Swift Creek Nature Preserve (and Crowder Park)

Yesterday (17 June) I developed terrible cabin fever. I'd spent all day at the apartment waiting for a phone call that never came. Even two glasses of wine (Hinnant Family Vineyards' Norton 2008) couldn't help. I decided I needed to get out of the house, and was just about to leave for Eno River State Park when apartment maintenance showed up to fix the fridge (water has been dripping from the freezer into the fridge since before I moved in). I was the only one home so I had to stay; twenty minutes later it became apparent we needed an entirely "new" fridge. (You must use air quotes when describing the fridge. It is not the same fridge we had before, but it is by no means new. However, it works, which is all that matters.) Thank goodness my roommates finally came home (they were at, like, class or something. Productive people make me feel bad), but by the time I was able to go for my hike, it did not make sense to drive all the way to Eno River any more.

Instead, I discovered the Triangle Land Conservancy, and their Swift Creek Bluffs Preserve. Swift Creek Bluffs is in Cary off Holly Springs Rd, a short jaunt from Raleigh. But you'd never know it was there; it's not advertised, there's very little signage, and your GPS will not lead you to the parking lot (don't turn on Birkhead, the parking area is actually next to the pumping station just before Birkhead). But the difficulty of getting there means you'll have the place mostly to yourself, and that's often why we wander off into the woods anyway. Right?

The first thing you see starting on the trail out of the parking lot is this seriously messed up pine tree. I have no idea what caused that; the scars go most of the way up the trunk. This is maybe 20 feet from your car. By this point if you haven't already found and started using a spider stick you need to do so. Seriously. Remember how I said you'd be the only one there? Yeah, possibly the only one in several days. You want a spider stick.

Another 20 feet along the trail and you come to the first junction... and just down the junction you see this. The rest of this tree is scattered around the grounds. Several others are downed across the trail. The trail is actually closed here and you really should not cross the "closed" sign. Really. Don't do it.

Okay, fine, so you're going to go where you shouldn't, huh? You just have to follow every single trail in the park? Who does that? I mean, apart from me. First, let me suggest to you that Swift Creek Bluffs won't be in such disarray for all that long; I'm sure they have a work day planned, and I've emailed Triangle Land to ask when that might be so I can go help out. Believe me, the lower part of the trail (through the "Chestnut Oak Swamp") is really in bad shape. It's possible that Tropical Storm Andrea did this much damage, but that seems unlikely; the size and number of trees that are downed throughout the preserve makes me guess that after Andrea's rain, one of the storms later in the week probably produced a microburst or mini tornado. You've got to go to really get an idea of the amount of damage. And if that's not enough to dissuade you from crossing the Do Not Cross barriers, examine this downed tree. That's a maple tree. But that maple tree had a very healthy poison ivy plant climbing up it, and all those leaves you see are ivy, not maple. You cannot climb over this tree. You cannot walk around it. You cannot avoid it in any way. So when you come across this tree you will get poison ivy oil on you. (Immunity to urushiol is my superpower, so I was okay.)

Along the closed trails I did come across this wonderful hickory. Hickories are even harder to differentiate than oaks are; they all look the same for like the first 100 years, and they grow so slowly and live so long. And their wood makes such wonderful cabinets. Anyway, this here is a shagbark hickory, and for the first time in my life I have seen why, in person.

The lower part of the trail, which is a nice hike (the parts of it that are not blocked by downed trees), runs alongside Swift Creek. There is a large population of these trees along the creek. I have no idea what these are. I swear they look like magnolias of some kind, but none of them have any sort of flower or seed that I could see. They're vaguely tropical-looking. I like them but they frustrate me.

Whatever these trees are, the most common tree in the entire park is the stately American Beech. This is very much a beech forest with other trees; there are easily more beeches in the Swift Creek Preserve than any other single tree. But that's not the whole story. The preserve is called Swift Creek Bluffs. So far we've only walked along the creek.

Frequent readers (I know there are none of those, but I have hopes that will change) will note that Swift Creek is the creek that runs through Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve also in Cary. Indeed, if you look on a map you'll note Hemlock Bluffs and Swift Creek are practically next to one another. And the key feature of Swift Creek Bluffs is indeed a high bluff, not unlike the bluffs at Hemlock Bluffs. I wondered if perhaps there'd be a hemlock or two hanging out up there.

There's a long stairway up to the top of the bluff, and then the trail wends along the top for a ways. But it isn't a loop. If you want to make it into a loop you have to take a little side trip onto the Birkhaven greenway trail, which takes you down to a golf course before you can re-enter the preserve. But that's cool. I stumbled around on the bluff for a while and then came back down the stairs and went through a swamp again for a bit and went back to the car.

Swift Creek Bluffs has some nice trails and is certainly an asset to the area, but until the park's been cleaned up and the rest of the trails are open you should probably visit another park instead. If and when you do decide to hike Swift Creek Bluffs, if it's summertime, don't forget the bug spray and the spider stick.

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I wasn't quite ready to go back to the apartment after hiking Swift Creek Bluffs. So I turned the car south to Ten-Ten Rd. and stopped at Crowder District Park, a Wake County park in Apex. It's a nice little park but not exactly a big place for hiking. You can come here and take a nice walk on paved trails. The boardwalk across the pond is nice. In the evening, the turtles congregate, looking for handouts. It's a little weird, actually; there are dozens of them and they congregate like ducks expecting you to throw them crusts of bread. Like slow, partially submerged ducks.

Occoneechee Mountain

I hiked Occoneechee Mountain State Preserve on a Sunday afternoon in June. The park is sandwiched in between I-85 and the Eno River and encompasses two high hills rising out of the Atlantic coastal plain, the namesake “mountain” and the smaller Brown Elfin Knob right next door. Really they're just big hills; actually, it's two peaks on one big hill. But we'll let it be a mountain if that's what it wants to be.

This is a seldom-visited park. You will need to apply bug spray before you leave the parking area. Lots of bug spray. If you’re troubled by the occasional spiderweb running across the trail, this probably isn’t your park. That said, it’s a most fascinating hike, especially if you’re interested in seeing several different forest types in a short hike. I did not complete the entire trail network but hiked about 2 ¾ miles, during the course of which I passed through four distinct lowland forests and some upland areas. The actual summit of Occoneechee is owned by Orange County, not by the state park system, but a trail will take you there. I didn’t visit it, although at the time I thought I had. I started out heading left from the parking lot. This means that for the first part of the hike I paralleled the interstate, and although the forest is pretty and reasonably peaceful the traffic noise is actually pretty loud. We forget sometimes that our blueberries are but domesticated forms of plants that still grow wild in this area; the understory in this part of the park has at least three species of blueberries and huckleberries (Vaccinium spp.), in some places entirely covering the ground. The smaller huckleberry species in particular are more common farther west, but there were many lowbush blueberries as well. All were still green; some still had flowers. This would be a fun park to walk through in July when the berries are ripe, assuming the birds don’t eat all of them first. The trail is clear but relatively narrow and has plenty of roots and other trip hazards, and thanks to numerous climbs and descents this would not be a very good park for any but experienced trail runners. That said, experienced trail runners would enjoy what is probably the most challenging trail in the Triangle. As the trail turns north away from the interstate the vaccinium species thin out and are replaced by other understory plants including ferns and a large population of witch-hazel. You’ll notice huge chunks of quartz sticking out of the ground every now and then. On the north side of the mountain you’ll parallel the Eno River for a ways, and begin to see Mountain Laurel and some native azaleas. There’s a short spur trail to a very nice swimming hole, though it is apparently on private property. (Still, there were several people swimming and I don’t get the impression the private owners are terribly upset about it.) Past this short spur, both sides of the trail host quite the healthy population of poison ivy. Watch for it if you’re susceptible. When the trail turns away from the river it ascends some stairs and a spur leads off to the “Occoneechee Quarry.” I took the spur. The quarry turns out to be a huge face of quartz that’s been just torn to bits; unmolested quartz rocks like this are found throughout the piedmont with names like “Shining Rock” or “Looking Glass Mountain” because the smooth face of the rock reflects the sun in early morning when damp with dew. At one time, Occoneechee Mountain looked like that. No more. You are specifically told not to engage in any rock climbing or rappelling activities on this degraded rock face, which is good advice because the rock is just broken all to hell and very friable, so put too much weight on any part of it and it would likely just break off and send you tumbling down the mountain into the river (this actually sounds like fun, until you consider that along the way you'd tumble across a bunch of very pointy rocks and through a whole field of poison ivy). That said, there are a number of paths directly up the side of the mountain here that don’t require any actual climbing, so I’ll say what I did was hike very steeply uphill with some help from my hands. At the top, there’s a wooden fence to hold visitors back from the edge. I took this to be the summit but later on reviewing MapMyRun’s gps map of my hike (at the bottom of this post) it looks like this was just one face of the hill, and the actual summit trail and summit was still some ways away to the east of where I climbed. So I’ll have to visit again. Along the way to the top, I found a huckleberry bush with a few ripe fruits. They were delicious. A short trail connects what I thought was the summit trail to the eastern edge of the park loop trail, along the top of Brown Elfin Knob. This trail goes through a large population of mountain laurel mixed with rhododendron and another large population of vaccinium bushes, mainly huckleberries this time. It is an easy trail and shorter than I expected. The summit is insignificant; time was when this small hill would have been topped with an observation tower but insurance costs have eliminated most such towers from American public lands. It's less a brown elfin knob than a brown elfin gentle-rise-in-the-landscape. The last portion of the loop trail runs beside two fish ponds and features more typical lowland species including canebrake and boxelder, which weren't anywhere else in the park including along the river. If you forgot the bug spray back when you got out of the car at the start of the hike, this part is really going to be unpleasant. But it's flat, so you could run. Think of the bugs as zombies. In a way, they are... This was a very enjoyable hike and particularly interesting for the large variations in forest type given the small area. I hiked 2.7 miles including my short vertical ascent, though there are at least another 2 miles of trails in the park. These trails are probably among the most strenuous in the Triangle (though very easy relative to a typical trail in the mountains). Also they have the most available forage, if for some reason you get lost and need to survive in the wilderness for a while...although you could just follow the sound of traffic and be standing next to I-85 in half an hour or less.

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I drove all the way to Hillsborough for this hike and didn't think to stop at a winery or a brewery (Mystery Brewing is there and you should totally stop in because they rock). But I have to go back to do the rest of the trails sometime, so I can make up for this tragic oversight.

Cliffs of the Neuse

First off, before we start, I'll answer the question I know you want to ask: it's pronounced [noose]. Down towards the coast the pronunciation seems to change more to [nyoose]. It is not, however, pronounced [noiss], as I suspected. It's a bad English transliteration of a native American word, not the name of some German settler. So anyway, Cliffs of the Neuse. It's a state park outside of Goldsboro, which itself is about an hour from Raleigh. Not officially part of the Triangle, but a short drive and worth visiting. But be forewarned:

The Neuse is extremely variable. Evidently even as far downstream as Goldsboro, during a drought the river becomes so minimal you can just walk right across it, but after a heavy rain it routinely floods, as it mostly flows through lowland swamps and there's nothing stopping it from just wandering across the landscape; more on that in a moment. Down at New Bern (apparently pronounced [NYOO-bern], which is just offensive. The word 'new' does not have a y.) it's more tidal and not quite so variable, at least not on the low end. And up here in Raleigh, it's dammed up at Falls Lake...which was created in the 70s to stop the river from flooding so much.

So this is mostly a lowland flatwater river, right? Sure. Except right here, at the cliffs. On the south bank (where I'm standing to take this picture) the land is a big chunk of limestone 80 or so feet high uplifted during the last Ice Age. The river's trundling along through coastal sediment for hundreds of miles and then whangs into this limestone bluff--which, it should be said, has no business being in the middle of the coastal plain--and you get these nice 90-foot cliffs.

Now if you notice this is not some tidy little blackwater river here. In fact if you look closely you'll see those willows on the left bank of the river (the bright green patch in the middle)... are all the way in the river.

See we just had this thing called Tropical Storm Andrea. It was a few days ago up in the Triangle and for the most part although the lakes are all at full pool there's not water standing everywhere. But a few days' river flow means the Neuse is probably at maximum flood stage here at the Cliffs right now. I didn't really think about that.This is the fishing area near the parking lot. Well, actually, the fishing area is under there somewhere. I'm not really sure where. But check it out: in the back, the tree closest to the river? Baldcypress. Haven't seen any up in the Triangle, which surprises me. But that will change once I get mine back from SC and put it in the ground.

Anyway. I came here for the hiking. Here's a picture of the bridge going to two of the three trails:Bear with me, this is a phonecam picture and I own the cheapest phone with the crappiest camera available on the market (actually, it's not even on the market anymore). A third of the way down at the center of that pic you see a little yellowish square? And a bit to the right of it, you can make out the right edge of a brown sign with white letters (click on the picture to blow it up). Those letters indicate the names of the trails. That's the trailhead, over there underwater somewhere. I'm standing at the edge of the water on some steps. There is, in fact, a bridge down there. Really. A whole bridge, all the way under the water.

There was a lot of water in this park. For example, here's another fishing area. Actually, the fishing area is about 100 yards away through there. But the main trail was accessible, and by going off trail for a bit and getting lost in the woods (well, not lost, but let's say I had no idea where I was. I wasn't lost, though, because I didn't care where I was) I managed to get about two miles of hiking done. There are a lot of steps on the established trails in this park.

There are also a lot of American Beautyberry bushes (Callicarpa americana) in the park. I mean, a whole lot of them. The way Mapleleaf Viburnums were absurdly common in Hemlock Bluffs is how common beautyberries are here. They're nice plants. People plant the Chinese and Japanese versions all the damn time in this country but we have a perfectly good native version with just as many flowers and just as pretty little berries (well, not in June). Some of these bushes were five and six feet tall.

However, it was hard to stop and take pictures. Maybe it's because the water level was so high, but the park and trails were swarming with ants. Not fire ants thank goodness, but I quite literally could not stop for 5 seconds to take a picture of anything without my shoes, socks, and ankles being covered with ants. All parts of all trails were like this. I don't normally mind ants because I don't usually see them in swarms, much less swarms on me, but this was pretty unpleasant.

Alas, with the water level as high as it was it was not possible to see the actual cliff face at Cliffs of Neuse. I'm not actually sure it's ever possible to do so, except from a kayak in the river. So sometime I shall have to put a kayak in this river.

Anyway. Cliffs of Neuse is a nice park; it has lots of campsites, a swimming lake (with paddleboats), and some short trails. You just might want to wait a little longer after a major storm blows through before making a visit.

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On my way home, I stopped by Hinnant Family Vineyards in Pine Level. I like pretty much every winery I've ever been to (even the ones without any actual wines I liked), so henceforth just assume that if I mention a winery here, I'm encouraging you to visit. Hinnant has mostly muscadine and fruit wines, which aren't always my thing, but they make good use of the Blanc du Bois grape and the Norton is very good (there's a bottle of it in my wine fridge right now). And the blackberry wine would be out of this world with a slice of cheesecake. $5 gets you 8 tastings (your choice out of a list of about 20) and a glass.

Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve

Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve trail map: This is a little gem in the middle of the town of Cary, off Kildaire Farm Rd. It’s a reasonably quiet part of town, mostly residential, and the trails and nature center are far enough off the road that Hemlock Bluffs genuinely feels cut off, quiet, and peaceful. It feels like nature, not a scrappy little city park.

I hiked every inch of trail, about 2.6 miles in all. The wide trail path is well maintained and laid with mulch; no roots or rocks sticking out. The main Chestnut Oak Trail is generally level with some mild climbs and descents but nothing untoward. The trail down to the Swift Creek loop is stairs, but the loop itself is flat and also well maintained. This is an excellent park for a trail run, especially for those new to trail-running. The Chestnut Oak trail covers a fairly typical coastal plain environment, with a forest of primarily chestnut oak, red maple, and beech; look for maple-leaf viburnum, a somewhat rare shrub so predominant in this park it might be the single most common understory plant. This park will be brilliant in early autumn thanks to a big population of maples; a good number of serviceberry and other small trees and shrubs should provide a decent springtime floral display though not spectacular.

Follow the main trail to the right and you’ll come to the Swift Creek ravine. The trail descends the ravine on well-made gravel-topped stairs, and two spurs from the stairs allow you to look at the truly unique aspect of this park, the Eastern Hemlocks on the south wall of the ravine. This relict population of hemlock is separated from the rest of the species’ distribution by some 150 miles. The trees survive here (some of the trees are old enough to predate European settlement in the Neuse basin) thanks to an unusual microclimate on the steep banks of Swift Creek. Because of the disjunct nature of this population they have no woolly adelgid infestation; it’s possible, sadly, that this might be the last healthy population of hemlocks in the eastern U.S. in another 20 years. The hemlocks share the streambank with a large population of galax and several other plants more commonly found in the piedmont and mountains.

The Swift Creek Loop is on lowland in the creek basin, below the ravines. This is a short, level loop through wet bottomlands. Bug spray is mandatory before attempting this trail. Throughout the park the squirrels are so fat and unmolested they don’t even run away from you when you walk directly toward them. And when they do scamper, it’s with the studied leisure of animals secure in their safety. Let them have their peace; please keep your dog on a short leash. Hemlock Bluffs preserves an interesting microbiome unique in the Triangle area. The park is very quiet and peaceful, and even on a nice Saturday afternoon was not particularly busy. It’s a real find this close to the center of town.

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The route with elevations. Note the actual elevation changes are pretty mild, despite the way the chart looks. If you wanted to do say a 5k trail run, you'd probably just want to circle the Chestnut Oak loop 3 times; the stairs down to the Swift Creek Loop (on the right in the map) could be a problem.

tumblr is getting hard to use the way I want to use it. For an idea of what I want to be doing with my blog, you could go read my Everglades post (I think it's linked over there on the sidebar). It's hard to use tumblr's interface to produce that sort of post, and that sort of post is what I want to produce. Ergo, no more tumblr for Smitty. Instead, let's try a new thing! Let's try Wordpress. You can find exciting things both old and new over at A Bad Idea Poorly Executed. Thank you for your consideration. I'm editing this post here instead of writing a new one: Ahem. Blogger, why did I ever leave you? I can directly edit code on this site, which I can't do on wordpress any easier than I could on tumblr (which is to say, not at all). Look how much prettier I can make these hiking posts, with the pictures and stuff sized and placed where I want them (close enough), and putting that trail map in is a snap whereas in Wordpress it took me 15 tries and I never got it to appear, despite explicitly following Wordpress' instructions. So... this blog will live here at this site, and that's that. Thank you for your support during this period of transition...

I Think I'm Going to Move to Tumblr

You can find me there. I've tentatively named it "A Bad Idea Poorly Executed." Or just search for, as always, thehappysmith.

Muffins!

I'm trying to get a good "tropical" muffin recipe together. I have lots of crushed pineapple and dried coconut and I finally went out and bought a one dollar beat-up muffin pan from Goodwill, and this morning I made my first attempt.

This isn't quite the right recipe. I can't put my finger on exactly what needs to be changed, but no question I need more pineapple, less coconut, and probably something other than guava juice (really? On a blog called "Gin & Guavas" I'm posting a recipe that I need to cut the guava juice out of). But they are tasty.

I use the following recipe for my dry muffin mix:
1/3 c white whole wheat flour
1/3 c teff flour
1/3 c flax meal
1/3 c + 1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Mix together and combine with 1 egg and 1/4 c applesauce, and you have a basic muffin mix. Of course I use teff and flax instead of just wheat flour because they have more fiber, more vitamins and minerals, and quite frankly more flavor. I think everyone should add flax meal to their recipes; the teff flour is harder to come by. But of course you could just use 1 cup of regular flour. And most people would probably use closer to a full cup of sugar (but I was adding pineapple, and that's plenty sweet).

What I added for the tropical part of it was:
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/3 c crushed pineapple
3 tbsp guava nectar
3 tbsp chopped coconut (rehydrated)
1 tbsp chopped rehydrated banana chips (I'd prefer a banana, but I didn't have any).
fresh grated nutmeg (maybe about 1/4 tsp?)

This made six muffins. I'm single; I don't need to be making a dozen muffins at a shot.

Next time around I think I'll try mango or maybe passionfruit juice instead of guava, and less almond extract (perhaps none at all), and a little more pineapple, and maybe one less tbsp of the coconut. Still, a good first effort.

Four Random Photographs

I haven't posted any pictures in a while. Well, I haven't done much with the blog in a while, but, more to the point, I have some pictures I took over the last couple months that I guess I intended to blog, but never did. And I also have two I took this morning.

My okra has succumbed to frost, and I don't think the tomato is long for the world (it's still ripening tomatoes, at about 1/3 normal speed, but we've had three frosts so far and it has managed to survive. I don't expect it make it to Thanksgiving but I'm also not going to complain if it does).But with the end of one season comes the start of another, and I have Brussels sprouts and arugula and fun things like that. And, this amusing little seedling. This is a red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), not a tree I even had on my list of trees to try to grow, mainly because my list is a couple years old and I don't know of any red buckeyes around here. But I collected this seed from a buckeye tree up at Biltmore, in Asheville, about six weeks ago. I brought it home. It sat on the kitchen counter for about three weeks. According to my notes the seeds need to be kept moist and planted immediately; if they dry out at all, they die. Very finicky seeds apparently.
Or not. I soaked it overnight and stuck it in a pot and figured there was no way it would grow. But here we are! I have no idea what this is going to turn into--I can't even tell if those are leaves or what. But it's sort of exciting. (The plant next to it is New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus), which has been growing for about two months. I have several of them sprouted now and I'm looking forward to actually trying the tea from them next winter.)

Back in the summer I made several ratatouilles. They were all delicious. I should post a recipe sometime. But it's a lot easier to just post this picture of the stew in the pot. So colorful. Of course summer is over; now it's gumbo season, so I'll have to blog the next time I make one of those.


I grew a lot of vegetables this summer and enjoyed them (the tomatoes and tabasco peppers were particularly great), but nothing was as exciting as this.I have three grape vines in pots here; some year soon they'll go into the ground but grape vines can live for 100 years or more so they'll be fine in pots for a few. How exciting to harvest my own grapes off my own vines... while living in an apartment. They were really good, too--although they were sold to me as "seedless," and they are anything but. But these are Concord grapes, the native Vitis labrusca, the ones Alton Brown talks about in the tv commercials for Welch's. Maybe some year the vines will be big enough to get enough grapes to try a few bottles of homemade wine. Not any time soon, though.

I've mentioned Schrodinger before. He needs a picture. Like all black cats he is very difficult to photograph. Most of my pictures of him are a black smudge with glowing green eyes. I have not yet managed to get a picture that matches up with the best picture ever taken of his mother, Batgirl, but eventually.

Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

This is the first essay-length philosophical thing I've written in four years. It took two hours to get everything right and do the cost research. It felt wonderful.

I was going to title this “What the Occupy opponents don’t get” but then I realized, heck, this is Occupy we’re talking about, and most of the protesters don’t get it, either. So instead it’s just some thoughts.

So, you’re a member of the non-struggling middle class. Perhaps you’re just an intelligent and reasonable person who knows what you want and doesn’t spend your time desperately trying to live a life well beyond your means. Lord knows that a real middle class salary can buy you a very nice life without credit, but if you’re constantly striving for more you’re going to always be unhappy and always be struggling.

Or, more likely (since there aren’t so many reasonable and intelligent people out there who live within their means), you’re actually part of the upper middle class or even the upper class but refuse to admit that to yourself or anyone else.

In either case perhaps you’re happy, satisfied, and not afraid, and you could care less about the Occupy protesters or the Occupy movement. Great! Good for you. You can stop reading now because I’m not talking to you. You don’t need a talking-to. You need to put a little money aside for a nice vacation and go pick up the kids from school.

But maybe you spend an inordinate amount of your time thinking about why the Occupy movement is wrong, why the protesters are boneheads or hypocrites or worse. Maybe you think that in reality if you just work hard and keep your expectations attainable you can live a perfectly happy life and shouldn’t be asking for handouts. Ha! You’re funny. You need to keep reading.

And maybe you think of yourself as just smarter than those idiot protesters, and you like to laugh at how they turn down job applications or refuse to offer their tents to the homeless. You, my friend, you are afraid of them. (And I haven't noticed you offering your living room to the homeless, either.) You don’t want to hear it—in fact, I just lost ALL of my readers who fit into this category because I’m not part of their preferred echo chamber—but the truth is, you are afraid of them. You are afraid because although you are comfortable now, you lack the requisite faith in yourself, your religion, or your society that, were things to change, and change meaningfully, you might not be able to make it. You are afraid that you could become one of the people Occupy is protesting for (or wants to think they’re protesting for; I suspect the majority of them are protesting to annoy Mom & Dad, who, ironically, were hippies themselves and protested mainly to annoy Mom & Dad. Who, of course, fought World War II and built the greatest nation-state the world has ever seen.)

The truth is, you’re afraid of something the protesters symbolize for you. It might be that you simply are afraid of anything that’s different; xenophobia is so third-millenium America, after all. Or it might be that, on some level, the bastards are actually right about something. But it’s too big of a problem or too difficult to really wrap your mind around and frankly life is so much easier and better if you don’t actually have to think about it. After all, the reason the echo chamber that is the modern opinionews industry (like that one? Infotainment is not the right word, since modern news doesn’t rely on information) is so successful is that frankly we all, all humans, want nothing more than to be justified, to have our feelings and opinions and attitudes reflected and justified by society (and Mommy and Daddy) to prove our own self-worth.

For people in subsistence societies this isn’t a problem—if you can help put food on the table in any way you’re justified. You’re all right. But for late modern humans in consumer cultures—and that’s about two or three of the seven billion of us—what we get from society every single day is that we aren’t good enough, that we need to buy more, have more, do more, see more or we aren’t worthy. We aren’t justified. Three generations have been raised now in this country and most of what we refer to as “The West” (Greece used to be a part of it, but not any more) under the guiding consumerist principle that your self-worth is entirely dependent upon your net worth.

(Aside: That WWII generation that was the last generation before this consumer culture spread its poison? Yeah, let’s not let them off the hook for their hand in creating said culture, okay? They were great. But when they came home they invented the American Dream, and that’s where it all started.)

If you conflate your self-worth with your net worth, some interesting things happen. First of all, you are never satisfied. Now, there’s something to be said (a lot, actually) for not being satisfied with where you are. But somehow not being satisfied with who and where you are no longer means that you need to learn more, or give more, or try to get better at your work, your hobby, or your life; it has instead come to mean that you aren’t satisfied with the income you have, the stuff you have, the material trappings of the life that you live. You strive to improve your position at work not because you want to be better for your own purposes, but because you need to get a raise to buy that cool new 3-D TV (hey, 3-D movie makers: you still haven’t improved on real life! How about just trying to write a good story for God’s sake? Damned sequel factory), the latest model-year car, and those seven dozen kitchen gadgets and new gas range from Williams-Sonoma you don’t actually know how to use. (Ever been through a model home in an upper-class development and seen the kitchen with the six-burner gas stove and commercial size fridge? Give me a damn break, more than half of the people who live in those homes don’t know how to cook anything more complex Spaghetti-o’s. But they have to have the best appliances!)

And so we come back to the anti-Occupy crowd (the ones who aren’t actually 1%-ers or investment bankers and actually have good reason to be scared). After three generations of self-worth/net-worth entanglement, these folks are, to be blunt, just scared that if society were in fact to change and we did in fact learn to separate our fiscal value from our human value, they’d have nothing to go on. They’d be unable to determine a self-worth, unable to find it, or, perhaps—and this is truly terrifying if you’re part of the crowd—that they might take a step back in relation to their fellow citizens.

This leads us, at last (hey, only two pages, that qualifies as brevity for me), to the original point, what the Occupy crowd (those who are protesting but also especially those who delight in making fun of the protesters) don’t get. We no longer live in a country where if you just work hard and do your best you’ll be rewarded and be able to afford the things you need and some of the things you want.

No, I’m not a communist. Hear me out. Now, the math for the pronouncement I’m about to make will be available after I tidy it up a bit because right now it’s scratch on paper. But let’s say we have somebody who is making minimum wage, works a 40-hour week every week without any vacation (52 weeks a year) and some occasional overtime, has an average commute and no car payment and lives in the cheapest safe apartment complex around, has a basic cell phone plan with a parasite company, eats hamburger and tuna helper and store-brand bologna sandwiches every single day except when ordering some stuff off the dollar menu at Burger King, never drinks any alcohol, doesn’t have health insurance and basically doesn’t go to the doctor, never goes out in the evenings to restaurants or clubs, and doesn’t have internet access or cable or satellite television. This person manages to spend $13,764 every year just for the bare minimums to sustain the above described existence in this country (and this is in a cheap part of the country). That’s before the poor soul has to purchase any clothing, or put any money aside for savings, or experience any sort of emergency from a car accident to an unexpected sickness to the need to replace something broken. And God forbid this person has children or other dependents. $13,764 is covering the basic needs for a safe but wholly uninteresting existence.

And how much does our safe dullard earn? Well, assuming he gets a bit of overtime here and there, we’ll give him a whopping $14,970 a year, after FICA but assuming no income taxes. So he’s got $1,206 at the end of the year he could put toward savings, pay for basic cable (which isn’t worth it; maybe he’ll get Netflix instead), or, given the way life goes, have to spend on some emergency (I had a $1400 unexpected medical bill this year. I sure as hell didn’t plan for that. That would break our poor hypothetical person).

Now, it’s all well and good for you to say, okay, but if this guy works harder, tries to better himself, earn a raise or a promotion, go to night school (which costs money he doesn’t have), get a better job, then he can rise out of that boring and meaningless existence and make something of himself. He doesn’t need the government’s (or my) help, and it’s just more evidence that everybody but me wants to get everything without working for it that anybody would complain about such a situation.

Fine. So our hypothetical man does get out of this job and makes a better life for himself. Good for him. But here is the key point: somebody else has to take his place. There will always be people who can’t make it, because there will always be a need in this country for people to do the minimum-wage scut work that the rest of us don’t want to do. Somebody is always going to have to be on the bottom of the pole. Somebody is always going to be barely getting by, if at all, and our economy demands that. You cannot take Homo economicus as an individual and say, he should get a better job, because the economy demands a H.economicus to work every necessary position, including the guy who cleans the toilets at Wal-Mart, and the guy who picks the tomatoes in Florida. Those guys cannot afford to live a decent life in America, and yet those of us who live better do so on the backs of those people. We aren’t standing on the shoulders of giants; we’re resting on the backs of midgets. And the last thing anybody wants is for the midgets to stand up and throw us off. That’s why Occupy is threatening, and why you feel a need to make fun of it. You rely on poor people to live even a moderately comfortable existence.

And here’s the kicker. If we decide, okay, those folks need to make $10 an hour. Everybody should earn a minimum wage that allows them to live decently, not just barely scrape by. Sounds good. I’m pretty sure I’m hearing that from Occupy types, some of them (some of them are just waiting for law and order to break down so they can get to looting, but that’s a tiny minority). So then what happens? Well, Wal-Mart’s salary expenditures go up by 50%, so their prices go up by a similar margin. Those of us who were previously comfortable now find that everything is more expensive, and we’re a lot less comfortable. Those tomato-pickers in Florida, the illegal immigrants you hate so much? Let’s let them earn a living wage, too, or, if you don’t like that, let’s throw them all out and hire unemployed Americans at the same living wage attested before; people would pick tomatoes for $10 an hour. But now your tomatoes cost $8.99 a pound (and that's for the nasty flavorless hothouse tomatoes bequeathed to us by Big Agriculture). A bag of lettuce costs $10. And because corn is doubling in price a whole roasting chicken now costs $3.99 a pound instead of 89 cents. But everybody’s earning a living wage! Except that wage has to keep rising because the cost of business keeps rising.

Know what doesn’t change in this scenario? How much money the 1% make. How much profit the corporations make. See, Wal-Mart will happily pay a higher wage, and raise their prices, whatever it takes to keep the profit margins where they are now so none of the high-rollers running the show have to take a pay cut and the stock price doesn’t fall. The richest, the ones with the power to change things, what the fuck possible reason do any of them have to change anything? The only way to create real change, change that doesn’t result in the endless inflationary cycle described above, is to fundamentally reevaluate how we value the wealthiest and most powerful people. And that is never going to happen.

That’s what Occupy should be protesting. And you can go home and listen to your echo chambers and make fun of the protesters, but bear in mind the echo chamber is owned by part of that 1%. You’re hearing what you want to hear because you’ve been told it’s what you want to hear by wealthy and powerful people who want you to think that way. As long as we continue to be lined up on opposing sides, we 99%, the 1% don’t have to worry. We’ll fight each other tooth and nail and let them keep the spoils.

H.L. Mencken once said that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” I might add that this is also the whole aim of modern capitalism. Capitalism is not bad (it's the best thing we've got, although no society has yet actually tried distributivism and nobody these days has even heard of the philosophy). The way capitalism is practiced in 2011, on the other hand, is not good. The protesters have a point. Their opponents have a point, too. But we’re all missing the bigger picture, and that’s exactly the way the power wants it to be.