On Naming, Not Persuasion

A letter to not send.

We wrote the following letter with no intention of sending it. It was a way to name something we were carrying and to put anger somewhere that wouldn’t leak out sideways.

We wrote it to clarify what had changed for us, not to change anyone else. Sometimes naming the damage is the only agency left.

We are sharing because we suspect we are not the only ones who have had these thoughts lately.

This letter is not meant to persuade you. It is meant to name what your choice has done to me.

Your vote changed how safe I feel in the world and how safe I feel with you. What you call politics entered my life as a personal loss.

The deepest wound is not disagreement, but your refusal to reflect or take responsibility for the harm your choice caused. I carry the consequences while you deny their existence.

I no longer trust that we share basic values of decency and truth. That loss has narrowed what we can share and who I can be with you.

This is the truth I need to acknowledge, even if you never do.

Arches Without Fees: Hiking Devil’s Garden During the Government Shutdown

Overview ~ Notes ~ Reflections ~ Photos

 

 

Top row: Views from trail near Double-O Arch over Devil's Garden and sandstone fins.

Bottom row: Double-O Arch and Landscape Arch in Arches National Park, Moab.
 

This post is about a hike through Arches National Park’s Devil’s Garden trail to Double O Arch. We were in Moab for a wedding and had limited free time to explore, so we only caught a glimpse of Moab’s surreal beauty. Even this hike was cut short for a pre-wedding dinner back in town. On the day we visited the park entrance was wide open: no fees were collected due to the government shutdown.

Overview 

Length: ~7.2 km (4.5 miles) (out-and-back to Double O Arch; the full loop is longer) 

Duration: 1.5 hours (we turned back before completing the loop) 

Elevation gain: 101 m (331 ft) 

Location: USA, Utah, Moab, Arches National Park

The Devil’s Garden trail is one of Arches National Park’s signature hikes, leading to a series of arches tucked into sandstone fins and ridges. Our destination was Double O Arch, a dramatic formation where two arches stack one above the other, like nature’s own punctuation mark. 

Notes

Driving into Arches felt surreal because we had not experienced this landscape in person before and were blown away. You normally stop at the entrance station, pay the fee, and get a map. (Or in some days we heard, you might have to wait to get into the park.) But because of the government shutdown, the booths were empty. Again, a little surreal. We simply rolled into the park, a free pass into one of America’s most iconic landscapes. It was unsettling—like sneaking into a museum after hours—but also a reminder of how fragile the systems are that protect these places.

The trail itself begins at Devil’s Garden trailhead, literally the end of the road in the park. From the trailhead, you go past Landscape Arch, one of the longest natural arches in the world. From there, the path grows more rugged, scrambling over slickrock and weaving through sandstone fins.


We reached Double O Arch, marveling at how erosion had carved two openings in the same sandstone wall. The larger arch frames the desert beyond, while the smaller one sits below like a hidden window. Standing there, you can't help but wonder how these arches form. The answer lies in millions of years of geologic processes:

• Sandstone layers deposited in ancient seas.
• Uplift and erosion exposing the rock.
• Cracks forming in the sandstone fins.
• Water seeping in, freezing and thawing, breaking rock apart.
• Wind and rain slowly enlarging openings until arches emerge.

In geologic time, arches are temporary features—eventually they collapse. Landscape Arch, for example, has shed massive rock slabs in recent decades, a reminder that these formations are always changing.

We didn’t complete the loop trail. Time was short, and Moab awaited with a pre-wedding dinner. Hiking back the way we came, we felt both satisfied and determined to return to explore more in the proper Travelmarx style. That said, the wedding activities were a blast.

Reflections

Returning to the United States after time abroad felt strangely disorienting. Driving into Arches without paying an entrance fee—because of the government shutdown—only heightened the sense that we’d stepped into a country paused mid-sentence. The landscape itself was timeless, yet the atmosphere back home was anything but: a highly charged political environment where even casual family conversations required careful navigation to avoid hot-button topics.

Against that backdrop, our hike through Devil’s Garden became more than just a walk among arches. It was a reminder of permanence and impermanence—the sandstone fins shaped over millions of years, and the fleeting turbulence of human affairs. Later that evening, we shifted from the silence of the desert to the joy of a wedding pre-celebration in Moab. The next day we would be not just guests but officiants, standing with a young couple as they began their life together.

The juxtaposition was striking with political gridlock on the national stage, personal restraint in family conversations, and then, in the middle of it all, the unambiguous joy of a wedding. The arches will one day collapse, the political climate will shift, but what endures are the bonds we create with one another: shared celebrations, moments of togetherness, and the sense of being united for common ends.

Photos

 

Left: View of Landscape Arch with grey sky.
Right: Trail in Devil's Garden.

 

Left: Sandstone fins in Devil's Garden, Arches National Park, Moab.

Right: A sign explaining how the "walls" or "fins" are formed.

  

Left: Formation in Devil's Garden.

Center: Sign at trailhead showing the possible routes.

Right: Our tracks for walk from trailhead to Double-O and back.

Weller Vases and Chlorphytum

  

Left and center: Weller Claywood vases with spider plants. Right: The location of Zanesville, Ohio 300 million years ago.

These Weller Claywood vases always bring a smile to our faces. First, they are cute when grouped together. Second, they survived a transatlantic crossing. And third, they go well with Chlorophytum.

We are at that point in our lives where we’ve regressed to the plants of our childhood, simple plants that can be grown in water for indefinite periods of time – as these spider plants can. They don’t complain too badly if you forget to water them. These Chlorophytum comosum are in glass jars inside the Weller vases.

Weller Pottery was founded by Samuel Augustus Weller in the 1870s in Ohio. The company mass-produced art pottery until about 1920, and producing commercial lines until the pottery closed in 1948. The Claywood line was one of Weller Pottery's well-known decorative series, which appeared around 1910.

Side note: We always wondered why Ohio was a center of American pottery, and particularly Zanesville. The area has important deposits of clay and developed into an important transportation hub thanks to first the rivers and then the railroads passing through. In addition, the country was rapidly modernizing at the end of the 19th century and there was an increased demand for utilitarian and decorative ceramics.

A fourth point for a smile on our faces: the clay that went into these pots came from the deposits laid down during the Pensylvannian period (roughly 318 to 299 million years ago)! At that time, Ohio was part of a flat coast plain with extensive swamps and floodplains. Check out the location of Ohio in this map of the USA 300 million years ago.


Other posts on Weller: Weller Claywood and Skimmia foremanii, Weller Clinton Ivory, Peters and Reed Moss Aztec Vases and Dryopteris, Weller Pearl and Lavandula stoechas Dried Flower Spikes, and Weller Louwelsa Vase with Rudbeckia nitida.

  

Weller Claywood vases with spider plants.

Mapping and Comparing the Murder Rates of Italy and the USA Using R

Overview | Code | Output

Three plots visually showing countries with a smaller and greater homicide rate than Italy and USA. Left: Map of the world depicting countries in green which have a homicide rate less than Italy. Center: Map of Europe depicting countries in green which have a homicide rate less than Italy. Right: Map of the word depicting countries in green which have a homicide rate less than the USA.

Overview

Traveling between the USA and Italy, you might be interested in crime statistics between the two countries as we were. In particular, we wanted to see if we could understand which country we were "safer". Safe is complex, multi-faceted concept, depending on where you are and what kind of things you do. To look at one facet of it, here we look at the murder rate per million people per country. These stats are published on the NationMaster site and are intentional homicides, number and rate per number and rate per million people.

The NationMaster site has a map where countries are colored light to dark based on their crime statistic. We wanted to look at the data in a slightly different way, specifically breaking the data into two: countries with a crime statistic greater than a reference country and countries with a crime statistic lower. Therefore, in a glance we could see for Italy or the USA (as the reference country) all the countries with the higher and lower values.

Code

You should be able to paste the code below directly onto the command line of your R environment. Here is the code on Github. See the notes below for more information.

require("dplyr")
require("rworldmap")
data(countryExData)

# www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent-crime/Murder-rate-per-million-people
data.murder <- read.csv("Murder rate per million people.csv")
colnames(data.murder)[2] <- "Rate"

# get values for Italy and USA
rate.Italy <- data.murder[data.murder$Country=="Italy","Rate"]
rate.USA <- data.murder[data.murder$Country=="United States", "Rate"]

data.murder.Italy <- data.murder
data.murder.USA <- data.murder
data.murder.Italy$RateF <- mutate(data.murder, RateF=ifelse(Rate/rate.Italy >= 1, ifelse(Rate/rate.Italy == 1.0, 1.0, 2.0),0.0))$RateF
data.murder.USA$RateF <- mutate(data.murder, RateF=ifelse(Rate/rate.USA >= 1, ifelse(Rate/rate.USA == 1.0, 1.0, 2.0),0.0))$RateF

# Plotting variables
title <- "Country homicide crimes relative to"
pal <- c("lightgreen", "lightskyblue", "mistyrose2")

# World map referenced to Italy
data.joined.Italy <- joinCountryData2Map(data.murder.Italy, joinCode="NAME", nameJoinColumn="Country")
par(mai=c(0,0,0,0),xaxs="i",yaxs="i")
mapCountryData(data.joined.Italy, nameColumnToPlot="RateF")
mapParams <- mapCountryData(data.joined.Italy, nameColumnToPlot="RateF", addLegend=FALSE, catMethod="fixedWidth", numCats=3, colourPalette=pal, mapTitle="") 
do.call( addMapLegend, c(mapParams, legendWidth=0.5, legendMar = 2, legendLabels = "none" ))
text(x=0,y=120,labels=paste(title,"Italy"), cex=1.5)
text(c(-100,0,100),-140, labels=c("Rates less than Italy","Italy","Rates greater than Italy"))

# Europe map referenced to Italy
data.joined.Italy2 <- joinCountryData2Map(data.murder.Italy, joinCode="NAME", nameJoinColumn="Country")
par(mai=c(0,0,0,0),xaxs="i",yaxs="i")
mapCountryData(data.joined.Italy2, nameColumnToPlot="RateF")
mapParams <- mapCountryData(data.joined.Italy2, nameColumnToPlot="RateF", addLegend=FALSE, catMethod="fixedWidth", numCats=3, colourPalette=pal, mapTitle="", mapRegion="europe") 
do.call( addMapLegend, c(mapParams, legendWidth=0.5, legendMar = 2, legendLabels = "none" ))
text(x=17,y=75,labels=paste(title,"Italy"), cex=1.5)
text(c(2,17,32),30, labels=c("Rates less than Italy","Italy","Rates greater than Italy"))

# World map referenced to USA
data.joined.USA <- joinCountryData2Map(data.murder.USA, joinCode="NAME", nameJoinColumn="Country")
par(mai=c(0,0,0,0),xaxs="i",yaxs="i")
mapCountryData(data.joined.USA, nameColumnToPlot="RateF" )
mapParams <- mapCountryData(data.joined.USA, nameColumnToPlot="RateF", addLegend=FALSE, catMethod="fixedWidth", numCats=3, colourPalette=pal, mapTitle="" ) 
do.call( addMapLegend, c(mapParams, legendWidth=0.5, legendMar = 2, legendLabels = "none" ))
text(x=0,y=120,labels=paste(title,"USA"), cex=1.5)
text(c(-100,0,100),-140, labels=c("Rates less than USA","USA","Rates greater than USA"))

Notes:

• On the NationMaster site, we selected all years to export. This gives the largest possible list of countries for comparison with the caveat that not all countries are compared for the same year. For this exercise of R code this wasn't a big concern. 
• If you export the NationMaster stats into a CSV file into a specific directory, then make sure you use setwd() to change to that directory or modify the read.csv() statement in the code to point to the correct location. 
• Using the rworldmap package is described here in the post Maps in R: Introduction - Drawing the map of Europe. See rworldmap package page on cran.r-project.org to get to the latest reference manual. 
• The rworldmap::mapcountryData() method will warn about quantiles as discussed in this Stack Overflow post. If you look at the help (?mapcountryData) it says "will generate unhelpful errors in data categorisation if inappropriate options are chosen, e.g. with catMethod:Quantiles if numCats too high so that unique breaks cannot be defined."

Output

The code generates three plots. Two plots are referenced for Italy and one for the USA. Each plot has three colors, green, blue and orange. Green represents countries with less homicides than the reference country and orange represents countries with more homicides than the reference. Blue represents the reference country, either Italy or the USA.

• Map 1: The world map referenced for Italy shows that there are many countries colored as orange, i.e., having more homicides. In the NationMaster data, there are only 19 countries with less homicide. Many are European and Scandinavian countries. A few countries with less homicide are in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula and others in Asia. The world map doesn't make it easy to see the smaller countries that are green.
• Map 2: Zooming into Europe makes it easier to see the countries in Europe that have less homicide than Italy, including Denmark, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austrian, Norway, and Iceland.
• Map 3: Back to the world map referenced on the USA, i.e., countries with less homicide than the USA are colored green and countries with more homicide are colored orange.

In 2010, 8.75 people per million were killed due to intentional homicide in Italy. For 2010, the number was 42.01 people per million in the USA. The UNODOC report Global Study on Homicide 2013 reports that for Italy, there were 0.9 homicides per 100,000 people with a total count for that year of 530. For the USA, the report gives 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people with a total count for that year of 14,827.

There will be discrepancy in the numbers because we are mixing years and different reporting sources, but it's still useful to do a sanity check.

• In 2012, Italy's total population was about 60 million. 8.75 people per million x 60 million = 525 people, close to the UNODOC report.
• In 2012, USA's total population was about 314 million. 42.01 people per million x 316 million = 13,275, about 10% off from UNDOC number.

The takeaway is that one is more likely to be killed by intentional homicide in the USA than in Italy. Crime in the United States Wikipedia article is a good introduction. It states that "Overall the total crime rate of the United States is higher than developed countries, specifically Europe, with South American countries and Russia being the exceptions", which is pretty much what is shown above.

An interesting side note from the UNDOC report is that "[i]n Italy, there has been a 50 per cent decline in this type of homicide since 2007, with organized crime-related rates of homicide decreasing from 0.2 to less than 0.1 per 100,000 population."

Update

2023-08-10:  This NYT article Why Is America Such a Deadly Place? references this report On gun violence, the United States is an outlier where there is this quote:  

Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole. The US has 23 times the rate of firearm homicide seen in Australia. 

Our estimates above for Italy were about 5 times greater for Italy for the years mentioned above. Just an estimate.