Month: July 2009

Living in a small town can feel a bit out of touch sometimes.  Also, visiting a small town can be a disconcerting experience.  I often have discussions with my bed and breakfast guests, who having arrived here from a very busy urban lifestyle, invariably ask me “What do you do here?”

This is a complex question to answer, as what I do here depends on the moment.  Something I do all through my day is just look at the mountains and the trees that surround my home.  Just a little while ago, I went outside to take the crisp, clean sheets off the clothesline and noticed that the world here was intensely quiet.  No birds chirping, except for one feisty hummingbird in the distance.  The sky was dusky with trailing storm clouds coming down from the high Sierra mountaintops (alas, no actual precipitation here.)  I just stood on the deck, with sheets folded over my arm, and listened to the stillness.

If the temperature of the outside air had not been so warm, I would have brought this laptop outside to do what it is that I do in other moments of my daily life–interact with the social media world of the internet.

Thanks to satellites in the earth’s orbit, which allow for a relatively fast internet connection, and the wonder of the Apple “airport” wireless router which graces both me and my bed and breakfast guests with an invisible connection to the world from a laptop, I am living my village life connected to the rest of the planet.  This blog and a few others are part of this creative exercise.  (And, of course, there is twitter.)

And so I decided to do some online sleuthing to see who else was writing about our little neck of the planetary woods, and found others writing about big trees and hanging out in Sequoia Park.  A search for the words “Sequoia Park” among WordPress blogs alone, showed numerous postings over the last week.

Here are some of the gleanings….

Kaleidospopic Wandering, a blog by freelance writer, Joanna Haugen, tells about how “National Parks have a way of keeping humans’ egos in check. Sometimes it’s the force of a mighty river that would take a person down instantaneously. Occasionally sheer mountain cliffs bring us down to size. There are the large, expansive meadows which go on for miles and miles and miles, reminding us how small we are in grand scheme of nature.”

On her Sierra Nevada Ramblings blog, Zhakie, describes a return visit to the Trail of a Hundrend Giants, “The rewards of taking such a drive are pretty amazing, with huge trees of such immense proportions and deep red color as to take the breath away. No matter how many times I have walked amidst a grove of these giants, their size and beauty still capture my attention and I return over and over again.”

A blogger named Susan, at Nimmo’s Blog-A simple girl with a dream, describes how a visit to see the Giant Sequoias, got her thinking about the world of marketing in a new way, “I’m saying that the mighty sequoia can teach us something about differentiating ourselves in the marketplace. If you’re unique, unlike other trees if you will, you’ll virtually eliminate the competition that competes for the same dollars and attention that you do.”

And conservation biologist, Dr. Reese Halter, writes about the giant trees on his Dr.Reese Blog, “Of 80,000 different kinds of trees on our planet there can only be one king of the race. The Sequoias of the Sierra Nevada’s hold that undisputed title. It is fitting that the largest trees in the world – Sequoias or as they are affectionately called  “Big Trees” – live on the spectacular snowy mountains or backbone of California. On the west side at the elevation of between 6,400 and 7,200 feet above sea level 18 feet of snow fall each year. And incidentally, it’s this snow which sustains most of our 38 million inhabitants, millions of tourists each year and the eighth mightiest economy on the globe.”

The twitter connections…

@SequoiaNatPark tweeting for the village

@SequoiaKingsNPS official twitter site for Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks

@zhakie Sierra Nevada Ramblings

@_DrReese Dr.Reese’s Blog

@3rnews local newspaper, The Kaweah Commonwealth

@art_talk voice for the Three Rivers Artists’ Studio Tour

See you on the trails or the satellite waves….. Elsah (a resident of the village of Three Rivers, California, since 1977, who first came here as a child in the 1950’s)

PS……..Do you have a story about living, long-term or short-term, in Three Rivers?