Cash is King and Should Remain So

I am sure that many have heard the expression, cash is king, but did not waste any time thinking about what that means.

The Federal Reserve System (the fed), our central bank system, has control over our money printing and monetary policy, but has no control over the cash in the underground economy, i.e. gambling, drug activity, illegal employment; it is an economic activity that they cannot control and thus our government cannot tax it via its fiscal policy.

The fed publishes the amount of money stock in the economy and control the interest rates values. How accurate is the money stock when one considers the amount of cash that circulates in the underground economy.

The rub of cash for the government is that they cannot tax and control all of it. How can they change that? By issuing digital currency, central banks digital currencies (CBDC), around the globe, and giving bankers the power to control EVERYTHING we and governments do.

Cash is the most liquid form of money and harder to trace and control by the omnipotent government. They measure the quantity of money in our economy as M1 and M2. M1 is the sum of all coins and paper money plus checkable deposits at banks and savings institutions. M2 includes M1 plus shares in money market mutual funds. There is an M3 which includes M1, M2, and all financial institutions.

Then there are near moneys, close substitutes for money, and credit cards which can be counted as what one owes on the credit cards or what their credit line is.

Cash is most liquid and often untraceable, especially the cash involved in the black market, do it yourself jobs, rainy day funds in safe deposit boxes, cash under a mattress, hiring a neighbor or an illegal to do a job that is not taxed in any way, babysitting jobs, grandmas’ cash gifts, etc.

How can the government then control everything and tax everything? Remove all cash from circulation and install the CBDC (central bank digital currency) where everything will have to be approved and paid for by electronic transfer by appointed bankers each time a transaction is requested.

Working for the government, the banks would tell you what to eat, how much to eat, when, what to purchase, where and when you can go on vacation, what to do with your money, how much money you can keep, what car to buy, how much money you can withdraw, if you are allowed to buy gasoline, a car, a house, tickets for a show, have TV, heat, air conditioning, food, go to doctor, buy medicine, buy a plane ticket, anything that keeps you alive and well as long as you behave according to government dictates, you obey them, and your social scoring is good.

Before 1945, most people paid for everything with cash. By 1990, about $30 trillion was moved annually by checks. By 1998, $1.3 trillion was moved electronically daily through the Federal Reserve System, our central bank with 12 regions, all owned by private investors.

By 2024, some central banks have already installed digital currencies and have removed cash from circulation altogether. One example is Australia and some third world nations. The central banks of Brazil, China, the European Union, India, and the United Kingdom are moving in that direction.

In 1862 the U.S. government issued its first paper money called greenbacks, printed in green ink to distinguish them from gold certificates.

The first European notes were printed in Sweden in 1661and France issued paper money in wide circulation in the 18^th century.

The British Empire issued promissory notes to Massachusetts soldiers in 1690. There were, of course, paper monies issued in different historical periods, but their strength depended on the economy of the country issuing them; Kubla Khan issued paper notes in 1282 made of mulberry bark; the kwan, issued by the Ming dynasty in China in 1368-1399, is the oldest surviving paper money.

Although not real paper money, the Babylonians of 2500 B.C. wrote bills and receipts on clay tablets.

Before paper money, people bartered with goods and services, but it was less convenient because it depended on “coincidence of wants,” whereas money did not require such a coincidence. Barter was not always fair because animals are not divisible. Barter restricted productive capacities.

Live animals and sacks of grain were accepted as money. In 1393 Europe, “a pound of saffron was worth one plow-horse; a pound of ginger would buy a sheep; two pounds of maize would buy a cow.” (WSJ, Guide to Understanding Money and Markets, 1990, pp. 98-99)

Commodity currency such as gold and silver, pelts, salt, cigarettes, chocolate, medicine, beads, cattle, sheep, was eventually replaced by fiat currency, the money of today, where governments decide what is money and their value based on the amount they print which is or is not backed by goods and services. If too much money is printed, way above the value of the yearly GDP, like today, inflation occurs, and the value of the currency goes down.

In the last four years, prices for most goods Americans consume have doubled in prices because of the inflation caused by the policies of the current administration. One shopper at Walmart bought the same basket of goods in 2024 that he had purchased in 2022 and the total cost has allegedly quadrupled.

The most frequently quoted hyperinflation is the Weimar Republic when in 1923 a German homemaker burned mark notes in the stove because it was cheaper than buying firewood and people carried a wheelbarrow filled with cash to purchase a loaf of bread. Such glaring mismanagement of the economy, by printing money for out-of-control government spending to boost the post World War I sluggish economy, gave rise eventually to Hitler’s Reich.

The Continental Congress issued paper money during the American Revolution because it was short on gold and silver to mint coins. They printed so many paper bills, causing such a high inflation that the price of corn rose 10,000 times and by the end of the war, a dollar dropped in value from $1 worth of gold to 2 ½ cents in gold. Congress did not issue money again for 70 years. They did issue currency with abandon during the Civil War and disastrous inflation occurred again.

What will happen once the central banks eliminate cash and install CBDC? The central banksters, which already run monetary policy, will also run the fiscal policy, replacing the legislative branches, and thus eliminating each country’s sovereignty and all individual sovereignty.

Cash is king. Keep it this way if you want to maintain independence and freedom as a country and as individuals.

Trip to Communism in 1985

When my oldest daughter was four and a half years old, we flew to communist Romania to visit my dad. The commies would not give him a passport or a visa to visit us, hence my trip with a small child, on a twenty-four hour flight.

So many things happened on that trip in 1985! I never thought that Mimi would remember much. Yet she remembers in great detail certain things that I never thought she would have even noticed. They had made such an impact on my little girl. She never traveled back again as an adult. Relatives from generations prior to mine are long gone except one maternal aunt.

Aside from the long flight, throwing up from motion sickness, missing the connecting flight in New York, doing without our luggage which flew ahead of us, and being threatened with jail time if she did not stop rattling a metal fence that irritated a Kalashnikov-carrying guard at the airport, the communist “adventures” kept stacking up.

A very musical child early on, my daughter was in love with Michael Jackson’s latest album, Thriller. She played his music every night on her Sony Walkman until the batteries drained. Disaster was looming.

Batteries were hard to find just like everything else in the communist economy, but my dad and cousin Mircea went on a day-long hunt on the black market at Obor, where people sold second-hand clothing and things obtained beyond the vigilant eyes of the economic police.

Nobody in the poor and starving proletariat was allowed to have more food or personal possessions than everyone else had, hence the strict laws in place against black market purchases. People did it anyway and bribed the local police to stay away.

My cousin Mircea and dad were remarkably close, they played chess together for hours on end and would do errands to expedite transportation. Mircea was the only person in the entire family on dad’s side of the family who owned a used and beat up Dacia car which he had to frequently repair himself.

The duo returned six hours later victorious with two Romanian production batteries which lasted about two hours of play before the acid leeched inside the Walkman and ruined it. My child’s tears could have drowned the entire neighborhood.

Every day we went on a driving hunt with Cousin Mircea to find a place that would feed us because dad had no food in his pantry at all; everyone in families on both sides struggled to feed their own children and spouses, did not have enough food to feed me and my daughter.

In 1985, the dear leader had passed more laws and decrees, specifically outlining how many calories each person was allowed to consume daily, and they had issued rationing cards to reflect the purchase of just enough food to keep that person alive in his/her category of calories permitted. The socialist man had to sacrifice for the good of the collective while the elites in the Communist Party were fat, happy, obscenely rich, and wasteful. The caloric decisions were made for everyone based on the type of job a person had.

The one place we found that could feed us daily for a high price, of course, was a restaurant at Lake Snagov. The cozy open terrace by the lake had good fresh food and Pepsi Cola, my dad’s favorite. The place also had an outdoor pool encircled with wooden walls and a wood bottom. I found the choice of materials curious at first but glad of its existence.

The lake was saturated with waterlilies’ roots which had drowned many would-be swimmers by entangling their legs into the vines and dragging them under the water.

Mimi remembers with fondness swimming with her grandfather in that wooden pool, a rare treat for people like my proletarian dad who would have never been allowed in the area had we not been carrying American passports.

Close to the restaurant was the club built for Ceausescu’s family and cronies with a Versailles-like Garden with a myriad of paths adorned with marble statues and iron benches near manicured bushes and beautiful flower beds, artificial lakes, artesian fountains, and intricate gazebos. It was a dream world that the proletariat was never allowed to enter.

Behind hedges and trees were buildings with a cinema, a bowling alley with its own café in a glass conservatory filled with palm trees and tropical plants. There was a banquet hall, a ball room, bars, and comfortable chairs for the elite communists who visited their opulent club daily, a short, chauffeured drive from Bucharest. Unseen guards appeared out of nowhere if anybody tried to get too close to the dear leader’s and his henchmen’s playgrounds.

Mimi remembers wading her feet in the large fountain downtown Ploiesti on the hottest day of our trip and the scary policeman who appeared from the tunnels under the building across, threatening us with jail if she did not get out immediately. Who would put a four-year old little girl in jail for having fun like millions of other kids around the world when they find a fountain, a puddle, a creek, or a pond? The answer is simple, a heartless, evil communist.

As American citizens, there were places where we were not allowed to enter. It drove my husband mad on previous trips because he could not go inside certain buildings. But we could shop in the very rare luxury stores set up for foreigners and for the communist elites where goods were priced in dollars, not lei. First of all, it was illegal for the masses to hold foreign currency, it was punishable by hard prison time. Secondly, the poor proletariat had to shop in their stores with empty shelves; they stood in endless lines, large wads of cash in their pockets, in hope that some food would be delivered eventually.

Mimi remembers her maternal great-grandmother, Elena Ilie, pumping water out of the ground in the yard, to cook our lunch; having no tub to take a bath in the country: going to the outhouse in the back of the farmhouse; and not having running water. So many things that people take for granted today were missing under the communist rule. As a child, Mimi thought it was fun to pump cold artesian water out of the ground and get wet and muddy while doing it.

Mimi remembers her grandfather frying chicken in a pan in heavy rapeseed oil which was an unpleasant looking dark yellow; the chicken was swimming in the heavy grease which it had absorbed. Dad did not have paper towels, nor napkins to soak the excess oil, it was a luxury only found in the homes of the party elites. As a southern girl through and through, Mimi loved fried chicken, but she barely nibbled on dad’s cooking and his French fries.

Mircea drove us to the Black Sea in his Dacia that had seen better days, a treat for my dad who went on vacation twice in his life. Unfortunately, due to the restrictive communist laws, even though we were close relatives, because my daughter and I held American passports, we were not allowed to stay in the same hotel as my dad and my cousin. My daughter and I had better rooms in a special hotel reserved for foreigners, for double the price, while dad and Mircea stayed in accommodations reserved for Romanian citizens. It was so upsetting for Mimi and for us that we were not allowed to stay together! We had come a long way to spend six weeks with him and the long arm of communist control was still keeping us apart.

We did not know at the time, but this was the first and the last time my dad was going to see his oldest granddaughter and the last time we would see him.

For seven years we had tried to get a passport and a visa for dad to come to the U.S. to visit or stay with us, but he was always declined. Four years later, in 1989, dad passed away after another severe beating he received at work from the evil goons on the Communist Party payroll. He was 61 years old and in good health – he never took any pills. He should have been left in peace to live happily in his retirement. But his distaste and hatred for communism ended his life.

What is ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’?

As a tyrannical government takes more power, pushing socialism/communism as best alternatives to capitalism, citizens must stop and think rationally, how does all this free stuff they are promised work, and how does the “dictatorship of the proletariat” work in real life? They only need to look at history to find out.

Coined originally by Karl Marx, as an expression of the dictatorship of the majority class, the dictatorship of the proletariat uses violence, brutality, imprisonment, and abject fear to rule and to keep the disarmed masses into compliance and oppression.

The majority class was comprised of all the poor and downtrodden citizens who had to listen daily to lectures on the wonders of communism while their bellies gurgled from lack of nutritious food and sometimes any food at all.

The communists in the elite class who controlled the country had a strong grasp on everyone thanks to a huge and well-paid army, security police, regular police, economic police, central bank officers, and paid informers who wanted a few extra crumbs from their Communist Party handlers. The elites in control did not have the internet or social platforms to spy on their citizens, they really had to work hard to keep a close tab on them.

The Marxist government offered positions of influence to those who could trace their lineage two generations. For security personnel, a person of “pure Romanian blood” had to trace back three generations of families born and living within the borders. If Romanians were married to people of other ethnic groups, the undesirables, were excluded from any government positions or promotions.

According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, “only a few token Jews, Hungarians, and Germans [had] been kept in high positions for propaganda purposes.” They could never have had access to the dear leader’s “secrets.”

A huge ethnic group, at least two million strong and highly cohesive, the Hungarians living in Transylvania, was the “most hated group” by Ceausescu. The dear leader quietly dispersed them in the 1960s throughout Romania to divide them. He borrowed this idea from Leonid Brezhnev who had dispersed to Siberia over a million Romanians living in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

One of the ways in which the dear leader dispensed with undesirables, dissenters, and political opponents was to label them political criminals. In this category ordinary people could be arrested for embezzlement, ‘speculation’ of goods in short supply (and they were all in short supply), dereliction of job duties, theft from work, or whatever reason they could concoct to fit a specific individual. “With imagination and creativity, once a fellow is in prison, he’s yours,” the dear leader is alleged to have said.

He advised his underlings, “It is not only on the street that accidents can happen. It is not just free men who get sick and die.” Thus, Imagination and creativity became the standard operating procedure of the security police.

Car accidents, pedestrian accidents, work accidents, suicides, and hunting accidents were also common even though few people owned a car, a hunting rifle, or the desire to kill themselves.

Jail cells were places where savage beatings, poisonings, and suicides took place. The most lethal was radioactive poisoning added to the arsenal in 1970 under the code name ‘Radu.’ “The radiation dosage is said to generate lethal forms of cancer.” (Pacepa, Red Horizons, p. 146)

Communists have never harbored love for the little people they pretended to defend, the proletariat who allegedly put them in power. It is debatable that they did put them in power, considering the violent tactics the Bolsheviks employed to get a majority of voters to elect them.

Communists also harbored scant love and loyalty for their own flesh and blood. One glaring example was the dear leader himself. He had built his mom a two-story house after her husband passed away, an elegantly furnished abode with servants. The octogenarian sat for years on a bench, “waiting to catch a glimpse of her son walking with someone in his garden.”

Pacepa wrote that “he never greeted her, absorbed in his own thoughts, and only after her death a few months earlier did he notice his mother’s absence.”

How could anyone in their right mind believe this communist monster that he cared about his little people, the proletariat, when he starved them to death and denied them the most basic human rights?

People should heed the lessons of the past of socialist republics ruled by the Communist Party as a warning to stay away from such a form of government and its accompanying disastrous centralized economy.

In the last four years, white Americans have found themselves excluded from many jobs and advancement in the corporate world and in government. Black and brown people, and sexual deviants are given priority for hire regardless of qualifications or experience.

Most commercials are staffed by black and brown actors, with a few Asians. White people, if they appear at all, are bumbling idiots who must be educated by the people with more melanin in their skin.

At the end of the day, what is the role of the proletariat in this “dictatorship of the proletariat?” It is, simply put, a communist dictatorship, a communist police state.

The proletariat was never in control, never got anything for free, they had to work hard for meager salaries, they were just useful tools and idiots in their own communist enslavement. Unfortunately, Americans are not paying attention to those who survived communist dictatorships and escaped them and do not understand the false rhetoric and blatant lies of Democrat communist activists and their mainstream media.

Why the Grand Canyon is Meant to be Admired from Afar

In July 2009, Bryce Lee Gillies of McLean, Virginia, a physics student at Arizona State University, decided to celebrate his 20th birthday by hiking solo in the Grand Canyon.

The 5' 3", 130-pound young man decided to traverse the most stunningly beautiful loop from the North Rim down to Surprise Valley.  All his attempts to find a friend to hike with him had failed so he decided to go alone.

He parked his Subaru at the Bill Hall Trailhead and hiked without sufficient water and experience for an entire week. After getting lost, he collapsed on a boulder, face-down, dead from heatstroke and dehydration. By the time intense searches were launched and he was found, his body had turned black and bloated from the intense heat.

The 27.6-mile hike he attempted, which Backpacker Magazine had described, "This could very well be the toughest long weekend hike in Grand Canyon National Park, but you won't regret a single sunny mile," ended Gillies' life.

He typed on his Blackberry while he was dying, "Life is good whether it is long or short. I was fortunate to see more than most, and for that good fortune I am most thankful." He also typed that he believed in God but was not sure what the afterlife was like, "but I hope there is water."

He was glad that he had a Blackberry with him, otherwise it would have been hard to carve words in the rocks surrounding him, he typed. His final sentence was, "I feel like going into the wild is a calling all feel, some answer, and some die for."

One of the park rangers named Sueanne Kubicek was assigned the painful and difficult task of driving his white Subaru from the Bill Hall Trailhead and of gathering soil in a small bag, which his family had requested -- soil from where he had lived his last dream before taking his last breath.

When Sueanne opened the car door, inside was a plastic gallon jug of water, awaiting Gillies's return from the hike.

His death was among the 125 known and recorded deaths classified as "environmental." Many others who have died of environmental factors, i.e., heat stroke, dehydration, and hyponatremia (low salt in the blood due to overdrinking liquids) are not known nor recorded since the park opened in 1919. Five people were established to have died before the opening and their deaths were also included in the 125 fatalities due to environmental factors.

Note: Yet millions of unsuspected hikers were lucky to have made it alive from the Grand Canyon, some carrying their toddler children in their backpacks and lived to talk about it.

Thoughts on Hiking in the Grand Canyon

I am reading a book I purchased in Grand Canyon village, "Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon." Had I read this book before our visit, I would have NEVER gotten anywhere near the South Rim or North Rim for that matter.

I am so glad we did not choose to hike down on any trail! My adrenaline junkie husband did go down on two trails totally unprepared but not far, relatively speaking. He had a tough time climbing back, a really tough time. And he is not in the worst shape for his age. 

One of the lessons I learned from the wise and seasoned guide, Michael P. Ghiglieri, is that "canyoneering is not mountaineering." Hiking on flat ground, hiking on mountains, and hiking in canyons are quite different.

Hiking on flat ground is obvious unless you are hiking in the desert with shifting sands, sink holes, intense heat, rattlesnakes, scorpions, or alligator-infested swamps.

Speaking of scorpions, one of our guides, Derrick, told us that he rented a house cheaply in Phoenix and, upon moving in, he realized that the house, while empty, had been colonized by scorpions. He was in the process of trapping them and using up a lot of glue traps until he realized that scorpions are cannibals. So, he left the traps in place longer until they were quite full.

Hiking in the mountains you learn early on how unfit you are, and that realization weeds the unfit out in the early game and you can return to the staging area, your life is spared.

Hiking down into the Grand Canyon, the trail appears easy, the air may be cool, there is often a breeze, and you are making good time going down. Then the unfit and unprepared must hike back up.

Ghiglieri wrote that "it is often a hot, dry, hard, agonizing, and often torturous physiological contrast to the descent, the unfit get weeded out late in the game and get weeded out brutally. Sometimes fatally."

The levels of heat and thirst in the Grand Canyon are unforgiving. And in wintertime you can get buried alive and freeze to death from sudden snows. And you can get trapped in rock crevasses. And during the monsoon season you can drown from floods coming from miles away.

Ghiglieri wrote, ...."many of us hiking in Grand Canyon seem more like bizarre medical experiments tossed into an alien landscape of hostile, temperatures, desiccating winds, and fierce solar radiation to see how long we can walk before we collapse."

It is an alien landscape filled with sharp edges, huge boulders, crumbling rocks, slippery rocks, sheer cliffs, huge walls, desert climate, intense solar radiation, dry heat sucking all electrolytes out of your body, and danger at every turn.

If the Inner Canyon temperatures are as bad (and they are) as the temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona in 2017 when 155 construction workers died of heat stroke, it is a no-brainer to stay away from such dangerous hikes. 

Hundreds of hikers made it back safely while others died, and the ratio seems in favor of those who survived. Just because the pull of the wild and dangerous is there, should we answer yes, I am coming no matter what?

Be careful if you decide to hike solo or in a small group! Better yet, hire mules, hire guides, and go hiking in large groups. Stay together and do not deviate from the detailed map and carry plenty of food and especially water. Most people need two gallons per day, others more.

P.S. I am not sure now which subject I am going to have more nightmares about, hiking down into the Grand Canyon and running out of water, stranded on a trail with no escape, or sharks on the loose, swimming unseen and close to us in the ocean while the Jaws song is playing in my brain.

 

NOTE:

I met a 51-year-old very athletic woman, Army high-ranking officer, who had hiked the Grand Canyon all the way down to the Colorado River from the South Rim when she was 34 years old, with her then 3year old son and her husband. She carried her son in her backpack while her husband carried the gallons of water needed to survive and food. They hiked down at daybreak and came back up the same day. She remarked that her son, an adult today, still has some memories of that hike.

I am not sure why adults put their children's lives in danger, i.e., infants, toddlers, and elementary school age ones. I understand that some adults are adrenaline junkies, others have a need to challenge themselves against the most desolate and dangerous places Mother Nature has to offer, for bragging rights, but to me, life is more precious than gambling it away to prove that you can do it, you came back alive and now have temporary or permanent injuries to prove it.

But my friend Laura did it for her faith, to be closer to God and that is an amazing reason.

Of the more than six million people who visit the Grand Canyon annually, most of whom only spend 90 minutes inside the park which is a World Heritage Site and one of the most amazing of the World’s Seven Natural Wonders, fly or drive from near and far to this massive void because it is a large area of wilderness unlike anywhere else on the planet. It is not a safe place but people are overcome with such an adrenaline rush of awe and wonder that it shuts off the rational part of their brains.

 

Meat Production Export and Emigration Visas

A farmer's potatoes for the winter

Living imprisoned inside the borders of a socialist republic run by the Communist Party was not easy – I know from personal experience. One had to get used to the many affronts to liberty and daily survival, including food and amenities the western world had taken for granted for decades and still do. Deep down most people wanted to flee, defect during a hard to obtain legal trip, or to disappear across the highly guarded border during the middle of the night.

Jewish citizens had more options; their freedoms could be bought with hard currency, the universally accepted (at the time) U.S. dollar. The currency was accepted by all because they had trust in the U.S. government. But faith and trust in the U.S. government is fading, in the same direction as the faith in the U.S. dollar.

Jewish emigration had one escape that the rest of the country did not have. Ceausescu used to say, according to Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from a communist country,” Oil, Jews, and Germans are our most important export commodities.” Ceausescu had mastered the art of milking money from the west, specifically Israel and West Germany.

A spy named Henry was the intermediary in a trade that involved paying a certain amount of U.S. dollars to the dear leader’s personal account for each Jew allowed to emigrate. According to Pacepa, Henry negotiated a deal whereby 500 Jewish families would be allowed to leave if an automated chicken plant were to be built free of charge at Peris. The communist president at the time was Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej and he approved the project as “a onetime experiment.”

The plant was built at Peris, a small village on the northern side of Bucharest. That property was owned by the Ministry of Interior, no doubt confiscated from villagers, plot by plot. The dear leader liked the plant and ordered five more built, making the Ministry of Interior the largest meat producer in the country by 1964. The packaged meat, transported by refrigerated Mercedes trucks, was delivered to the west in exchange for hard currency which the commies at the top pocketed, while the citizens starved and spent their days standing in endless lines to find bones for soup. We considered ourselves lucky if we found pork’s feet in the butcher shops.

What did the Ministry of Interior own that made it the largest meat producer? “Chicken farms, turkey farms, pig farms, which produced tens of thousands of animals per year, several cattle farms, and other farms with some 100,000 head of sheep – all with automated slaughterhouses, refrigerated storehouses, and packing plants.” (Lt. Gen. Pacepa, p. 73)

Pacepa wrote in his book, Red Horizons, that Henry paid for everything in exchange for exit visas for Romanian Jews. They could go wherever they wanted to emigrate to the west.

Political prisoners staffed the packing plants. Often among them they found engineers and veterinarians who were forced to work to maintain the dear leader cash-cow enterprises.

When someone complained that they needed more men-power to run the ever-increasing farms and packing plants, Gheorghiu-Dej is alleged to have said, “If you cannot find the people you need in the jails, just arrest the ones you need and then use them.” Find the men needed and then create the crimes to put them in jail to use as free labor.

The production of these enterprises, eggs, chicken, turkey, pork, beef and even cornflakes from a cornflakes factory, was earmarked for export to the west only while the population starved. We had no idea what cornflakes were since we never saw such products on our markets, and we did not eat cereal for breakfast. Our breakfasts consisted of rye bread with butter, if we were lucky enough to find it in the store, and linden tea.

By 1965, Pacepa wrote, “Romania was producing 50,000 Landrace pigs a year, all exported to the West as bacon and ham.” We never saw such ham and bacon in the proletariat’s stores.

The Landrace piglets had been smuggled out of Denmark in diplomatic automobiles and trucks. Landrace piglets were the result of selective breeding in Denmark. They were forbidding their export for breeding, but the commies always found ingenious ways to steal from others.

When Ceausescu came to power after Gheorghiu-Dej died, he found the scheme outrageous to swap food production and farm animals for Jewish visas, not from a humanitarian standpoint but from a financial gain point of view.

He produced a new plan to levy a cash amount for every Jewish visa, based on age, education, profession, type of employment, and family status. The amount could be anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 per person. Some people’s visa demand was $250,000.

Bolstered by the millions of dollars obtained from these visas, Ceausescu decided to sell such visas for ethnic Germans too; Romania had almost a million of them. The awful sale of Romanians of Jewish and German descent padded Ceausescu’s numerous foreign bank accounts with credits and his secret cash stashes with daily suitcases filled with dollars delivered by planes.

At some point Ceausescu decided that those given visas should also become secret agents. He ordered, “No Romanian citizen of Jewish or German descent, should be given an emigration visa unless he has signed a secret agreement with the security forces and has agreed to act as an intelligence agent abroad.” This unique type of tyranny has been emulated by other communist countries who allow their citizens to emigrate to the U.S.  They are loyal first to the country they left.

Who knew that animal husbandry, meat packing, and the sale of emigration visas could be so profitable to communist tyrants!

The Grand Canyon (Part III)

Two hours after we left Sedona in our rearview mirror, taking the 114-mile route through Williams on I-40 and Highway 64, we finally reached the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

We parked in the Grand Canyon Village (elevation 6,800 feet) and began exploring the various cabins and sites made famous since the official opening of the national park in 1919.

I was not planning to hike the easy 12.8-mile Rim Trail which skirts the edge of Grand Canyon between South Kaibab Trailhead and Hermits Rest. Taking this trail would have given any hiker the opportunity to pass by more than a dozen amazing and “jaw-dropping” viewpoints.

We stopped by the Yavapai Geology Museum and Verkamp’s Visitor Center which happened to be near our parking spot.

Nothing had prepared me for what I experienced when I first laid eyes on the majestic and enormous Grand Canyon - I was absolutely speechless, breathless, afraid that if I blinked, this magnificent otherworldly beauty before my dizzy eyes might disappear. I was choking with emotion, tearing up in amazement, and experiencing absolute joy to be alive in that moment.

It was unlike anything I had ever imagined it would be! Was it really all carved by the Colorado River and fractured into 600 tributary canyons? Was it part of the Biblical Flood? Was it once an ocean?  God’s creation, volcanic activity, hardened lava, the Colorado River, water erosion, and Ancient Aliens must have been busy to create this gigantic “hole in the ground” stretching for 277 miles.

The Canyon’s South Rim extends for 1,373 miles. The North Rim stretches 1,384 miles, a total of 2,757 miles of rim. If one was to build guardrails for it all, it would need to encircle the equivalent of half the planet, according to Michael P. Ghiglieri. 

Colorado River seen through 40x optical zoom

It looked like a strange spatial gorge filled with monoliths of unfriendly and sharp rocks rising out of the mantle of the earth like pyramids and impaling torture devices. The rusty, ochre, orange, pearl, and even violet hues gave the rocks the appearance of an immense dessert that was waiting to be carved for someone’s birthday.

The closer I got to the rim, the dizzier I got. I was grasping for support from branches of small juniper trees growing here and there. The feeling of immense permanence of these rocks vis-a-vis my fleeting and tiny existence in time was overwhelming.

I really felt that, if I blinked, the huge chasm would disappear and I would find myself sitting in my chair comfortably at home, daydreaming about climbing into a caldera in which the volcanic rock had cooled into magnificent shapes. Except these rocks were not all volcanic, and it was not a caldera.

My husband standing by 1,000-year-old juniper tree on the left

We are told by geologists that the Grand Canyon is a mile-deep gorge in northern Arizona which had formed about 6 million years ago when the Colorado River started to carve a channel through layers of sedimentary and other types of rocks.

Sunset on the South Rim

Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to make their way into this gorge in the 1540s. But humans have lived in the canyon since the last Ice Age. We have found evidence of such even though most of the Canyon has never been explored.

Since Cortez, and then the 26-year-old Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s exploration of the Canyon in the 1540s, the Spanish looked for the fabled seven cities of Cibola in search of gold but found nothing. Subsequent attempts to go down in the Grand Canyon such as Captain Mendosa, Juan Galeras, and one other man, also failed but they were at least able to go down one third of the way to the Red Wall Limestone cliff. That is when they realized that the tiny boulders, they saw from the rim were actually bigger than the 300-foot Tower of Seville. Trying to go down further looked like suicide so they turned back.

What miners found centuries later resulted in a sort of mineral rush by 1890: copper, uranium, arsenic, cobalt, nickel, molybdenum, zinc, lead, and silver. The quantities were never very large, and it was difficult to bring them out of the canyon.

Sunset on the South Rim

We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to President Benjamin Harrison who declared the Grand Canyon protected in 1893 as a forest reserve. It became an official U.S. National Park in 1919 for endless generations to visit and marvel at God’s creations.

Located northwest of Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon is over 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, and one mile deep, one-tenth the length of the continental U.S., containing the oldest exposed rock on Earth with a cross-section of the Earth’s crust dating back two billion years. What a magnificent opportunity for geologists to study evolution through time!

I walked the Trail of Time in awe. James Kaiser wrote in his book that, when walking the Trail of Time, with each meter, you are walking one million years. “So, the 1.3-mile trail, which stretches between Yavapai Geology Museum and Verkamp’s Visitor Center, represents 2.1 billion years of Earth history.”

At the west end of the Trail of Time is Verkamp’s visitor center named after John G. Verkamp, a pioneer who began selling “curious” to visitors in 1905. His family ran the bookstore, the early pioneer historical exhibits, and information desk for 103 years, the longest family-owned business in all parks. The National Park Service bought it in 2008.

Hopi House seen from El Tovar porch

The Vishnu Basement Rocks at the bottom of the Inner Gorge formed 1.7 billion years ago “when magma hardened and joined this region (once a volcanic ocean chain) to the North American continent.” Rising to 7,533 feet, the Vishnu Temple is a pyramid named by geologist Clarence Dutton after the Hindu’s four-armed Supreme Being. This geological formation can be admired from many viewpoints along Desert View Drive. (Museum Archives)

View of the South Rim from El Tovar Lodge

The Havasupai, according to their tribal history, have lived in and around the canyon for more than 800 years. The Paiute, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi tribes, preceded by ancestral Pueblo people have one time or another inhabited the Grand Canyon. But when the Grand Canyon land was taken and turned into a reserve and later into a national park, the tribal lands became public lands.

The Havasupai received in 1975 a substantial portion of their land back from the federal government once their cause was pleaded publicly. The tribe capitalized on tourism; the cerulean blue pools and red rocks of Havasu Falls are a great attraction for 20,000 visitors each year.

Mary Colter, a famous architect, designed eight buildings at the Grand Canyon, among them the Hopi House, Bright Angel Lodge, Hermit’s Nest, Lookout Studio, Phantom Ranch, and Desert View Watchtower.

The Hopi House was built in 1904 as a concessioner facility for the historic inhabitants, the Hopis, featuring their artisan crafts. Colter designed it to resemble a traditional Hopi pueblo with its low hanging door frames. It opened on January 1, 1905, two weeks before the El Tovar Hotel across from the Hopi House.

El Tovar Hotel, “the Ritz of the Divine Abyss,” built before the area became a national park, was designed as a destination resort by the Santa Fe Railway. The tradition to name places after Spanish names resulted in this hotel being named El Tovar after Pedro de Tovar, who spread the rumors of a large river in the area, inspiring the Garcia Lopez de Cardenas expedition in 1540, the first European to have glimpsed the canyon. They used Hopi guides. The expedition did not go far when they ran out of provisions. They decided that the Colorado River was small, only six feet wide when the river is 300 feet wide in places.

During those times, a destination resort provided an elevated level of luxury and comfort at “the edge of wilderness,” twenty feet from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Other such destination resorts were later built in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The same design was used in similar parks, superficially rustic but offering quite comfortable visits. Roosevelt stayed at El Tovar in 1911 and 1913 and even authored a book about his 1913 trip.

The sunset (the Hopi Point is the most famous view, but Mather Point is the most popular due to its proximity to the visitor center) over the Grand Canyon filled our eyes with an amazing painter’s pallet of dark blue shadows over the rock formations, with hues of orange, red, purple, and pink. Our left side cheeks and bodies were illuminated at just the right moment before the sun disappeared in the west.

The Abyss’s sheer cliffs drop from the canyon’s edge almost 3,000 feet. Here you can glimpse the top six rock layers which showcase 80 million years of our planet’s history.

The Grand Canyon is a shocking abyss, its geology is millions of years old, made up of cooled lava (basalt), limestone, sandstone, shale, dolomite, quartzite, granite, and other rocks. One mile down, the Colorado River shines a beautiful green. If one falls from the top of the South Rim, one will never reach the very bottom. He/she would disappear in the rocky and sharp chasm.

I viewed the ledge, whether with a retaining wall, a metal grate, or a chicken wire barely reaching my thigh, or nothing at all, as extremely dangerous, one eye blink away from a fatal misstep, dizziness, vertigo, or fainting.

Dee Dee Johnson, a stunning fashion designer, attempted to model “pedal pushers” on September 15, 1946, on the parapet wall of the South Rim while photographers were recording the moments with blinding flashes. In a split second, she fell off the wall and disappeared into the chasm below.

How many people fall off the rim is a frequently asked question. Nobody can give an exact number, but the rangers know for sure that falling off the rim almost always equals death. Dee Dee got lucky, and her fall was arrested temporarily by debris. She was saved by a swift ranger who was able to rope her to a Pinyon Tree and stop her falling into the rocky void.

Michael P. Ghiglieri lists 67 names of people who fatally fell from the Grand Canyon rims since the establishment of the park in 1919. (Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, pp. 33-42, second edition, June 2022)

The immense vista has a magnetic pull on all visitors. Adrenaline junkies fall into a bizarre category of humans who take stupid chances for reasons that the rest of us fail to understand.

Other humans add alcohol into the mix and the results are deadly. Some commit suicide, others play foolish pranks on their families and fall over, some pass out, some have heart attacks, others die of heat stroke (it is increasingly hotter as hikers descend into the canyon, a 30 degree F temperature difference from the rim), or hypothermia, lack of water; others disappear forever, their bodies never to be found. Fatal errors inside the Grand Canyon since its opening as a park resulted in 750 known victims who perished in various parts, for similar reasons.

My husband sat on a blanket watching the sunset over the canyon one evening but I was too spooked to even sit down close to the fenceless rim. I stood the entire time, took pictures, but kept my distance from the edge. I fought hard the dizzying magnetic pull of the void.

Young couples had brought their toddlers, babies, and infants, and while holding them in their arms or by their hands, they stepped at the very edge of the void. One couple had brought their two dogs. How can they not have any sense of danger for themselves and their babies, standing unguarded and unprotected on the rim of a mile-deep gorge? Are pictures and leaning over for a better look or a better selfie worth dying for?

Through the years, hundreds of people have fallen to their deaths, some were lucky enough to survive and be rescued, and lived to talk about it.

I would never understand the fascination of being at the edge of death, toying with one’s life for the sake of a better view or a better selfie, but I left the enormous gorge with a better understanding of my justified and rational fear of the dangers of Mother Nature. I felt the magnetic pull towards the edge; I stepped on the occasional loose gravel at the edge, and experienced dizziness and vertigo, the closer I got to the South Rim. I was painfully aware that one wrong step or slip would mean the difference between survival and disaster. Like my husband aptly said, we were “canyon-ed out” and were ready to leave the fierce and dangerous Mother Nature behind. Just because you can hike down the gorge, on foot or with mules, no matter how prepared, does not mean that you should. Mother Nature always has the last word.

The ride back to Phoenix was uneventful, we were jarred by the many cracks and potholes on the highways and on the interstate and the driver’s love of speed. You would think that, given the number of close to seven million visitors per year, the roads to the Grand Canyon and their maintenance would be stellar.

Free stock photo (author unknown)

I spotted a female elk grazing at the edge of the ponderosa pine forest and a male elk further in, standing majestically between the trees, with its huge rack visible from afar.

My photo of the female elk

Miles and miles down the road, below the 3,000 elevations, the forests were replaced by low desert brush and large Saguaro cacti. Once we made it to Phoenix, the pleasant cool air and temperatures were replaced by infernal dry heat, upwards of 103 F.

Would I go back to visit the Grand Canyon? I would visit the Western Rim with its Sky Walk but I am in no hurry. I would rather hike in our local forests, 45 feet above sea level, where the only dangers are the occasional snakes and recently seen bears pushed increasingly by northern Virginia deforestation from their habitat, to make room for more ugly apartments and condominiums.

 

Copyrighted photos: Ileana Johnson, June 2024 (except the female elk stock photo)

Trip to Sedona (Part II)

Exhausted from the trip to the Heard Museum, I decided to ride the metro back to the hotel and walk one block to shade and temperature safety. But my husband wanted to go back to the Heard Museum and eat a late lunch in the Museum Café. We took the metro once again and then walked all the way to the museum in even hotter temperatures. But the Café had delicious food and it was worth the trip. We walked through the outdoor gardens a bit and returned to the hotel.

Early next day, our Uber driver took us to a hotel on the other side of downtown Phoenix where we were taking the Detours company van to Sedona, with 10 other people. They turned out to be wonderful travel companions, some single, some couples.

The Uber driver, a lovely man hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico, who had been in this country for 50 years, serenaded us, unexpectedly, with a surprising song, Che sera, sera, which happens to be our favorite song. How he knew about it, I had no idea. We were both surprised.

Stan, our tour driver, and guide greeted us, and, after picking up other people, he drove to Scottsdale which turned out to be quite a sleepy town given the early hour in the morning. We picked up the last couple at the Marriott resort, fancy coffees and off we went.

We drove by many varieties of short cacti in bloom, including the infamous teddy bear (because spines look so fine) or cholla (pronounced Choya) cactus, and a few fields of Pima cotton. The Pima Indian tribe grows large fields of this cotton. The long-fiber Pima cotton grows as a small tree with bright yellow flowers. The cotton is superior because it does not pill like short-fiber cotton. The long fibers of the Pima cotton make any clothing last for years.

The landscape was desert sand and brush, wildflowers now and then and plenty of cacti, first small and then larger and larger Saguaros. A lone frame house, trailer, or RV would appear far from the road, not attached to any electricity or running water. There were powerlines close to the road, but nobody was connected to it. Water cisterns with the emblem “potable water” passed us by or were visible in the distance between the isolated homes. Nobody in the group could understand why people chose to live so far from civilization and so primitively. There were no solar panels anywhere nor wind turbines. Talk about the massive work of conserving whatever water people bought and stored from the traveling tankers with potable water!

The landscape changed to heavy and huge concentrations of Saguaro cactus mixed in with juniper trees and eventually huge ponderosa pine forests. When that happened, the Saguaro cacti disappeared – they cannot grow beyond 2,000 feet elevation due to colder temperatures. Any kind of frost destroys its arms, and the Saguaro plant eventually dies.

The first stop was the Montezuma Castle National Monument in Camp Verde, Arizona. The rock formations and carvings had nothing to do with the Aztecs or Montezuma and such connections were not proven. Presumably naturally occurring caves were eroded by water into the soft limestone or built by its inhabitants, the Sinagua people (1100 A.D. – 1425 A.D.), a pre-Columbian culture closely related to the Hohokam and other indigenous people of the southwestern United States. Nobody knows what caused the culture to disappear or if they moved themselves elsewhere when the water source ran out or became foul. The five stories structure contains about 20 rooms and the entrances look like caves.

The day was gorgeous, sunny, and breezy, the temperatures were milder, in the seventies. We were on alert for snakes (Arizona has six types of poisonous rattle snakes). Luckily only one juvenile was spotted by a group member. We were told that native tribes return to the area for religious ceremonies annually.

As we climbed higher and higher, the landscape resembled Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, with steep gorges, beautiful forests, and dizzying drops and gulleys.

From the Village of Oak Creek, heading north on highway 179, we came upon the Bell Rock Boulevard with its towering red rocks in the distance.

Bell Rock is a butte south of Sedona in Yavapai County with an elevation of 4,919 feet. To its east is the Courthouse Butte. Legend says that criminals were judged and executed at the foot of the Courthouse Butte, hence the name.

To reach the summit of the Bell Rock, an unmarked and challenging trail must be followed. The easier trail reaches a small plateau on the northwest face.

Sedona is said to have gained its New Age community in 1987 when hundreds of devotees gathered to watch the top of the rock which was supposed to crack open and allow a spacecraft to fly out. When that did not happen, and no little Martians made their appearance, nobody left disappointed. The legend continues to this day and the new date was set for 4044.

As we climbed to higher elevations to reach Sedona, at 4,350 feet, we stopped at the magnificent Chapel of the Holy Cross, surrounded by red rock buttes. The Roman Catholic Chapel was completed in 1956 and was built into the red rock within the Coconino National Forest. A wealthy local rancher, inspired by the Empire State Building, commissioned this chapel carved into stone. It has since become the most visited point in the area.

Climbing to the top, it was an awe-inspiring experience for me not only because the surrounding rocks and landscape were breathtaking and you could see so far away across the land from the top, but because I wanted to light three candles in the memories of my mother, my mother-in-law, and my dad, and I wanted to pray. I do not know if it was the mountain desert heat and the intense sun, or the solemnity of the moment, but I felt light-headed and had a slight vertigo looking into the chasm below.

Sedona revealed itself like a precious desert flower, colorful, artsy, hippy, in a crystal vortex of shops and restaurants, art galleries, and green gullies overlooking more red rocks like giants made of intricate and broken bricks peppered with juniper trees in the inimitable green of the waxy desert leaves. Unusual cacti decorated spaces with intense yellow, red, and fuchsia flowers, interspersed with hippy art.

                                                      Sedona seen from its highest point

 

TO BE CONTINUED