An AI Argues Against Artificial Reality

 As an experiment, I used Claude 3 to write an essay in my voice and style. I fed it five of my newspaper columns and gave it a one sentence thesis to expand upon.  It is copied below, unedited: Enjoy! \

A Tonic for the Screen-Addled Soul

We spend so much of our lives these days staring at glowing rectangles. Our phones, our tablets, our computer monitors - they've become indispensable portals transporting us everywhere except the present moment. With a few taps, we transcend physical space, our consciousness beamed to any corner of the digital universe.

And what wonders that universe contains! We can explore ancient civilizations without the hassle of digging up ruins. We can wander virtual forests without getting a speck of dirt on our shoes. If boredom sets in, we're only a click away from any diversion we can imagine - from videogames to viral videos to bottomless social media feeds. 

Reality has been augmented, enhanced, optimized for maximum stimulation with minimal effort. Yet the more I'm seduced by these digital sirens, the more I crave authenticities they can never provide.  

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the marvels of technology as much as anyone. This screen before me is the magic anvil upon which I craft words into stories, ideas into understanding. But every so often, I need to escape its flattering glow. I need to ground myself in something real - in the thin, piney-scented mountain air, in the cadence of river water passing over rocks, in my own beating heart pumping blood through my veins.

These transcendent experiences cannot be virtually recreated or machine-rendered. To know them, I must unplug, step outside, and be fully present. Only then can I be bodily re-minded of all that's tangible and tactile. Only then can I recalibrate my senses by imbibing the rich communion of earth, sky, and living creatures coexisting in harmony.

Such reminders are soul-salving. They provide perspective and humility that hours of doomscrolling through our societal dumpster fire cannot. Out in nature, I'm confronted with grandeurs that dwarf my insignificant human dramas. I gaze upon ancient trees that witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations while standing immortally unperturbed. My worries and wants are put in their properly piccayune place.

At the same time, being outside reminds me that I'm not just an animated avatar, but one strand in an intricate tapestry of organic life. I'm invigorated by the dance of birds and squirrels, reassured by the turning of seasons, grounded in the cyclical patterns that predate and will outlast my own existence. Catastrophes that loom so large on my device screens become mere blips when viewed through nature's wide-angle lens of cosmic inevitability.

Spending time outdoors also fosters reconnection - to others, to community, to the enduring and embodied rituals that technology aims to "disrupt." Around the evening campfire, we gather united in the most ancient of human traditions, mesmerized by the primordial heat and light that made civilization possible. We share stories and sustenance, comfortable in the knowledge that we're enjoying the same simple delights as generations before us.

While our apps and algorithms relentlessly optimize for convenience and hyper-efficiency, nature nudges us to slow down and apply human care to every task. We cannot Instacart our way into a bountiful garden. We cannot Amazon Prime our way out of splitting firewood for winter. These processes require our sweat, our struggle, and our patience - reminding us that life's most visceral rewards come through conscious effort and presence.

Days spent out in the fresh air, with no concrete plans or digital inputs - these are the times when my truest self has space to breathe and be known. My dreams and doubts, so easily drowned out by the online maelstrom, rise to the surface undistracted. Problems once paralyzingly complex become penetrable when I'm mobile and in touch with the natural cadences around me.  

I often think about what legacies we'll leave for future generations if we remain so disconnected from the roots that nourished our ancestors. Will they be able to navigate by sun and stars, or only by glowing urban grids? Will campfire songs give way to curated streaming playlists? Will they know the peace of kicking through piles of fallen leaves, or just the synthetic crunch of virtual foliage?

If Richard Louv's warnings about "nature deficit disorder" in youth prove true, we're raising a generation at risk of developing empathy deficits as well. For it's in the great outdoors that we naturally learn compassion - for the small creatures whose lives we briefly join, for the trees providing our shelter and shade, for the interdependency binding all living systems in reciprocal balance.  

In virtual worlds crafted by human hands, we're at the center of our own detached, egocentric narratives. But surrounded by nature's humble truth, we realize we are not consumers to be perpetually entertained, but humble participants in Earth's great orchestral chorus.

So go ahead, put down the phone. Shut off the screens. Step outside into the dazzling, multi-dimensional theater that's been playing to rave reviews for eons. Out there, the air is crisper, the colors more vivid, the drama more compelling than any pixel portrayal. I promise your soul will thank you for the respite from simulated living. For it's only by unplugging that we can truly feel existence's electric hum charging every blade of grass, every raindrop, every breath we take.

We are creatures of the natural world, no matter how many technological layers we insulate ourselves with. When we shed those layers, even briefly, the restorative benefits are profound. The noise quiets, the light clears, and we can perceive what's real again – the symphonic unison in which every one of us plays an indispensable part.

Huckleberry in the Time of Covid

We stumbled into our camping trip, a little underprepared.

Up until the moment we left, part of us suspected it wouldn’t happen at all.  

 

We shut down early in this state, we took it seriously when the novel coronavirus hit our shores. First professional sports canceled their multi-billion dollar seasons. Then schools scrapped in person classes and high school sports and then, with reluctance, graduations. 

 

Shutting down bought us time to learn, understand and adapt. People in our area look out for one another and made hard choices that likely saved lives. 

 

In our house we were looking forward to a busy March --- spring basketball and the start of track season -- but it all came to a halt. We looked forward to a summer of showing cows and riding horses in the Silver Buckle series, as well as the county fair. Canceled, cancelled and all canceled.  The replacements were innovative adaptations, but still poor substitutes for our expectations. 

 

We learned the hazards of looking forward. 

 

Habits and expectations are troublesome things. We humans like patterns to reassure us -- to light the path of our movement through the seasons. We like to look forward to the next, we abhor uncertainty. 

 

This year has been nothing but uncertainty. I have no doubt it will scar us thus. 

 

This is the year that it was canceled. 

 

This is the shortened season, the asterisk.

 

 The year we couldn’t go. 

 

We do our best to adapt and we are not the first to have done so. I remember the gas shortages of the 1970s. Amy remembers turning around when it was unclear that there would be a gas station open to get home. Parents and grandparents remember blackout curtains and ration cards in WWII. We have sacrificed, adapted and survived in the past and we can do so again. 

 

We have been lucky that this challenge comes at a time when the internet is mature enough to allow us to see each other even in quarantine and to have anything delivered to our door. Pixels are poor substitutes for a hug or handshake, but should be appreciated all the same. 

 

Still, we long to get away from our screens and go outside.

 

So we steal a summer day to paddle up Skamokawa creek, finding the moving waters reassuring in the summer sunlight. We busy ourselves with landscape projects and home improvement. 

 

Mayo Clinic - Safe Outdoor Recreation in Covid19

 

This summer has seen an increase in outdoor activities -- hiking, camping and kayaking. We are blessed to live where nature is right outside our door. Meanwhile, less fortunate city folk are launching themselves into the outdoors like coiled springs. 

 

Retailers in the Pacific Northwest have reported increases in people buying outdoor recreation gear that will allow hunker-downers to get out and have fun while staying six feet apart and outside. It is boon for the $21.6 billion recreation economy in this asterisk year, and hopefully a salve on our stressed and disrupted lives. 

 

Out on a hiking trail or around a campfire, it is easier to keep your distance. On a hiking trail or on the water you can see a friend and still keep a healthy six feet between you.  Outside activities have been shown to be less risky for transmission than indoor spaces. Kayak and bike sales have seen sharp increases as families find ways to enjoy the summer days. 

 

As Marc Berejka, director of Community and Government Affairs at REI told the Seattle PI recently,. "As we all work our way through the pandemic, it’s clear Washington is a state of people who love to spend time outside."

 

Our little family has been getting outside for years. 

 

Amy and I camped on our honeymoon.  Camping, hiking, kayaking and riding bikes and horses have filled our summers as the girls have grown. 

 

Huckleberry picking on Mount Adams is an annual pilgrimage that marks the turning of summer. It has become something akin to a ritual -- a journey outward and inward -- a late summer renewal in a quiet forest before the start of the school year.  

 

In the days leading up to this year’s Huckleberry Haj, I’d been anxious. I found myself clinging to that journey more than I realized.  So much has been canceled this year, so many of our family traditions erased. I found myself yearning for it to happen and at the same time secretly telling myself that it too would be canceled somehow, preparing myself for disappointment. 

 

We started our annual huckleberry trips when Grace was still in diapers. Now she is old enough to drive.  Over and over again we have found healing in the silence of the mountain. 

 

Bright sunlight, a sun-washed Mount Adams and the snap and skitter sounds as we find ourselves exploring off forest trails in search of the huckleberry. We talk as we pick. We call “Marco - Polo” when we lose sight of each other in the brush. 

 

We find each other as a family. We find each ourselves in the woods. We store up summer to get us through whatever winter holds in the dark days ahead.

 

This has been a year of disappointments, the year of cancellation. 

 

For the most part, we have taken it well, for we have stored up our memories … packed them away like summer gratitudes in the freezer and pantry to be savored on a rainy day. Much needed nourishment for our souls. 

 

Yet,  we are human and we know the world around us is fragile and in clumsy hands. 

 

We have a plan but the plan can change. We have been lucky and careful and grateful and kind but we know that as the tension turns ever tighter on this string --  it can snap as easily as it can sing.

 

So we prepared for camping and yet didn’t prepare. A broken trailer jack and a missing tool had us arriving at our campground at the cusp of darkness, undaunted.  We  rested our heads on the mountain's shoulders and tried to dream of the time before. 

 

We picked berries in a place where no cell phone has a signal. We dipped our toes in the Klickitat river and took a family photo on our favorite rock - another family tradition unbroken for near 20 years.

We climbed Sleeping Beauty Peak - a 4,900 foot mountain with a four-mountain view overlooking Indian Heaven Wilderness. The trail curls through dark wood until the last, steep hundred foot elevation gain where bright sunlight opens to a view to tomorrow. 

 

No picture does it justice.

 

You have to get outside, to see it for yourself.

 

After all we’ve been through this year, it is still there waiting. 

 

-30- 

 

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/visitors.html

The River, The Road, and the Forest

I rode my motorcycle around the valley in the days after the storm.

Sandbars of brown silt still scarring local roads. Guardrails dented and mangled where trees had fallen across, now cleared away. 

One such tree had come down across State Route 4 just a few feet away from the house built by  Ole Dosland - a Norwegin immigrant who got a contract to use his team of horses to grade the road that would cut right through his farm. 

Clouds clung to the treetops along the steep slopes of the Willapa Hills, the field of the green flat land on either side of the Grays River, still obscured by trapped floodwater waiting to either drain down into saturated soils or evaporate into saturated air. 

A quarter mile from my house a sign warned of a road closure on KM mountain. A slide of rain-saturated earth liquified and oozed across the road January 23rd,  taking dozens of trees with it. 

The slide was so great - 55,000 cubic yards of earth and rock - stretching so far up the steep hill, that it was quickly determined that the cleanup would stretch weeks and months. Thus a major transportation route toward the outside world cut off for the foreseeable future. 

So tenuous are our roads this close to the end of the world that we do well not to take them for granted. 

Highways are latecomers to this part of southwest Washington.  Roads do not belong here in the rainforest -- the fact that they exist is a mark of human tenacity. 

For the first 100 years of European settlement the transportation pathways of choice utilized the many rivers to transport goods and people inland from the larger world. Steamers ran regular routes connecting farm communities at riverside landings. Railroads cut deep into woods to haul out lumber, only to dump the logs into the river.

Milk from early 20th century dairies was often taken by skiff to the local creamery. The “school bus” was a boat that delivered students to the steps up the riverbank before the bell rang. 

 Victorian tourists traveled down from Portland to their Seaview beach houses on the Columbia, meeting up with a clamshell railroad that “ran by the tides” from the Ilwaco docks. 

Rivers and creeks and bays -- such obvious natural highways predated European settlement. Well established and understood by the Chinook speaking people of the region - sophisticated traders that used the coastal waterways and Columbia River as their economic artery to barter with inland nations. 

Early settlers watched the native people navigate the rivers to maximum effect and conceived of a canal to connect the Puget Sound to the Columbia River -- a wild infrastructure dream that started in the 1860s and kicked around for 100 years. Private surveyors planned a canal route in early 1910. Two canals would cross relatively narrow stretches of land between Baker Bay and Willapa Bay and between Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor.  

Eventually, cranberry and oyster growers in Pacific and Grays Harbor counties put an end to the talk. Cranberry growers feared losing the high water tables needed to produce their crops while the oyster growers knew the freshwater pouring into the bays would change the salinity and ruin their industry. Fishermen worried about losing spawning grounds. 

Even so, the canal dream persisted until 1977 when lawmakers consolidated the state canal commission with other agencies into the Department of Transportation. 

These days the Department of Transportation is busy working to clean up that massive slide on KM -- restoring uninterrupted travel on State Route 4 while trying to repair other storm damage up and down the coast. 

We tend to think of these vital roadways as ever-present -- we take them for granted as our commute to and from work depend increasingly on jobs miles away from home. 

However,  State Route 4 is fairly new, and if you think creating a massive canal between Seattle and the Columbia river sounds far fetched, that idea becomes laughable when you realize how difficult it was just to cut a two lane road through the forest from Longview to Long Beach. 

At the turn of the 20th century regular steamship traffic on the rivers adjacent to the Columbia were kept busy serving the little farm and fishing and communities growing up in the valleys still mostly separated by the steep rain-soaked and forested Willapa Hills.  

Yet in those days, it was easier to go from Deep River to Astoria than travel the four miles as the crow flies over to Grays River. As the communities thrived with new settlers, demand for roads to connect these communities grew. 

Earliest roads were hand-cut through forest, sometimes with volunteer work crews from local towns taking on the job. These “volunteer roads” slowly connected communities. Bridges -- first of wood -- later of steel and concrete -- forded rivers and plank roads crossed marshy shifting soils. The ingenuity required by logging operations to erect railroad trestles deep into the forest was applied to grading and bridging the “Hungry Highway” from Naselle to Knapton as well as other gravel roads that -- at their best -- were still  seasonal and unreliable. 

Winter storms brought downed trees, landslides and washouts. Roads here have always been a battle between steep forested grades and flat flood-prone lowlands. 

As local roads were puzzle-pieced together through the woods and along the Columbia river -- the road across KM mountain was the missing link connecting the coast to the booming planned city of Longview.

The original State Route 19 wasn’t connected from Longview to Long Beach until 1933 and wasn’t fully paved all the way until 1939. 

State Route 4 hugs the Columbia river until it cuts inland at Skamokawa, choosing to climb up over KM rather than continue along the shoreline. 

Why this route was chosen dates back to an early Grays River entrepreneur William Meserve.  

To say Meserve had a store in Grays River is a bit of an understatement. Built in the 1890s to serve the river traffic on the Grays, Meserves’ store had a theater, bowling alley, barbershop and post office.  Daily steamship traffic brought goods to the store and hauled away goods from the surrounding farms. 

Meserve was a state lawmaker by the time the route for the highway was proposed. Early surveys planned to follow the river between Skamokawa and Megler -- the shortest route -- leaving the farms of the Grays River Valley isolated. As a state senator, Meserve lobbied for a route that would take it inland through the valley past his farm and his store, and continuing through to Deep River and Naselle. 

While the politics between a river route and KM route tussled in Olympia, early motorists took matters into their own hands with a caravan over KM. Lead by Longview resident Gus Hafenbrack, the August 1924 expedition required the motorists to put their cars on a logging railroad car to cross KM. The next year the logging company had pulled up the rails the expedition had to drive their cars on rail-tie trestles over 200 foot canyons with no guard rails. 

Yet each summer the  journey between Longview and Long Beach got a little easier. State contracts and money started flowing. Plank roads gave way to graded rock. Ferries were replaced by swing bridges and finally arcing concrete built high enough to allow commercial river traffic.

The story of State Route 4 isn’t of a single road, nor is it a single story, it is a hundred little roads, surveyed and abandoned, cut through forests by ambitious local volunteers and depression era works projects. It was built and moved and built again. 

It is still being built and rebuilt to this day. Frequent rockslides east of Cathlamet pound pavement into a pockmarked shambles each winter. Slides force commuters back to the ferries or to detours deep in the woods.  

All the roads in this temperate rainforest suffer winter’s rage of a thousand cuts. 

Vital roads seem so much more permanent now that we rely on them for our daily commute. 

Yet, that same battle rages on every winter, with state and county road crews fighting skirmishes with every soil-saturating Pineapple Express and tree-toppling windstorm. 

Winter rains here are brutal on roads, and the roads and bridges that we take for granted suffer as a result. It is easy for us to become impatient, and to second guess heroic efforts just to keep the way open. 

Yet floods and slides and broken roads are just a price we willingly pay to live where the rivers meet steep-sloped rainforest along an often un-Pacific ocean. 

On a summer day --or even a sunny day in February --it is easy to forget what it takes to make a road in the forest. 

-30-

Author’s note: photos and research for this essay are thanks to the amazing Appelo Archives in Naselle, where you can find a wealth of amazing photos and history about our region.

Missing the Rain

Guérin, Jules Vallée, Artist. Commuters With Umbrellas at Street Car Station. , 1906. [?] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010716471/

When I was a small boy — the year before we moved out West — I remember a summer when the Californians came to visit.

On a warm summer day, the New Jersey sky opened up in an angry cascade of warm rain. This is a common occurrence back East. The rain would crash down in torrents from the coal-gray skies, pounding the mown lawns and the tidy streets of our neighborhood. 

The Californians took off their shoes and ran out into the rain, dancing in their T-shirts, shorts and bare feet in the puddles that formed on hot sidewalks and concrete driveways. 

It was the late 1970s and California had been in the midst of an epic drought.
They had been missing the rain. 

In 1978 we moved with those same Californians to the hills above Lyle, Washington. East side of the Cascades, but where the scrub oak are like pebbles on the shore of the vast desert ocean.  

It is a place where the rain quits us in early may, never to return until late October. If you blink in that early spring, the green will be gone. Cloudless summer skies and blistering heat were the norm. Sun so bright it seemed to leap up from the ground to assault your eyes. Wind was oven-hot and gave no relief. It curled in dust devils a mile away. 

I remember one summer on High Prairie and I had a job pulling up fence posts along a property line with a boom truck. The metal of the barbed wire burned skin. We ate our lunches huddled in a sliver of thin shadow offered under the frying-pan hot truck. 
It was a magical thing then to even see a ghost of a cloud far off a mountain's shoulder, even so, there was no promise of rain in it.  

One summer we vacationed on the coast. I walked summer rain-soaked streets of Ilwaco, blue tarps rustling on hulls in the boatyard. Watercolor skies and swirling mists in late June when the grass back home had already dried to brown. 

I married a local Grays River girl that I met at college.  It was Amy that taught me the rhythms of the rainforest life. Past 30 years now, it has wrapped its ways around me like favored polar fleece and gortex. 

In my little home among the Willapa Hills, we average more than 110 inches of rain each year, with 192 days of measurable rainfall.  That is 30 inches a year more than the highest rainfall picked up in Portland and many surrounding communities. Indeed, the least amount of rain received at the Grays River hatchery — 75.9 inches in 1985 — was still higher than Portland’s average yearly rainfall. (data up to 2006) Astoria averages less than 70 inches a year.   

Yet Astoria has almost the same number of rainy days at 191. 

Thus the Grays River valley in particular lies in a perfect hydrophilic place for precipitation — inland just enough from the coast, tucked between the first ridges of hills that harvest the fresh clouds with their peaks.  

I never tire of it. 

It could rain 100 days in a row here — it often does — yet it can be different each day. This is a wild and dynamic meteorologic magic to which we are privileged. 
I will not go on about its practical benefits, yes it waters our gardens, grows our trees and feeds our river songs.  

It washes our streets, greens our fields.’ 

It calls our salmon back from the ocean. 

It hides our tears.  

I write best, and most often in the rain. Sitting in my recliner looking out my window or stomping through the wet fields and forest brings relentless words to mind. 
Conversely, I have been trained by my time on the wet side of the state to associate a rainless day with outdoor projects and work to be done. 

Seize the golden day between the storms. Make hay while the sun shines.
Comes now a year when a dry summer follows a dry spring, following a winter punctuated by an unusual number of sunny days. Good for motorcycles and horseback rides, for outdoor projects that usually would not even get started until mid-summer.  Not so good for quiet contemplation at the keyboard. 

So it was this summer that my grass dried to brittle yellow before June had even past. So it was that the cows and horses huddled in the shade rather than graze on the dwindling grass.  

Then came a hint of a rainstorm on the weather forecast. A summer storm at last. 

I found myself in a state of anticipation, dashing around cleaning up the yard, watching the clouds gather. I could smell the air thickening, I longed for a growl of thunder to herald the coming rain.  

When at last I awoke to that music on my metal roof I found strange joy in the pre-dawn hours knowing the rain had finally come. Later that morning, I went down and took up my book by the window. I smiled but did not read. I simply looked out at the gray.

I wanted to go out then, in the summer storm.

I wanted to take off my shoes

I had been missing the rain.

-30-

(This article was originally published in the Daily Astorian, 2015)