of a series, that starts with a look at a most amazing architectural landmark in that area, kind of like Los Angeles's Watts Towers only very much more so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp8HZm-nebs