u5lc_criticalthinking

From Blue Highways

by William Least Heat-Moon

A Place

Two Steller's jaybirds stirred an argy-bargy in the ponderosa. They shook their big beaks, squawked and hopped and swept down the sunlight toward Ghost Dancing and swooshed back into the pines. They didn't shut up until I left some orts from breakfast; then they dropped from the branches like ripe fruit, nabbed a gobful, and took off for the tops of the hundred-foot trees. The chipmunks got in on it too, letting loose a high peal of rodent chatter, picking up their share, spinning the bread like pinwheels, chewing fast.

   It was May Day, and the warm air filled with the scent of pine and blooming manzanita. To the west I heard water over rock as Hot Creek came down from the snows of Lassen. I took towel and soap and walked through a field of volcanic ejections and broken chunks of lava to the stream bounding off boulders and slicing over bedrock; below one cascade, a pool the color of glacier ice circled the effervescence. On the bank at an upright stone with a basin-shaped concavity filled with rainwater, I bent to drink, then washed my face. Why not bathe from head to toe? I went down with rainwater and lathered up.

An Experience

Now, I am not unacquainted with mountain streams; a plunge into Hat Creek would be an experiment in deep-cold thermodynamics. I knew that, so I jumped in with bravado. It didn't help. Light violently flashed in my head. The water was worse than I thought possible. I came out, eyes the size of biscuits, metabolism running amuck and setting fire to the icy flesh. I buffed dry. Then I began to feel good, the way the old Navajos must have felt after a traditional sweat bath and roll in the snow.… I liked Hat Creek. It was reward enough for last night.

Another Person

Back at Ghost Dancing, I saw a camper had pulled up. On the rear end, by the strapped-on aluminum chairs, was something like “The Wandering Watkins.” Time to go. I kneeled to check a tire. A smelly furry white thing darted from behind the wheel, and I flinched. Because of it, the journey would change.

   “Harmless as a stuffed toy.” The voice came from the other end of the leash the dog was on. “He's nearly blind and can't hear much better. Down just to the nose now.” The man, with polished cowboy boots and a part measured out in the white hair, had a face so gullied even the Soil Conservation Commission couldn't have reclaimed it. But his eyes seemed lighted from within.

   “Are you Mr. Watkins?” I asked.

   “What's left of him. The pup's what's left of Bill. He's a Pekingese. Chinese dog. In dog years, he's even older than I am, and I respect him for that. We're two old men. What's your name?“

   “Same as the dog's.”

…

   Watkins had worked in a sawmill for thirty years, then retired to Redding; now he spent time in his camper, sometimes in the company of Mrs. Watkins.

…

   “What kind of work you in?” he asked.

   That question again. “I'm out of work,” I said to simplify.

   “A man's never out of work if he's worth a damn. It's just sometimes he doesn't get paid. I've gone unpaid my share and I've pulled my share of pay. But that's got nothing to do with working. A man's work is doing what he's supposed to do, and that's why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn't the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man's work. Let me show you my philosophy of life.” From his pressed Levi's he took a billfold and handed me a limp business card. “Easy. It's very old.”

   The card advertised a cafe in Merced when telephone numbers were four digits. In quotation marks was a motto: “Good Home Cooked Meals.”

   “‘Good Home Cooked Meals’ is your philosophy?”

   “Turn it over, peckerwood.”

   Imprinted on the back in tiny, faded letters was this:

   I've been bawled out, balled up, held up, held down, hung up, bulldozed, blackjacked, walked on, cheated, squeezed and mooched; stuck for war tax, excess profits tax, sales tax, dog tax, and syntax, Liberty Bonds, baby bonds, and the bonds of matrimony, Red Cross, Blue Cross, and the double cross; I've worked like hell, worked others like hell, have got drunk and got others drunk, lost all I had, and now because I won't spend or lend what little I earn, beg, borrow or steal, I've been cussed, discussed, boycotted, talked to, talked about, lied to, lied about, worked over, pushed under, robbed, and damned near ruined. The only reason I'm sticking around now is to see WHAT THE HELL IS NEXT.

   “I like it,” I said.

   “Any man's true work is to get his boots on each morning. Curiosity gets it done about as well as anything else.”

Source: From Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. Copyright © 1982, 1999 by William Least Heat-Moon. By permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

Thinking Critically About Visuals

Words Paint a Picture

Describe a time when you were able to “paint a picture” with words, as this professional storyteller is doing with his young audience. Why were you able to use language so effectively? How can we “paint” word pictures more frequently in our everyday lives?

   Because language and thinking are so closely related, how well you perform one process is directly related to how well you perform the other. In most cases, when you are thinking clearly, you are able to express your ideas clearly in language. When you have unclear thoughts, it is usually because you lack a clear understanding of the situation, or you do not know the right language to give form to these thoughts. When your thoughts are truly clear and precise, this means that you know the words to give form to these thoughts and so are able to express them in language.

   The relationship between thinking and language is interactive; both processes are continually influencing each other in many ways. This is particularly true in the case of language, as the writer George Orwell points out in the following passage from his classic essay “Politics and the English Language”:

· A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly.

   Just as a drinker falls into a vicious cycle that keeps getting worse, so too can language and thinking. When your use of language is sloppy—that is, vague, general, indistinct, imprecise, foolish, inaccurate, and so on—it leads to thinking of the same sort. And the reverse is also true: Clear and precise language leads to clear and precise thinking.

   The opposite of clear, effective language is language that fails to help the reader (or listener) picture or understand what the writer (or speaker) means because it is vague or ambiguous. Most of us are guilty of using such ineffective language in speech (“It was a great party!”), but for college and work writing, we need to be as precise as possible. And our writing can gain clarity and power if we use our creative-thinking skills to develop fresh, striking figures of speech to illuminate our ideas.