Tourists crowd in to the Midway Geyser Basin on July 14, at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Yellowstone is one of many national parks seeing record numbers of visitors this summer, while coronavirus cases are rising in many states: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. — I must admit that it does get boring and even annoying at times to be right most of the time, and ahead of one’s time.

Maybe I should strive to be more behind the times like most newspapers, universities and other Southern writers, and simply stop caring about the future or the outcome of events. Like dead comedian George Carlin, who does not appear to be dead on Facebook — now a trillion dollar company.

Even though he died in June of 2008, before Facebook caught on, Carlin appears to be one of the most popular comedians on Facebook. This video of an interview Carlin did with Charlie Rose of PBS before he was “canceled” during the height of the #MeToo movement, was the lede video on my FB news feed recently.

Why?

Who knows what moves the FB popularity algorithm? Artificial Intelligence (AI) ain’t all its cracked up to be.

Did you see the video of Zuck on the power board flying the flag on the Fourth? A gaziliion views of that? I was waiting for the crash video. It never came. Lame.

Waking up a little late Friday morning to a golden-green scene in a mountain campground, with the cardinals trilling their happy love songs, it came as no surprise to get online and see The New York Times reporting on massive crowds in the national parks out west, even as a major heat wave and drought grip the region in a dirt crackling, pavement crumbling plague on the Earth.

Like George Carlin often liked to say, “people are stupid.”

The Earth will be fine, he said in the interview. But humans are doomed and will be extinct soon.

He said that well before the novel coronavirus came out of the unsanitary sewers of Wuhan, China and killed more than 4 million people across the planet. People are still dying from the so-called Delta variant, mainly because they are too stupid to get a free vaccination shot and wear a mask, which many stores gave away for free.

Have we totally lost the ability to market to rednecks? Give the vaccines out at Wal-mart and advertise them as FREE! That will get their big dumb butts moving.

Throw in a BAMA T-shirt and cap.

Meanwhile, Americans are flocking to the big name national parks in the American West in record numbers, the Times reports, in many cases leading to long lines and overcrowded places, even as June sets a record for the hottest ever in North America.

I mean how dumb is that?

These are newbies, who’ve never been before. They’ve discovered the great outdoors — or at least national parks — because of COVID, a movie called Nomadland — and a social media advertising campaign that is not only a waste of federal money. It’s causing far more harm than good for our treasured places, set aside for future generations and called “America’s Best Idea” by Ken Burns and PBS.

But you know people. Stupid is as stupid does.

In a way it’s a good thing people don’t listen to me — and I can fly under the radar with the best of them — because I’m now nearly all alone in this campground loop, over 1500 feet in elevation and nearly exactly 1000 miles from Mobile, Alabama and its 70 degrees as I write this. That’s what you want if you know what you’re doing. One of the showers has amazing water pressure here too. Shhh… That’s just between you and me. I’ll tell you where, but only in a private message after you make a donation.

I said almost alone. Except for one Asian family in the campsite next door.

Why do people bring little kids camping, when they are inevitably going to hate it and cry every time a bug lands on them, even if it’s just a lightening bug in the daytime? There are very few mosquitoes here, and the bees are mostly those little pollinators we used to call sweat bees. They really won’t hurt you, but how is a 2-year-old supposed to know that?

To Make It Explicit

The place to be right now, in July and August — for all you smart people out there reading this — is in a campground in the mountains of the mid-Atlantic region, or even further north if you can get there.

A few years ago I published a rough calculus of how to escape global warming and climate change in the hot summer months, while newspapers were still running stories asking the question: What city should you move to in order to escape climate change?

Duh, you don’t want to be in a city. This heat dome and heat wave hovering over the west right now will roll across the country soon and settle over the cities on the Eastern Seaboard, like the one did two years ago when I was here. I hightailed it out of the city and headed for the mountains, where I discovered a rain shadow.

Related: Escaping the Heat Dome and Heading for Walden Pond

Related: A Dangerous Heat Dome Covers the Country, and Clouds Our Brains

The calculus is pretty simple. For every 300 miles you drive north of the Gulf of Mexico — starting at a latitude of 88.10 and an elevation of 16 feet — it gets on average five degrees cooler. For every 1,000 feet of elevation you ascend to, it gets on average 5 degrees cooler.

So when it’s 100 degrees in Mobile, Alabama in July, if you drive 1000 miles north and go up above 3,000 feet in Shenandoah National Park, it will be on average about 75 degrees, 10 degrees for the miles and 15 degrees for the elevation. This is not true every day of the year, but it works out on average.

The state parks are still filling up on the weekends with local family campers, but you can find gaps during the week and a campsite with electric power hookups in range of a cell phone tower — even a mile from Camp David as the crow flies — where you can find WiFi on an iPhone hotspot.

Related: Camping in the Washington, D.C. Area Can Be A Rewarding Challenge

So enough of that. We know people are basically dumb, with an average IQ of 100. But we also know we are smarter than that, you and me.

It’s time to break down and head back into the city for the weekend, but I will be back in this spot again next week. Maybe a few other people will get smart and join me, or at least help fund our journey of discovery.

It doesn’t cost much to keep this site free.

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That’s me looking out over the Colorado River at Grand Canyon National Park by Glenn Canyon Dam: Walter Simon