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The rare pink pigeon of Mauritius.

Might be somewhat belated due to my general ignorance, but little by little this world travel routine is making a dent in my thick noggin.

But, belated and simplistic as my awareness is, I have to admit and accept the globe it takes days to travel is also instantly connected in ways I do not fully grasp.

In how many small shops in far off locations was I able to use a U.S. credit card to buy food or gifts?

How many nations (so far my experience says an open border is something most nations don’t allow in order to protect their people and territories) now screen and permit visitors by using electronic visas?

How many have you pass your Passport through a device for screening before you yourself are screened by camera?

That’s right. So far on this adventure I’ve not had a single stamp put on my papers.

Consider the meaning of instant access to cash resources without having to carry currency. It wasn’t so very long ago that international banking and currency was in its infancy or didn’t exist.

In the buildup of the monetary system (loosely related to passport-citizenship management) we have today there was a lot of mess and disaster. Huge industries and big banks were, in part, what made the horrors of World Wars possible.

Those very same things also led to massive civil improvements when warship development brought improved shipping and making explosives with chemicals led to replacement of organic fertilizers.

In short, it’s possible to say that assigning blame is much the same as giving causal credit. And yet, if it didn’t work and fulfill some need we wouldn’t have it.

And recall, please, the human ego plays a part. By assigning blame we get ourselves off the hook. It’s their fault.

Contrarily, giving others their due credit takes away from our human pride. Part of the pride problem revolves around deciding on things without sufficient information behind us.

Take, as example, attitudes about wealth and money.

How long ago was it that money was primarily held in gold and silver. The gold standard was a serious issue in American politics. And truly, numbers of readers will recall U.S. paper money being silver certificates, each representing the U.S. treasury (famous Fort Knox) as having the amount of silver as represented by the paper certificate.

If we were to have limited the amount we were able to spend or invest by the gold or silver available then how many hospitals or schools or cannon could we have afforded to build?

The monetary system we’ve come to use has allowed growth and progress beyond the limits of a treasury.

In this way criticism of a system such as banking or monetary policy rests on success of the system being questioned. Worth keeping in mind.

Many of us, myself included, have a strong regard for nature. Wouldn’t life be better if lived more in tune with nature?

But, how far and close to nature do we want to be?

With Africa on my agenda I wonder how we’d be if, let’s say, a trip west from Duluth might have to halt for a day or two for a herd of bison to pass by.

Or, as some have suggested, the famously extinct passenger pigeon (rare pink pigeons are found in Mauritius – in case you are a pigeon fancier) once visited our region the reason for it not returning to the same place every year was habitat degradation. Caused by? Passenger pigeons.

Imagine the Twin Ports or Two Harbors or Cloquet buried under a million or more nesting, feeding, defecating pigeons.

The lovely natural world we see in BBC documentaries or wonderful cartoons for kids isn’t real. There are no blisters, bug bites or guano piled a foot deep at the doorstep. The snow we bemoan is as much nature at its finest as any film ever made. The green boreal and pine forests around us had, whether bleak outcrop or enchanting picnic spot, to periodically burn to ashen remains.

With glassy seas and biologically unique Madagascar on the horizon as we near Africa it’s not possible for me to ignore the challenging puzzles of our ever-complex world.

Seen from afar shorelines once assumed remote glow with proof time stands still nowhere and for no one.

I can play the games of a Mark Twain Innocent Abroad asking a tour guide for newer fossils.

On a hot as Hades tropic isle it’s fun to stand in a throng of aging touri anticipating a sedate excursion and loudly ask, “Oh, isn’t this the tour to nudist island?”

And of course how not to make the on-deck comparison of the sunning elderly with basking walrus? Except for the odor of tanning oil you might not sense the difference and think you were on a breeding beach covered in sea mammals rather than retired stock brokers nursing lingering hangovers.

So long as you or I have strength to shovel snow aside or swat an annoying mosquito we participate in the real world.

No attempted truth telling, sarcasm, polemic, humor, warning or glowing praise I might present to you can either capture or alter the immensity of, let’s say, the Indian Ocean, let alone the Pacific from Alaska all the way south toward the Antarctic.

A frame of reference, say multiples of Lake Superior becomes unwieldy to the point of uselessness. At what point does comparison with Superior fall flat? How many Sure, our much loved terrain drains into the Arctic via Hudson Bay, the Atlantic via the Great Lakes, and Gulf via the Mississippi, but can any of us imagine the space between James Bay and Gulf as equivalent to a number of Lake Superiors?

In any event, odd to be on a Frenchspeaking Pacific isle and think Duluth did not get it’s name by being Spanish.

We are connected in more ways than I can explain.

The lights of commerce on ships move between glowing shores where ports might be seen as luring goods with light as if ships were moths drawn to an unknowable fate.