My Way Is The Highway

1887–A Vintage Year for Graffiti?

Graffiti at Karnak Temple, Egypt	Graffiti in a Buddhist cave temple, Kuda Cave, India	Graffiti in a ruin at Mancos Valley, Colorado, USA

Graffiti is utterly deplorable. Deplorable until the graffiti itself becomes old enough to assumes historic proportions. Other than defacing of age old monuments, the three pictures above, have one other thing in common. They were all inscribed in 1887.  I am sure statistically, there are hundreds of graffiti all over the world inscribed in a particular year in at least different three places of historical importance, except that I have witnessed them myself.

Ever since finding the second 1887 graffiti in Kude cave near Pune in 2009, I was on the look out for graffiti inscribed in that year and was blown away when I found one last month in an Anasazi ruin in the Ute Tribal Park in Colorado.

In this age of Internet, once you start looking for something, you invariably find “stuff”. For instance, two more examples of graffiti inscribed in 1887: one in Britain, the other in a high security prison of Alcatraz, SFO.

Then I found this law passed by City of Langford in California, USA; Law # 1887 that prohibits graffiti. Talk about coincidences.

P.S. If you happen to have a photo of graffiti inscribed in 1887, please send them my way.

A Memorable Weekend At Lake Quinault

On the Memorial weekend of 2012, I was sitting in my home office—sunlight tumbling out of the Seattle sky—complaining on one social media site about how I could not understand how to use another. Ironically, I stumbled upon a photo on that site that made me sit up. I had not even heard of a place called Lake Quinault located on the Olympic Peninsula. Before I knew I was calling up hotels in the Lake Quinault area. They were all booked

What are the chances that a room will be available on a long weekend, I thought? I decided to make one last phone call. Luckily Rain Forest Resort Village had just one last room available. They even offered me a deal! That sealed it.

Hiking the Unseen Mesa Verde: Mancos Canyon with Fred Blackburn

The museum rock in front of the granaries had a large shard of a Mesa Verde mug

“There are two Mesa Verdes.” Fred Blackburn said in a non-condescending tone. “The National Park you have already seen. Would you like to see Mesa Verde, the general area that Anasazi lived for over a thousand years up until the end of the thirteenth century?”  Fred looked distinctly familiar. It finally dawned upon me that if Fred had a great shock of white hair, he could stand in for Albert Einstein.

I was convinced by the time he uttered the first two words. I was siting in his office in Cortez because I had thoroughly enjoyed his deeply researched and insightful book Cowboy and Cave Dwellers.  Fred was a ranger with the BLM in the 1970s. All the time I spent understanding calculus, game theory and fast Fourier transforms, Fred was in the canyons. He is an authority on the history, geography and biology of the Four Corners. If he were to point at a Styrofoam cup and say “Pueblo 0. White on White”, I would start making notes.