Author Archives:
Prologue
It’s been a quarter century since the newspapers and talking heads of Central California reported a story about a backcountry pyromaniac as a montage of official reports, sound bites, and rumors. Insult though it may have been to the actual people involved in those troubling events, perhaps it was well enough and best left alone. [...]
The Cut-Off
There were no trails across the Great Western Divide until the early Twentieth Century. Though some travelers crossed the Divide, most took the Hockett Trail around it. Parties would often take this circuitous route to reach destinations that are now accessed in a fraction of the distance, thanks to the high-tech expressways—er, trails—of the Twentieth [...]
Priest Dogs of Iran
This is a continuation of a thread on dogs. Zoroastrian funerary rituals appear to indicate that ancient Iranians believed that dogs had a unique power to discern whether the life had departed from a body. What follows next is known as the dog-sight (sagdid) ceremony. A dog, generally a “four-eyed” dog (a dog with two [...]
Kissing the Killer
Throughout the lowlands singers sing of your deep, feminine soul; How reclining, you roll down your bed amidst your veils and embankments; They marvel at your fluent, accommodating ways, how you slip through the world, flowing around every obstacle, rounding every edge, and polishing every turn. You compel us, it is true, down to where [...]
Hockett Trail Notes: Devils Ladder and Coyote Pass
Taking a moment to process some minutia of Hockett Trail history … This early account of the rerouting of a short segment of the Hockett Trail appears to corroborate my understanding that the Hockett Trail followed the same route that Horseshoe Meadows Road follows today, only with shorter switchbacks: From Round Valley down to where [...]
River at the Edge of the World
It may presently be one of the most God-forsaken places on our planet. The Kokcha River region of Afghanistan is good for little more than opium farming and arms smuggling today, though it was once one of the great corridors between the ancient worlds of India and Iran, long before Darius and the Persian Empire. [...]
The Cradle of Ethical Metaphysics
If we turn to the Gathas to determine the geographic origins of Zoroastrianism, it seems reasonable to conclude—or guess—that Zoroastrianism originated somewhere in or around Bactria-Margiana. Recent discoveries of what appear to be ancient, pre-Zoroastrian fire temples in the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex (BMAC), appear to confirm this line of reasoning. But we cannot necessarily conclude [...]
The Original Holy Land
What place do most of us think of when we hear the term “Holy Land”? Perhaps we ought to think of Afghanistan. Let us begin by looking at that highly influential proto-western religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism. Though it is evident that Judaism originated in Mesopotamia and developed in and around Palestine, it is [...]