of the travels of the Billy Goats Gruff
Here’s something that, if you read it in a book, or saw it in a movie, would be rejected as too unbelievable.
We now live some 200 miles from where my wife Carol grew up.
The other day she went into a local antique store and picked up this old book, thinking it looked familiar. When she opened the cover, she found her own signature from some 55+ years ago!
The intervening circumstances are a complete mystery! She bought the book for $1.60. Believe it or not!
By snow, that is—and how well I remember!
The monstrous blizzard came to be called the Storm of the Century.
At my eastern Pennsylvania home, it was a unique opportunity for my young kids to experience a real blizzard! And they still remember how I made them go out with me in the storm to feel the cold and the wind and the ice sting our faces. And to develop character! I wanted to teach them what my older sister had taught me when we were kids: how to dig a hidey-hole for your head in a large snow drift, so that when the wind blew and the ice stung your cheeks, you could shelter in place. My sons were up for the brutal wind and cold; my daughter, not so much!
By definition, a blizzard consists of three simultaneous conditions: significant snow accumulation of .31 inch or greater per hour; sustained winds of at least 35 mph; and temperatures of 20F or less. A severe blizzard is when winds mount to a steady 45 mph or greater, visibility drops to near zero, and the temperature hovers at just 10F or lower. The consequences of such a storm produces fatalities. They include wind chill temperatures of -30F and lower; wind damage; burying snow drifts; hardship for wildlife; disruption of commerce and traffic; accidents and collapsing structures; interruption of energy distribution, communications and basic utilities; structure fires from constant heating; and shortages of food, medicine, shelter, and other vital provisions.
Here’s how I described the Blizzard to Remember in my book Discover Nature in the Weather (2001, Stackpole Books):
The blizzard of March 12-15, 1993 produced snow at least one foot deep from the Appalachian Mountains east to the Atlantic Ocean, in a continuous swath from Alabama to Nova Scotia. In some locations, several feet of snow fell in its passage, marked with killer tornadoes, straight-line wind gusts over 100 mph, record-low sea level pressures, and record cold temperatures. This memorable blizzard resulted in 270 fatalities and property damage estimated at nearly $1.6 billion.
The Blizzard of the Century’s aftermath in my backyard: my sons and their extra tall snowman; my book Discover Nature in the Weather.
the life and death of the last great gold rush
This fascinating book about the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1899 was written by Pierre Barton, the son of parents who were there at the time, although they found no gold themselves. It is both first-rate history and first-rate entertainment. So frenzied was the dash for gold and so scant the information about the rugged mountain wilderness and its immobilizing winter cold, that the rush for richness became a kind of fabulous, entrepreneurial madness.
In his conclusion, Barton writes, “The great majority of those who took part in the stampede were young mean in their mid-twenties. It is this youth that helps explain the impetuosity of the gold rush. The Argonauts were still young enough to want to search for something even though they did not exactly know what is was they were searching for. They were still young enough to be gullible, young enough to be foolhardy, young enough to be optimistic, young enough to be carefree. They were young enough to see a mountain and climb it, though they had never climbed a mountain before; to see a glacier and cross it without a second thought; to build a boat and tempt a rapid, though they had never wielded an ax or paddle in their lives. The Klondike was their Everest; they sought to reach it because it was there.”
So many fascinating, incredible, one-of-a-kind tales of endurance, foolishness, perseverance, luck, agony, hardship, honor, and deceit you’ll never find anywhere else. I highly recommend it!
and how we can use it to improve ourselves and those around us
Whenever I’ve talked about the need for critical thinking, I’ve noticed that those who need it most are usually the ones who agree most—but for other people!
Maybe this stems from our volatile society, but our collective exasperation (outrage?) at others’ points of view is certainly exacerbated by a lack of critical thinking by all parties.
I don’t consider myself a master critical thinker, but at least I can see how most political ads break every rule of sound and fair reasoning. (Of course, their purpose is to vilify opponents with innuendo, appeals to irrational fears, outright lies, distortions and half-truths; and a creative lack of depth, breadth, clarity or fairness. For that, they do a pretty consistent job—however unprincipled!)
But let’s start with clarity.
What critical thinking is not: using a judgmental spirit to find fault, assign blame, cancel, or censure.
What critical thinking is: using a disciplined thought process to discern what is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence.
After all, we are what we think. Our attitudes, feelings, words, and actions are all determined by the quality of our thinking. Unrealistic thinking leads to disappointment; pessimistic thinking spurns joy; practical thinking builds productivity; grateful thinking grows appreciation; and affirmative thinking leads to possibilities and opportunities.
Our brains do a pretty good job in identifying patterns and fixed procedures that require minimal consideration. It allows us to function efficiently in familiar zones and predictable routines. And hardwired in all of us is a prioritized egocentric core to protect our personal interests. But increasingly, our progressively diverse world and its unrelenting pace of change requires analytical thinking that is more vigorous, more complex, more adaptable, and more sensitive to divergent views—if we are not to degenerate into the dystopian futures of our movies!
That kind of elevated thinking is reasoning, which draws conclusions about what we know, or can discover, about anything. To reason well, we must intentionally process the information we receive. What are we trying to understand? What is its purpose? How can we check its accuracy? Do we have a limited, shaded, or jaded point of view? What is fact, what is evidence, and what is interpretation? What is the question or problem we are trying to solve? What assumptions are in our inherent biases, and how can we move away from them? What are the ultimate implications or consequences?
Our reasoning, therefore, needs standards with which to measure, compare and contrast all the bits of information in order to come to a meaningful and fair conclusion. Such intellectual standards include clarity, precision, accuracy, significance, relevance, logicalness, fairness, breadth and depth.
In the absence of these reasoning standards, we default to our self-centeredness, which inevitably leads to gnashing of teeth, biased irrationality, and social regrets. But when we vigorously apply these standards, we develop a capacity for fairmindedness, rational action, and healthy societies. This intellectual clash for the mastery of our own minds frames two incompatible ends:
Virtues for fair-minded rationality Vices inhibiting fair-minded rationality
intellectual humility intellectual arrogance
intellectual autonomy intellectual conformity
intellectual empathy intellectual self-centeredness
intellectual civility intellectual rudeness
intellectual curiosity intellectual apathy
intellectual discipline intellectual laziness
intellectual integrity intellectual hypocrisy
Here is a starter set of questions for better thinking and reasoning, drawn from the critically acclaimed book Critical Thinking, by Richard Paul and Linda Elder:
Informed reasoning leads to better self-management, better understanding and relationships between people and groups—and ultimately, a better, more cooperative society. And let it begin with me.
I have a standing personal rule: Always Bring a Book!
Whenever I break it, I’m inevitably sorry.
Books are important to me: in them I find distilled wisdom, practical instruction, and engrossing entertainment. They customize my intellectual, psychological, and spiritual development; they build my technical and relational capabilities; they expand my leadership and service; they refresh my mind and spirit.
In 2022, my wife, son and I wrote a book about the challenges, lessons and adventures in raising our youngest son with Asperger’s Syndrome, which will be published this coming year.
I try to read widely. Not all my choices pertain directly to my job, or my personal interests. Invisible Women opened my eyes and mind to systemic male-based data bias. Even fiction, when it represents a divergent point of view, can add to my useful stores of knowledge. Case in point for this year: The Personal Librarian, based on the true story of a black woman passing as a white woman in the employ of J.P. Morgan in the early 1900s.
The complete list follows, but here are my personal citations for those I’ve found most captivating, memorable, or practical in the following categories:
Work-related: CEO Excellence; Critical Thinking; Extreme Ownership
Biography: Frederick Douglass; An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
History: The First Conspiracy: The Plot to Kill George Washington
Iconic/Classic: Travels with Charley in Search of America
Fiction: Where the Crawdads Sing; West With Giraffes; The Personal Librarian
Science: Humble Pi; Brilliant Maps for Curious Minds
Societal: Invisible Women; Untrustworthy
Thriller: Boar Island
Humor: The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach
Spiritual: The Hole in Our Gospel
by personal friends: Super Powers and Secrets; Crushed and Marred; Stand; People Connectors
remembering the day the photographer came to town in 1903
It appears my great-grandpa Edwin Henry Herd (1869-1949) is still in the public eye!
In October this year, I was honored to speak for Anniversary Sunday at the church in which I grew up, and which was a Herd haven since Edwin served as its Lay Leader. In fact, several of my ancestors have their names memorialized in the stained glass windows! (Shown: William and Elizabeth Herd, Edwin’s parents, who had been born in the 1830s in Devon, England.)
I spoke on Our Spiritual Heritage, and was able to weave in some of the old family stories and photos associated with the history of Chapman Quarries United Methodist Church.
One of them is this portrait of the Chapman Slate Co. work crew, dated October 16, 1903, which includes Edwin, just above center, wearing a round hat with the number 22 written on his chest. Just to the above left is his 11-year-old son Hambly, one of my great uncles. (Young boys often worked the quarries in those days as “hollibobbers” to swab the slate with a stick wrapped in burlap to keep it wet so it could split easier, and to rework poorer quality slate into smaller pieces to gain experience.)
After church that day, we went out to eat at the Town & Country Restaurant in nearby Bath Borough, and found we were seated underneath a framed picture of that exact same image!
And now the other day, as I was catching up on some periodical reading at work, I discovered this page in the Pennsylvania Borough News magazine on little Chapman Borough, featuring yet again that same image from the day the photographer came to town!
another heartwarming episode of “Life as I Remember it Ought to Have Been”
Today is another day of cancelled school while the populace waits for its hopeful interrupting snowfall. In anticipation, the streets have already been sprayed with snow-melting solution, the public works guys are counting overtime hours, and it’s a great excuse for a surprise holiday.
Remote workers: you got nothing.
But back in MY day, an accumulating snow, much less a forecast of it, was no reason for changing the day’s plans.
(Disclaimer: my bachelor’s degree is in forecast meteorology; and this is no bash against my brother and sister prognosticators!)
But as I was saying, back in MY day, things were different.
I have a vivid memory from a particular wintry day back in the early 60s, when Good Ol’ Bus 4 ambled up our unnamed road to our farm in rural Moore Township, Pennsylvania. Cold. Windy. Snow covering the yard, feeding troughs, fields, road and everything. Me, bundled in my red coat with the hood up and tied tight round my face with a threaded shoestring, wearing tall, black rubber boots, each with a half-dozen railroad-track latches, and clutching my metal Donald Duck lunchbox with matching thermos inside, I stood dutifully next to our mailbox held aloft by a red, white and blue painted plank figure of Uncle Sam.
The bus arrived just as expected, I giant-stepped into the maw of the yellow beast, and it trundled its load of captive minors toward another day’s sentence in jail (which today might be called “The Learning Facility.”)
But in just another two hundred feet or so, the bus lodged itself in a blustering snowdrift that had dammed the roadway between our barns. “Schlegel,” the bus driver, gave it the old college try to plow his way through, but today the game appeared to be already decided with the low score of Stubborn Snowdrift: 1, Good Ol’ Bus 4: 0.
I quickly and opportunistically offered to hop off and go back to the house and tell my parents. But Schlegel wouldn’t have it. With an order to his charges to “Stay on the bus!” he abandoned us to trudge back to the house. Inside, my parents allowed him to use the party-line telephone to call the school (what were they thinking!?) and let them know we were stuck in the snowbank between a pair of barns isolated in the backcountry wintry wastes.
Eventually, Schlegel returned and resumed his seat at the front of the bus, and closed the bifold door. And there we all sat in the damp cold on the hard bench seats. And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And then, in the distance, appeared an growing yellow smudge amid the swirling snow: Rescue!
Another bus crawled toward us from the other side of the world, turned itself around, backed up to “Our Drift,” and invitingly opened its door to the frigid wilderness.
With Schlegel stomping a path through the monstrous frozen whitecap, each of us snow-hopped across to Mean Ol’ Bus 6, retook our seats, and resumed the long, cold trek to No Excuses Consolidated Elementary School.
I couldn’t possibly tell you what I learned that day in class, but the memory of that singular adventure is a permanent fixture of what happened back in MY day!
Note: I sure wish that my dad had hustled outside with his Argus and taken a Kodachrome of that stuck school bus, but he stayed inside while all us kiddos built character. Instead, I offer these photos from another winter’s day when the Township’s bulldozer eventually got us plowed out—after we had run out of food, and my dad had skied into town to fetch some groceries.
illustrating generational differences
While assigned to the U.S. Army’s 189th Supply Depot near Mannheim, Germany in 1946, my dad, Joe Herd, sat for his caricature at age 19. At the time, he was a Tech Corporal driving truck transferring GIs, Officers, and German POWs to their assignments.
He explained to me that the artist had been drawing all the other fellows with a beer in their hands. But Dad told him he didn’t want that, since he didn’t drink. The artist surprised him with this interpretation.
Contrast that with my portrait at age 21 in 1977, while I was nearing the end of a two-year tour with a singing troupe. At the time I was enjoying the glitz of Las Vegas, NV. We appeared in several venues there, and opened for keynote speaker Robert Redford at the National Recreation and Park Association Congress.
Perhaps no two other images can as readily illustrate the difference between our generations. The earlier fought the critical fight in World War II so the next could enjoy unprecedented freedoms, prosperities and opportunities.
And I’ll never forget it. Always remember and be grateful!
simple steps to introduce children with ASD to nature
Whether it’s simply walking in a park, gardening, biking, kayaking, wildlife watching or even just sitting with a view of greens pace, nature is good for what ails us.
Our physical, mental and emotional health is surprisingly co-dependent on interactions with our natural environment. Regular exposure delivers restorative benefits; a lack of it brings detrimental consequences.
In his book, Last Child in the Woods, author Richard Louv describes the effects of what he called “nature-deficit disorder”: a distressing bundle of physical and emotional afflictions from the lack of personal interaction with nature — like low self-esteem, social anxieties, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
And he’s not a lone prophet crying in the wilderness: a growing body of worldwide research backs him up.
Such studies have shown that time spent in nature can raise our morale, sociability and mental clarity. It can reduce the effects of stress, anxiety, attention deficit disorder behaviors and more.
For children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), research shows that engagement with nature provides sensory motor skill, emotional and social benefits. However, related issues — like sensory challenges, phobias, inappropriate behaviors and safety concerns — may make the adventure a bit harder than just your average walk in the park. Of course, each child’s strengths and needs vary, but psychologists say nature exposure can be an effective intervention strategy.
Beyond its calming attributes for children with ASD, nature also can be an exciting place to focus their exceptional powers of observation. The same single-mindedness that can master a narrow, arcane topic may also find fascination in the feel of a breeze, the ripples in a puddle, the rhythm of a katydid, the colors in a rainbow, the fragrance of a rose, or the textures and patterns in a pinecone.
Interacting with animals is another encouraging ASD-nature connection. Equine therapy uses horses and trained instructors to help the children calm, focus, think, talk, behave and learn. Family pets can be a ready-at-any-time, home-based therapy. Studies have shown that children with autism who had a pet from a young age tended to have greater social skills. Other research verifies how social behaviors in children with ASD temporarily improve after even a short play period with a live animal, such as a guinea pig (versus a toy).
My family experience with my youngest son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, bears this all out. From the time he was 5 years old, we lived in the country, with nature literally out the door, and he often played and explored outside contentedly for long stretches. (We did have a neighbor through the woods who sometimes blasted his radio as far as our yard, which greatly upset our son in his quiet communing with nature. We had to go ask him to turn it down, which he graciously did.) For a time, we had a knuckleheaded dog, named Toby, which our young son loved and treated very well, as he did a series of multicolored cats. One year, he incubated bobwhite quail eggs and raised the chicks until they matured, and we released them into our back field. Another year, he raised chickens until the roosters crowed at 4 a.m. In all his animal interactions, he brought enthusiasm and a pleasant demeanor to his interest and grew in his responsibilities for caring for them.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry adds that caring for a pet can help children develop nonverbal communication, compassion, empathy and trusting relationships. Along with their connection to nature, pets also can bring comfort contact for unmet physical and emotional needs.
Here are some simple, starting steps to introduce children with ASD to nature:
Simple interactions with nature can bring both immediate and long-range therapeutic benefits for children with ASD. All they need is someone to introduce them in ways they can appreciate; nature provides the rest.
an inadvertent insight to empathy
Normally my dreams are bizarre, nonsensical mashups of illogical plotlines, coupled with acutely detailed observations. My latest, however, may give some actual insight to better understanding people with autism; or at least, some empathy.
Many autistic people are highly sensitive to all kinds of sensory input, and often cannot prioritize among them, or be able to respond or communicate in ways non-autistic people comprehend or deem appropriate. Many are also intellectually gifted, but ill-equipped to interact with an alternately-oriented world.
My dream visually depicted their outward communication as a load of transparent cylinders crammed with parcels of concepts. Each package was a discrete, labeled thought, wrapped in a different color of cellophane.
I have no image of that dream scene to share, so I will try to describe it as well as I can.
There were several of these cylinders of various sizes and diameters in my view. I understood that the concepts inside had first been compressed into separate thought packages, and then further compacted together to fill each capped and sealed cylinder. They were varying sizes and shapes, like paper-wrapped cuts of meat; and like various sizes of gravel, they filled all the spaces within the cylinder. I was able to read two of them. One larger, pork chop-shaped gray package contained the observation that the individual hairs on the back of a person’s head had gray tips, much like the silver guard hairs on a wolf’s fur. A small red round one counted the ticks of a wristwatch on someone else’s arm in the room. These bundles were stuffed inside the cylinders with all the other encrypted thoughts and impressions, without any order, category, or priority.
The cylinders, then, were the delivery mechanism of self-articulated thoughts and stimuli responses to an outside world. They included no instructions for unpacking, decoding or deciphering the contents.
I have no way of knowing if this visual depiction in any way represents the actualities of an autistic mind and response system. Like many of my dreams, it could be the result of random firings of neurons in my own brain representing sheer nonsense. But it does give me empathy for those who are neurodivergent, and their challenges to communicating with those of us who aren’t.
