People are actually reading this!
It's a little unnerving to know that people are actually reading what I write here. When I considered doing this, I knew what it was like for people to write what you read, but recently it's been in a very anonymous way. When I write locally, and I go to the mall and see someone perhaps carrying a copy of the Daily Herald, I assume that their eyes may have crossed an article I've done. Statistically, I know this. With another paper, say, the Glencoe News (which I actually haven't written for yet, but it came to mind first), maybe the odds are lower.
Here on the net, though, boy, people come right up and say hello! A woman wrote and said she liked what I'd done so far and asked to list this page on a geographical list of such diaries. I told her to go ahead. One thought does occur to me, though: what use is a geographical list in a medium where geography is meaningless?
I have the television on, and I'm watching the second part of what is turning out to be another excellent film by Ken Burns. Lewis and Clark were heroes of mine when I was in grade school in Minnesota. For all the hardships, for the lack of instant (or even timely) communications, for the disease and danger, those still must have been remarkable times in which to live. The end of the Age of Exploration. Opening the world. The depressing part came later... the destruction of native peoples and wildlife and land documented in another PBS film I watched, The West. That film depressed me after I watched it. It's hard not to be depressed about things in which somehow you feel a responsibility but over which you have no possible control. You want to apologize to everyone, but who is "everyone?"
One of the commentators is a writer named Erica Funkhouser, whose poetry I've enjoyed. You can find some of her work here if you follow the links at The Atlantic and some more here at Academy of American Poets online reading page. She has two books out which you might find at Amazon.