The Moon will be full today, April 23, 2024, in 2 hours (7:49 PM) and sunset in Paradelle will be at 7:45 PM (EDT). The Moon rises in the east and sets in the west, like the sun, but the exact time changes throughout the month. The Moon may also rise in the east-northeast or east-southeast, depending on the phase of the moon and the time of year. So tonight, I can watch the sun setting in the west and the Moon rising in the east at the same time.
Commonly called the Pink Moon, it will be visibly “full” for about three days, from yesterday to Thursday morning. If you watch it rising, don’t expect it to appear pinkish in color. Keep in mind that when Full Moons were named by the ancients and also by Native Americans and colonists the name referred to the lunar month rather than one day.
Pink phlox with Mt. Fuji in the background
April’s full Moon often corresponds with the early springtime pink blooms. One perennial wildflower native to eastern North America in particular, Phlox subulata, commonly called creeping phlox or moss phlox or moss pink, at one time covered entire hillsides or fields creating a bed of pink under the Moon.
We had lots of it growing on the slope of our “rock garden” when I was a child. My mother called them “mountain pinks.” They have fragrant flowers in the spring but they can be white, pink, lavender, or hot pink. The flowers cover the entire plant when in full bloom, creating a carpet of color. pink or white. The plant has dark green leaves that can remain partially evergreen throughout winter.
The names for these lunar months used by Native American tribes tend to be more interesting to me than the common ones. For April, we could use the Breaking Ice Moon (Algonquin) and Moon When the Streams Are Again Navigable (Dakota). If you are far North, they may be applicable. In Paradelle, ice melted last month. Budding Moon (Tlingit) and Moon of the Red Grass Appearing (Oglala) are two name that reference plants that are appearing, budding or blooming.
For some tribes, it is the appearance or reappearance of certain animals that the Full Moon became associated with, such as Moon When the Ducks Come Back (Lakota), Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs (Dakota), and Frog Moon (Cree).
The name Sucker Moon (Anishinaabe) is an odd one because of our modern associations for that word, but it refers to sucker fish, which return to streams or lake shallows to spawn. Sucker fish are freshwater fish that belong to the family Catostomidae, and there are about 80 species of sucker fish. They are closely related to minnows and carp, and are bottom-feeders with ventral (downturned) mouths and large lips that help them suck up food from the stream bed.
Northern hogsucker Hypentelium nigricans
As food, they are an excellent source of protein and healthy omega-3 fatty acids, which help keep the heart healthy and are good for brain development. Unfortunately, they are also known as garbage fish, as they are thought to be undesirable and harmful. However, they are – like other bottom feeder, such as catfish – janitors of the river, keeping the system clean by eating from the riverbed aquatic insect larvae, waterfleas, sideswimmers, snails, clams, algae, other plant matter, decaying matter, and fish eggs.
The Anishinaabe is a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples present in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States. According to Anishinaabe legend, this Full Moon or an earlier Full Moon is when this fish comes back from the spirit world to purify bodies of water and the creatures living in them. The sucker fish are honored for their sacrifice in order to to feed the Anishinaabe peoples, traditionally helping them to survive the lean winter.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost was a poem I knew from high school, but it made a bigger impression on me in the years that I taught middle school students the novel The Outsiders. One character uses the line “Stay gold” as advice to his friend. His interpretation of Frost’s poem seems contrary to Frost’s intent, but people are not like things in nature that are often controlled by the seasons. We can stay gold.
The autumn equinox of 2023 is today, September 23. The autumnal equinox is one of two moments in the year when the Sun is exactly above the Equator and day and night are of equal length. For the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox falls about September 22 or 23, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox occurs on March 20 or 21.
Following the astronomical definition of the seasons, the autumnal equinox also marks the beginning of autumn, which lasts until the winter solstice.
A friend, knowing that I write here about the Full Moons, equinoxes, solstice, and seasons, asked me if Native American tribes had names for the seasons as they did for the Full Moons. I had to admit that I did not know. And so I did some research.
Native and indigenous people in all ancient cultures around the planet were keen observers of the changes in the natural world around them and in the movement of the Sun, stars, and Moon. Without telescopes and mathematical calculations (and in many cases without a written calendar as we know them), they still tracked the passage of seasons based on what was happening around them rather than a calendar. It makes sense. How autumnal will it seem in your little Paradelle on the 23rd? It may well feel like summer.
The Abenaki are a Native American tribe and First Nation. They are one of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of northeastern North America. The Abenaki originate in Quebec and the Maritimes of Canada and in the New England region of the United States. In their calendar, autumn is called tagwogo.
The Powhatan refers to any of the Indigenous Algonquian people that are traditionally from eastern Virginia. It is estimated that there were about 14,000–21,000 Powhatan people in eastern Virginia, when the English colonized Jamestown in 1607. For the Powhatans there were five seasons. Early and mid-spring (cattapeuk); late in the spring until mid-summer (cohattayough); late summer (nepinough) was harvest time, and the autumn and early winter is called taquitock which was a time for feasts, religious rituals and time for communal hunts. The late winter and early spring is known as popanow.
The Cochimi had 6 seasons that pair with two of our months. Late summer is amadeapee which is approximately our September and October.
The Cree divided the year into 8 seasons. Late summer is megwan; early fall is tekwagun; late fall is migiskau.
I was on one of my walks on the local Lenape Trail. It’s not hardcore hiking. Chunks of it don’t even run through woods as you would expect of a trail. I was looking at a map of the trail and realized that many parts of my own childhood and the childhood days of my sons are on that trail.
The trail crosses Essex County, N.J., one of the most congested counties in the United States. It connects Newark, New Jersey with Roseland, New Jersey. This trail forms a segment of the Liberty-Water Gap Trail and incorporates the West Essex Trail (the Lenape Trail’s only rail-to-trail section) and it connects with Morris County\’s Patriots Path trail. It was only established in 1982, though some of the trails it followed have been used for a long time. It is the fifth-longest trail in the state behind the Delaware and Raritan Canal Trail, the Appalachian Trail, the completed section of the Highlands Trail in NJ, and the Batona Trail.
It’s a suburban/urban trail and it traverses Newark (Jersey doesn’t get more urban) and its suburbs, through parks as well as the Watchung Mountains and Passaic Meadows.
I walked the mostly urban street parts of the trail when I worked at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. I have walked all of its 34 miles piece-by-piece. The eastern terminus is in Newark’s Ironbound district. A nice urban start with plenty of good places to eat.
It is all street walking through downtown Newark and through the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Branch Brook Park. That park is home to the city’s Cherry Blossom Festival with 3,500 cherry trees (more that D.C.) and the most diverse cherry blossom display in the country.
Do you want old trails? The Passaic Meadows was the former basin of Glacial Lake Passaic. We are talking dinosaurs and the earliest natives. Glacial Lake Passaic was a prehistoric proglacial lake at the end of the last ice age approximately 13,000 years ago.
I read about it when I was a kid. I had found some fossils and wanted to be a paleontologist. The lake was formed from waters released by the melting of the retreating Wisconsin Glacier that had pushed large quantities of earth and rock ahead of its advance, blocking previous natural drainage.
The drainage basin is what we call today the Passaic Meadows and the part near the walking trail is the Hatfield Swamp. The lake was formed on the western side of the Watchung Mountains by a blockage of the Passaic River.
Eventually, the river formed its present course, a circuitous detour around the north end of the Watchung range through present-day Paterson. The lake found a new outflow to the ocean via the Great Notch in Little Falls, near Totowa and Montclair. When the glacier retreated farther to the north, the outflow of the lake drained toward the north and formed the gorge of the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, which was just a short walk from my office at Passaic County Community College when I ran the writing program there.
What is left of Glacial Lake Passaic is several swamps in northern New Jersey, particularly, the Great Swamp.
Back on the trail. Leaving Newark, it goes west through Belleville, Nutley, Bloomfield, Montclair, and into my town, Cedar Grove. That part of the trail I have covered many times. It’s my favorite section. Mills Reservation is a county park, 157.15 acres that bridges Cedar Grove and Montclair. I walked the woods many times with my sons when they were young Indians, soldiers, hunters, wolves, and Cub Scouts. The reservation has no development other than a small parking area and the trails.
The Reservation is a minimalist design by the Olmsteds in their last association with Essex County. The three Ronkowitz boys made maps of the area, and brought our lunch packs, hiking staffs, compasses, cowboy hats, Indian weapons, and lots of energy and imagination into those woods.
One of the trails runs the edge of a cliff that overlooks the New York City skyline to the east. It was a part that my sons loved to walk. It was a part that terrified me when they were young – the cliff, the edge – stay close.
On a clear day, you can see to the southeast the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the New York City skyline including the Statue of Liberty. To the northeast is the Palisades and to the northwest, peaks from the Ramapo Mountains can be glimpsed and the beginning of the Second Watchung Mountain.
The outcrop at Quarry Point was the site of a World War Two anti-aircraft radar relay emplacement. All that remains is a concrete circle which was our resting place and picnic table. My younger son, Drew, planted a circle of trees near there so that the forest spirits would have a place for their ceremonies.
Directly across from that point, you can see the Montclair Hawk Lookout. Atop a 500-foot basalt ledge, it’s a stone-filled platform that is the site of the New Jersey Audubon Society where birders gather to watch the migration mixture of both coastal and ridge flights in spring and autumn.
After Mills Reservation, the yellow blazes lead you to a place where it combines with the West Essex Trail on the former Caldwell Branch of the Erie Railroad. You enter Verona on the old Erie Railroad line, hit some pavement, and go into Verona Park.
Verona Park was the fishing hole for my sons. Sunfish, stocked trout, catfish, and even once a big carp that someone must have released from a backyard pond or tank. I spent many happy hours in that park with my boys.
Then, the trail moves into Eagle Rock Reservation passing the Eagle Rock lookout on the ridge of the First Watchung Mountain (AKA Orange Mountain). From that view of the New York Skyline, many people, myself included, watched the Twin Towers fall on September 11, 2001. There is a memorial there now.
The trail goes under Interstate Highway 280 and follows power lines over the Second Watchung Mountain (AKA Preakness Mountain).
I read that a side trail is planned that would lead to South Mountain Reservation. That sanctuary between Orange Mountain and Preakness Mountain was where this urban kid tried out his Huck Finn fantasies.
South Mountain Reservation was my childhood forest. It is much bigger than Mills Reservation. I took my sons there too, but it wasn’t around the corner, so it wasn’t a big part of their childhood. It covers 2,047.14 acres between the first and second ridges of the Watchung Mountains.
In 1896, John Durand described the mountain that includes South Mountain Reservation as “a wilderness, as it probably existed at the time of Hendrick Hudson, a primitive forest abounding with deer and other wild animals, and traversed by streams alive with trout. Game was plentiful – partridges, quail, woodcock, rabbits, squirrels of every species, raccoons and foxes; while occasionally a hungry bear that had trespassed on the farmyards in the vicinity would be tracked to its den and shot.”
In 1680, wolves, bears and cougars were observed in the area, and there was a bounty on them. As a kid, I saw them all. Well, I imagined I saw them all. I did see deer, foxes and once I saw a porcupine. Sometimes these days a black bear is spotted.
I had my favorite places. Hemlock Falls and the smaller cascade Blackrock Falls were always stops when we were hiking or biking. At the far south end of the reservation, we used to go fishing at Diamond Mill Pond. There were some bass there and the state would put trout in, but usually we were catching and releasing sunfish.
Another view of New York City is there from a a ridge called Washington Rock. A plaque there sent me to a history book as a kid. I had to check the facts again now. new Jersey really was the “Crossroads of the Revolution.”
It was from this outlook that, on June 23, 1780, Essex County and Newark Militia were first warned that the British had launched an attack westward toward “the Gap” (now call Hobart Gap), a natural pathway to Washington’s troops encamped at Morris Town. In a pincer movement designed to gain access to the Gap, Hessian troops fought bitterly along Vaux Hall Road, with the British advancing along Galloping Hill Road, until they were repelled, the Hessians at the base of the mountain and the British in Millville (now Millburn). Washington Rock served again as a lookout for the Army when reactivated during the War of 1812.
The Lenape Trail also goes through Becker Park and a blue side trail goes to to the Walter Kidde Dinosaur Park. This park has thousands of dinosaur tracks, including some of the smallest ones ever found.
Then the Lenape Trail continues west across the Morristown and Erie Railway tracks, passes under I-280, and continues along Hatfield Swamp and the Essex County Environmental Center before ending at the Patriots’ Path.
So what is missing from this tale? The Lenape. Nowhere in any of the pages that I read online was there any mention of the Lenape Indians whose name is on the trail. Does the trail follow some of their original paths?
Lenape camp
The Lenape (AKA Lenni Lenape, who were later named Delaware Indians by Europeans) were the natives who lived in what is now New Jersey and along the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, the northern shore of Delaware, and the lower Hudson Valley and New York Harbor in New York when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Their Algonquian language is known as either Lenape or “Delaware.” Among other Algonquian peoples, the Lenape were considered the “grandfathers” from whom all the other Algonquian peoples originated. Consequently, in inter-tribal councils, the Lenape were given the respect one would give to elders.
The Treaty of Easton, signed between the Lenape and the English in 1758, moved them west from NY and NJ and into Pennsylvania, then later Ohio and beyond. Unfortunately, for the Lenape, they were the first Indian tribe ever to enter into a treaty with the United States government with the Treaty of Fort Pitt signed during the American Revolutionary War. The Lenape actually supplied the Continental Army with warriors and scouts in exchange for food supplies.
“When the white man arrived, the Lenape had developed an extensive system of trails through the wilderness. These trails were originally 18 inches wide and could only accommodate persons walking in single file. Warriors, messengers, hunters, diplomats, and visiting families apparently used separate paths. These Indian paths became bridle trails, wagon roads and twentieth-century highways. http://www.newhopepa.com/delawareriver/Lenape2.htm
The Lenni-Lenape of New Jersey were part of the Algonquin nation and some of the other tribes scorned them for their peaceful ways (The Iroquois called them “The Old Women.”) and they were sometimes intermediaries in resolving problems within the nation. The Lenni-Lenape were organized into three subtribes. In the North, were the Minsi, “the people of the stony country.” In the Central area, were the Unami, “the people down the river,” and in the South, the Unilachtigo, “the people who lived near the ocean.” [http://www.usgennet.org/usa/nj/state/Lenape.htm]
There is still a group of the Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation (AKA Ramapo Mountain Indians) numbering about 5,000 who live around the Ramapo Mountains of northern New Jersey and southern New York.
The Lenape Trail in New Jersey was not designed to follow specific Lenape trails, but it does pass through land that was historically theirs. Their trails were used for everyday travel, trade, and seasonal migration. Their trails became the foundation for some of the earliest roads in New Jersey.
The 75-mile Lenape Great Navesink to Minisink Trail was the longest Lenape Trail in New Jersey and is recorded as having groups as large as 700 people traveling together in transit. The trail connected the Lenape communities living along the Navesink River area of Sandy Hook on the Jersey shore to the Lenape Minsi Council Fire at Minisink Island in today’s Delaware Water Gap across the river from Pennsylvania.
Old York Road in Hunterdon County was a Lenape Indian trail. It became known as the King’s Highway in 1764 and was a main stage route between Philadelphia and New York.
Walkabout refers to a rite of passage where male Australian Aborigines undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months. It’s a vision quest taken to extremes.
My introduction to it was through a fill called Walkabout by Nicolas Roeg. I saw it the year I started college and it really intrigued me.
It follows the journey of a sister and brother who are abandoned in the Australian outback and their meeting with an Aborigine boy who is on his walkabout. Together they journey innocence into experience in the wild.
The film has a cult status these days, but back in the early 1970s very few people I knew had ever heard of it. Of course, I was not alone in having a crush on the unnamed girl in the film played by Jenny Agutter.
The film was unconventional and had almost none of the “plot” that we expect in a film. Years later, I saw a “director’s cut” but by then I had forgotten the details from my original viewing. (A benefit of the aging brain and memory is that you can re-experience things you loved as if they were new again.) The scenes of frontal nudity and realistic, survival hunting scenes seemed perfect in context, but unusual at the time.
So, that film led me to read the original book and several other non-fiction books about the walkabout experience. I even tried once to teach the book to middle school students, but they just didn’t get it.
I loved the idea that the seeker followed “songlines” that their ancestors took. These songlines (or dreaming tracks) of the Indigenous Australians are an ancient cultural concept and motif perpetuated through oral lore and singing and other storytelling dances and paintings.
The songlines are an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and mechanisms for navigation. They remind me of the songs of whales. I can’t explain how they work any more than I can explain the whale songs or how migrating birds find their way. Though I have read about all of these things, I don’t think I really want to know (at a scientific level) how it works.
Each song has a particular direction or line to follow and walking the wrong way may even be sacrilegious. You don’t go up one side of a sacred hill when that is the side to come down. That would send you in the wrong direction both literally (on a map) and figuratively (in your life).
What is it about being alone in the wilderness that tunes (or, more likely, re-tunes) our awareness of the natural elements and our connection to them, and even to some creational source? Though I and my ancestors are a long way from that natural life, something remains inside us.
Like the vision quest, the walkabout is an initiation into the teachings and mysteries of the self and the universe. The seeker both finds truths and has truth revealed.
While the walkabout may have Aboriginal roots in Australia, and the vision quest is associated with Native American traditions, the journey is not unique to only those locations. That is why that film eventually led me to read about the archetypical “hero’s journey” and the search for the Holy Grail.
I wish I had a true vision quest or walkabout tale to tell you. I still hope that someday I will.
I have taken two much smaller journeys. On one full moon weekend journey, with some guidance from someone who knew more about it than I did, I sought my “guardian animal” in a vision or dream.
I wish I could say it was a wolf that I found because I have always felt an affinity to them, but it was a rabbit. (Of course, I was in New Jersey at the time, so a coyote would have been about as close as I was to come to a wolf – and we know the coyote is the trickster.)
I have also felt some kind of connection to rabbits since childhood. The rabbit in my vision was quite real and I felt led me. I say that because I followed it and it never ran away but would stop, look back at me, wait, and then continue. I followed it for what seemed like a long time, and then, while I was looking at it, it disappeared.
That’s how I would describe it. Disappeared.
We were at the top of a rocky outcrop. There was a small stream ahead of us and down the rocks. I did not see a life direction or message in where I had been taken that day. But I felt that I was at a place where I had a good, clear view. I did not know exactly where I was, but I was not lost. I could find my way back to where I had been, but I didn’t see where I needed to go next.
In the traditional Lakota culture, the Hanblecheyapi (vision quest) means “crying for a vision.” I am still looking.
Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma who holds up the world.
I think I first saw the expression “Turtles all the way down,” when I read Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. He recounted it as a conversation between a Western traveler and an Oriental philosopher.
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the Sun and how the Sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
If you search a bit online, you’ll also find this called “The Infinite Turtle Theory” and find that it has found its way into a good number of cultural works. I myself have pinned the saying to several web pages I have online.
Although Hawking relates the anecdote more to point out something about ridiculous theories, others actually use it as a way to discuss an infinite regression belief about the origin and nature of the universe.
When I encountered it, I immediately thought of it as a variation of ancient beliefs that our world moves through the universe on the back of an animal. In many Native American creation myths, it is a turtle that holds up the world which is called “Turtle Island.”
I also found that it is similar to some Indian classical texts, including the myth that the tortoise Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma who holds up the world.
The reference to Bertrand Russell may be from a 1927 lecture he gave titled “Why I Am Not a Christian” during which he said:
“If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”
But you could go back to 1690 in John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” where he refers to an Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise “but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied — something, he knew not what.”
A more modern allusion to it supposedly came from William James (father of American psychology) who supposedly had a conversation with an old lady who told him the Earth rested on the back of a huge turtle.
“But, my dear lady”, James asked, “what holds up the turtle?” “Ah”, she said, “that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.” “But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?” “It’s no use, Professor”, said the lady, avoiding a logical trap. “It’s turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way!”
Ah yes, we will never get to the bottom of some things.
Infinite regressions. What existed before the universe existed? If God created the universe, what created God?
As the year 1890 was ending, a massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota occurred. It happened despite a treaty signed two decades before in which the United States government guaranteed local tribes rights to their sacred land around the Black Hills. In the 1870s, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, so the whites wanted the land again and the treaty was broken.
I was assigned to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for a college history course and the book revealed to me my ignorance of American Indian history. What a sad and terrible history it is.
People from the Sioux tribe were forced onto a reservation, with a promise of more food and supplies, which never came. Then in 1889, a native prophet named Wovoka from the Paiute tribe in Nevada had a vision of a ceremony that would renew the earth, return the buffalo, and cause the white men to leave and return the land that belonged to the Indians. This ceremony was called the Ghost Dance. People traveled across the plains to hear Wovoka speak, including emissaries from the Sioux tribe, and they brought back his teachings.
Ghost Dance by Frederic Remington Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Public domain
The Ghost Dance, performed in special brightly colored shirts, spread through the villages on the Sioux reservation, and it scared the white Indian agents. They considered the ceremony a battle cry, dangerous and antagonistic. One of the agents wired Washington to say that he was afraid and wanted to arrest the leaders.
He was given permission to arrest Chief Sitting Bull, who was killed in the attempt. The next on the wanted list was Sitting Bull’s half-brother, Chief Big Foot. Some members of Sitting Bull’s tribe went to warn Big Foot, and when he found out what had happened, he decided to lead them along with the rest of his people to Pine Ridge Reservation for protection.
It was winter, 40 degrees below zero, and he contracted pneumonia on the way. Big Foot and the group were flying a white flag, and he was a peaceful man. He was one of the leaders who had actually renounced the Ghost Dance but the Army didn’t make distinctions. They intercepted Big Foot’s band and ordered them into the camp on the banks of the Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot went peacefully.
The next morning federal soldiers began confiscating their weapons, and a scuffle broke out between a soldier and an Indian. The federal soldiers opened fire, killing almost 300 men, women, and children, including Big Foot.
Even though it was a very one-sided “battle”, the massacre at Wounded Knee is considered the end of the Indian Wars. That blanket term refers to the fighting between the Native Americans and the federal government which lasted 350 years.
I wrote earlier about one of the men wounded but not killed during the massacre. That was the medicine man, Black Elk. His book Black Elk Speaks was another book I read in college after finishing my assigned reading. Both books were revelatory both in the history and my own spirituality and in forming a philosophy for my own life’s path.
Black Elk said about the massacre: “I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
From my own high hill of old age, I also see dreams that died there, and in too many other places around the Earth.
by 
. I saw it the year I started college and it really intrigued me.
and several other non-fiction books about the walkabout experience. I even tried once to teach the book to middle school students, but they just didn’t get it.
. He recounted it as a conversation between a Western traveler and an Oriental philosopher.
which is on a nearby shelf (I have both the nicely 
, and the 
which I found easier to understand).
Weekends in Paradelle 