Category Archives: Literature
If You’ve Been Wise . . . .
“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”
Caves and Kivas
So many things can go wrong . . . .
Eastman boat in Chicago
24 July 1915
Just finished reading Preston/Child’s Thunderhead, a thriller set in the mysterious canyons of the desert Southwest. Thrills. Chills. And sherds. Lots of potsherds.
New words: kiva; Quivera.
Forrest Fenn is listed in the Acknowledgements. You’ll see why if you read it.
Will I sleep tonight? Yes. Well, maybe.
Will I wander the canyons in the Southwest? Not on your life.
I also picked up Treasure Island at the library since it’s mentioned in Fenn’s The Thrill of the Chase . I don’t think I ever read it as a kid. I see that there is a Skeleton Island on the treasure map, and, (yes, I peeked at the ending which I rarely ever do), there is a cave — filled with all manner of gold and such.
Forrest Fenn’s Treasure Chest
Click on this link to see a 45 million year old stalagmite in Europe.Antiparos, the Cyclades – A travelogue [part II].
Related articles
- Review: Preston/Child – Relic (abstracthorizons.wordpress.com)
- Underwater Cave (rbcconnects.com)
- Treasure Island: A Review (nobodyputssarahinthecorner.com)
- Explorer rescued after getting stuck inside New Milford cave (rep-am.com)
“If Robert Redford had ever written anything….” Forrest Fenn
Robert Redford in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) ( Sorry I missed this event. I love Madison.)
When I returned my armload of TheThrill of the Chase-related library books yesterday, I thought I’d check the history section again. It’s about 4 1/2 feet long, but has had an amazing amount of titles I could use in the chase.
After a minor delay (they’d rearranged their shelves), I found 5 more books to check out that I hadn’t seen before. I suspect someone else in this county is also on the TOTC hunt and had just returned them.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when they landed on a young Robert Redford. Serendipity strikes again. Important Literature. I won’t mention the title, but it was sub-titled A Journey Through Time. Does that not resonate, fellow Fennsters?
The book is full of photos of a trip on horseback that Redford took in the Rocky Mountains (more than 300 miles west of Toledo) and some fascinating anecdotes, historical and otherwise.
English: U.S. Postage: Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1954 Issue-3c. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Currently, I’m thumbing through a book, a 1979 publication by the National Geographic Society, and taking copious notes. And then there’s one on Lewis and Clark.
Another of the books on that same history shelf is on fly fishing. I should probably study that before I head west.
My husband/fiance/boyfriend at the time tried to teach me how to fly fish.
Putting In
One of the problems was that we were in a canoe on a lake in Wisconsin. (A friend dubbed the plastic orange-ish Coleman “a barge with points.” It did have stability in its favor.)
We’ve since bought fly rods. I’ve got waders, needed for another purpose. I picked up an assortment of flies. I watched my Dad fly fish. Am I ready for a chalk stream in the Rockies? I just hope no one will be video-taping.
Serendipity
The morels and asparagas already gone, I wandered a washed field on Mother’s Day afternoon and found a trove of arrowheads, mostly pieces. Like gold and fish, they are where you find them. I think luck plays a part, but also some logic and imagination. To find Forrest Fenn’s The Thrill of the Chase treasure, it will take all of the above. And research. He says the lucky finder will be able to walk right to it, deliberately.
And so, we seekers continue our research and refine our plans. A simple Venn diagram (see Wikipedia) is a series of overlapping circles yielding useful data. A Fenn diagram is going to look more like a flow chart
Flowchart (Photo credit: BWJones)
branching off each time a clue has more than one solution. There are so many diagrams because no one knows where to begin. Well, we might think we do.
I thought at first it would be a simple fill-in-the-blank game. Decide where the warm waters halt, where to put in, and what the blaze is. Okay. But ‘halt’ has many meanings, likewise ‘warm waters’, even ‘warm’. And then you start to wonder, what does ‘it’ even mean!
A couple weeks ago, I came up with an utterly unique answer for “where warm waters halt”. This week, I even found a butterfly connection.
So, maybe the Chase isn’t keeping me away from the internet, but it has gotten me into the library, especially the history section. Here’s to all your discoveries made along the way. Enjoy.
The Fenn Diagrams 