Rail Trails

(The above are from the KATY Trail in Missouri.)

One of those memory things popped up on my Facebook news feed.  You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.  Facebook periodically reminds you of something you posted a few years ago.  This one was from four years ago.  I tried to make a comment about it and repost it, but something happened that my comments didn’t make it.  But it got me to thinking, which is bad news for you.

The memory and pictures were from my bike ride on the Erie Canal Towpath four years ago.  It was a solo ride, though I had lots of support from friends who kept in touch with me on the ride.  I had someone looking after my health and someone else watching the weather for me.  I was met partway through the ride by friends who brought me much needed nourishment and refreshment.  And I had friends who kept in touch with me as I rode.  My biggest support came from Susan who not only dropped me off at the beginning of each day’s ride and picked up the pieces at the end of each day, but encouraged and supported me each step (pedal) of the way.

(Erie Canal Towpath)

KATY Trail

That experience inspired me to continue riding.  Since the Erie Canal Towpath, I’ve ridden on the KATY Trail in Missouri and the Confederation Trail on Prince Edward Island.  Our oldest son and our youngest daughter accompanied me on the last two rail trail rides.  They said they wanted to accompany me on the rides to spend time with me, but I think they just wanted to make sure I didn’t die of a heart attack on the trail.

Between the three major rides that I’ve done, I’ve ridden the equivalent of riding from Washington, D.C. to Kansas City.  When you include the training miles for those rides, the distance would extend to Salt Lake City.  For a lot of cyclists, that distance is no big deal.  Some would cover that and more in a single summer.  I’m old and slow and I’m determined and I will eventually make it to my destination.

Confederation Trail, Prince Edward Island

I have been richly blessed as I have ridden these trails.  Not only have I seen beautiful country that a person would not normally see otherwise, but I’ve become acquainted with people from around the country and around the world.  I’ve been surrounded by the love and companionship of family and friends.

The rides are not over.  There may even be one more long ride this fall.  I’m sure there will be more next year and you will be inundated with more pictures, hopefully from Idaho, Nebraska, Indiana, and Louisiana.  And maybe my health will be as such that I can continue annual bicycle rail trail rides.  Until then, Happy Trails!

Erie Canal Towpath

Firearms Deaths

The good folks in the news media would have you believe that every murder committed is with a firearm.  Indeed, firearms account for more than half of the murders committed in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that all murders are done with a firearm.

From a criminological point of view, murder is a complicated and (technically) messy act.  We always want to know why a person would take another person’s life, which goes to motive.  We sometimes look to motive to show a person’s intent to murder.  Motive is not a factor in our judicial system.  Intent, however, is. 

There are relationships, things people do, and places people go that expose them to violence.  The majority of murder victims are either related to their assailant or are acquainted with their assailant.  It should be no surprise that a person's home can be a dangerous place.  The presence and use of alcoholic beverages also expose a person to violence.  Being with someone who is intoxicated or being in and around bars or lounges also puts a person in harms way, especially at night.  Gang activity is responsible for about 2,000 homicides annually.  There were 2,363 gang homicides in 2012 (https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Survey-Analysis/Measuring-the-Extent-of-Gang-Problems).

To be clear, I am a Second Amendment supporter.  I also believe there are actions we can take to reduce the number of firearm murders.  But I think it is also important to keep things in proper perspective.  For that reason, I’ve compiled a list of weapons used to commit murder in 2012 along with Drug Overdose Deaths, and Traffic Deaths, including DUI/DWI deaths.  Source data are included.  I’ve only listed some of the instruments used for murders.

Cause of Death	Number & Year of Statistics
All Firearms	9.032 (2012)
Drug Overdose	70,237 (2017)
All Traffic Deaths	37,461 (2018)
DWI/DUI	10,874 (2017)

Murder Instrument	Number
Handguns	6,562
Rifles	248
Shotguns	262
Other Firearm	1,959
Knives	1,567
Blunt Object	435
Hands/Feet	660
Fire	71
Narcotics	62
Strangulation	89
Asphyxiation	96
Other	830
Total	11,961

(https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2010-2014.xls)

“70,237 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in 2017.” (https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html)

Highway traffic deaths: 37,461 (2018)

(https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812451)

DWI/DUI Deaths 2017: 10,874

(https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving)

If we want to reduce preventable death and carnage in our country, it would only make sense that we would express more outrage about drug-related deaths and traffic accidents.  And while we should not downplay the role of firearms in murders and suicides in the United States, I would suggest that we have a behavioral problem in our country and not a gun problem.

Note: Sources used were based on the first reliable sets of data that were found on the internet.

Confederation Trail: Endurance, Exertion, and Exhaustion

Our ride on the Confederation Trail on Prince Edward Island, Canada, actually began three years ago when Susan, our daughter Megan Tilton, and I paid a visit to that beautiful island province.  As we toured the island, we noticed a sign at the trailhead in Tignish that said Confederation Trail.  Then as we traveled about the island we kept seeing where the trail crossed the highway.  We researched the trail and learned that it was a rail trail that traversed the entire island from Tignish to Elmira for a total of 273 kilometers or 170 miles.

Most of our sightings of the trail were on fairly level ground.  Though the eastern half of the island was a little hilly, we figured that the rail trail itself could not be too difficult.  Later research showed that there were indeed hills, but nothing greater than a two-percent grade.  How hard could that possibly be?  We learned.

We left Megan’s home in Little Elm, Texas, on July 21, 2019, and traveled through Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and Albany, New York, on our way to the Canadian border and on to Summerside, Prince Edward Island.  Because of time constraints, we made the trip in three days, meaning that we spent about 12 hours a day on the road not counting stops along the way.

Endurance

We began our ride on Wednesday, July 24, at about 6:45 a.m. Atlantic Time.  We passed through the towns of Alberton, Elmsdale, O’Leary, Wellington, and ended our day’s ride 70 miles later in Summerside.  We were at an elevation of 174 feet when we left Tignish and climbed to 450 feet at Elmsdale.  There may have been higher elevations, but Elmsdale was the highest point that I recorded.

  

Our first real stop was in O’Leary where we met a young couple from British Columbia.  They had decided to ride their bikes on the Atlantic provinces and were camping along the way.  I think they were little more hardcore riders than we were.

Wildlife on this leg of our journey included a Garter Snake, several birds including yellow finches, chipmunks, and a fox.  We saw the fox just east of Wellington.

Several benches and small pavilion covered picnic tables were along the path, located about every two or three kilometers.  They became welcome sights as we continued along our way, especially on the second and third days.

Exertion

We left Summerside at 6:00 a.m. on Thursday.  Our motel was located in Summerside, so when we arrived the previous day we simply rode to our motel, then left from our motel on Thursday.  On this day we passed through Kensington, Emerald Junction, Hunter River, Winsloe, and ended at Tracadie.  Our elevation at Sunnyside was 260 feet and we had climbed to 646 feet a little more than an hour-and-a-half later in Kensington.  Tracadie has an elevation of 397 feet.

This second day of our journey saw lots of up and down hill riding.  One peak reached 1033 feet and the second-highest peak was at 984 feet.  This would have been a 590 feet climb from the beginning of our ride in Tracadie.  Though these were two-percent grades, they were on the order of seven to nine kilometers long.  There were not as many benches and picnic tables along this second stretch of the day’s ride of 52 miles.

We saw a huge rabbit outside of Kensington.  Other than birds and chipmunks, the only other animal we saw was a red-bellied brown snake.

We were met with a pleasant surprise at Emerald Junction.  A rest area was located near a community center that, though it was closed, had a nice clean restroom open and accessible.

Prince Edward Island has a reputation for its potatoes, and we saw hundreds of acres of potato fields along the way.

We made a lunch stop at Hunter River where there was a nice park adjacent to the trail.  Hunter River is situated on a hill and all the businesses in town were downhill from the park where we stopped.  We were sorely tempted to go down the hill to the businesses, but the immediate thought came to mind that we would have to climb the steep hill back up.  We chose not to go down, though I’m sure the reward would have been worth it.

At about kilometer 168 we saw a couple of youngsters with a mother at a lemonade stand at a road crossing.  We couldn’t help but stop and buy a couple of cookies and a fruit smoothie.  The kids were cute, but I have a feeling that we may have been their only customers for the day.  Refreshment was not the only thing we picked up at the lemonade stand.  It was here that we learned that Tracadie is not pronounced Tra-CAY-dee, but is TRACK-a-dee.

Susan picked us up at Tracadie at 5:20 p.m. and took us back to Summerside.

Exhaustion

We returned to Tracadie on Friday to resume and finish our ride to Elmira at the eastern end of the trail.  The ride began with a long uphill stretch.  We traveled up toward St. Peter’s Bay where we saw lobster boats in the bay.  We also stopped for fish and chips at St. Peter’s Bay.

We noticed that there was a variety of scenery across the island.  Whereas the western part of the island is quite forested, the last 48 miles of our ride was marked with ponds, lakes, and ocean inlets.  There were not quite as many trees along this leg of the ride.  We didn’t see quite as many people along this stretch of the trail either.  In fact, we saw a woman who regularly rides a few miles of this part of the trail who informed us that we were only the second riders she had seen all summer long.

This part of the trial was not as well maintained, but was certainly passable.  Though the elevation was not as high as the previous day’s ride, we climbed to at least 650 feet before we reached our destination in Elmira, elevation 466 feet.  Yes, the last couple of kilometers were downhill, thankfully.

There is a railroad museum at Elmira.  Unfortunately, it was closed.  However, just a few miles away from the end of the trail there is a lighthouse at the tip of the island.

It was a great experience.  It was hard but it wasn’t bad.  The days were long.  In hindsight, this would have been a much better ride in September or early October.  It is debatable whether we should have started at the east end and ridden west instead of the way we went.  Prevailing winds were at our back most of the time, though we could certainly feel it when it was in our face.  Also, in hindsight, had we had more time it would have been a much easier ride had we taken at least four days, if not five or six days to ride.  On the other hand, it was a challenge – a challenge that we met and I’m grateful for having had the experience.

The best part of the ride was spending time with my daughter.  There really is no other way to express it other than to say that the ride was about family.

The Parable of the Apple Pie

There was once a bakery in a small community.  Not long after the bakery opened for business it quickly gained a reputation for baking some of the most fabulous apple pies in town.  As the bakery’s reputation grew people began to come to this town to live just so they could have a piece of the apple pie.

Never did the quality of ingredients change in the apple pie and the same tender loving care that went into the first apple pie was repeated in every apple pie that was sold.  People longed for the crisp sweet, tart flavor of the local apples, just the right amount of spices, and flaky pie crust.  Though many people preferred their apple pies warm and fresh with a scoop of ice cream, it was the pie they came for.

As the reputation of this bakery grew, people from a neighboring town decided they were going to raid the bakery and take total control of it so they could have it for themselves.  The mayor of the neighboring town was especially interested in the revenue the bakery could generate for his own town.  But the people of the little town where the bakery was located united together and defended their bakery.  As a result, their little town grew closer together and it continued to prosper.

In fact, because the people had united together around their apple pie bakery, they decided to work together to make the bakery’s pies available in other communities.  Of course, there were communities that did not like nor want apple pies, and that was fine.  But many communities loved the apple pies coming from the little bakery and were more than willing to buy the apple pies.

So valuable was the apple pie from this bakery that soon and entire economy grew from it.  There were farmers who planted their orchards into apples and who hired quality control employees.  The orchard machinery was being built in the town and bankers set up business to help control the flow of money and generate interest for investors.  The bakery had grown, but maintained the high standards it had started with. Traders in sugar and spices sat up business to keep the bakery in full supply of quality ingredients.  A trucking business grew in order to transport apples from the orchards to the bakery and to supply apple pies around the country.  Soon, the little stores that sold the apple pies grew into large grocery stores.  Shop keepers became chain store operators.  The townspeople knowing that the apple pie produced by the bakery was so important to their economy that they sent their children off to the best schools to become agronomists, biochemists, farmers, engineers, welders, plumbers, electricians, lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, and police officers – all so they could keep the valued apple pies in their community.

Several miles away there was another community.  The people in that community saw the prosperity of the little town that was home to the famous apple pie bakery.  They knew that attempts had been made to take over the bakery by force, but realized that the townspeople worked together to prevent that from happening.  So, they devised a plan.  They decided that they would gradually move into the famous town and begin buying apple pies from that bakery.  One of them would get a job at the bakery and suggest that the owner could improve sales by altering the recipe to meet the desires of his friends who had also moved into the community.  Then after they had established themselves, they would demand that certain ingredients be omitted from the pies because it didn’t suit their needs.  They would then demand that other ingredients be substituted and that the way the pies were baked had to be modified to make them happy.

The owner of the bakery wanting to please everyone decided to make the few changes in the apple pies and did so gradually over a period of time.  At first, the townspeople were O.K. with the changes to accommodate the newcomers to the town, but after a while, the apple pies that were coming from the bakery tasted nothing like the original apple pies.  Soon, none of the original townspeople would go to the bakery for their apple pies.  Neighboring communities lost interest in the apple pies coming from the bakery.  The owner of the bakery seeing that he had lost all his business from the townspeople decided to sell his bakery.  He barely made a profit from the sale of his bakery to the newcomers and left town.

The bakery, now under ownership of the newcomers soon closed.  The apple pie that it was once famous for was no longer the apple pie it once was.  When the bakery closed, the community fell into disarray.  No longer were delicious, mouth-watering apple pies available to the world.  Farmers no longer had a buyer for their apples.  The trucking industry shut down.  With no customer to buy spices and sugar and other pie ingredients, the traders in those businesses closed their doors and left town.  When all these business owners left town to seek other opportunities, the lawyers, doctors, and bankers also left.  Soon, there was no revenue stream to fund village and the firefighters and police officers could no longer be paid, so they also left town.  Schools closed because few children were left to attend school and there were no teachers left to teach the remaining children.  Buildings burned to the ground since there were no firefighters and crime escalated when it was discovered that what few police were left could not handle all the calls for service.  Soon people began taking the law into their own hands.  The town became a brutal place to live.  People died from illnesses that could have been cured had there been doctors and nurses to care for them. 

While a few of the original townspeople had the means to live in the once prosperous little community, they discovered that they no longer had a say in the way their town operated.  They found themselves taxed at such a high rate to keep what little city services were available going that they could also no longer afford to live in what had once been their lovely little community.  And soon, they too left.

The bakery with its doors and windows long since boarded over, sat empty with the exception of apple peels here and there on the floor.  The distant town had moved in, but there were no more apple pies and without the apple pies there was no prosperity.

Meanwhile, those who left the town and people in neighboring communities longed for the day when they ate delicious, mouth-watering, warm apple pie.  But there was none.

News Media Can't Get it Right

Trigger Warning!

I am defensive of law enforcement.  Start messing with the police and I get upset.  Make wild accusations about law enforcement and I really get upset.  Distortion of the facts falls into the “wild accusations” column.

However, when criticism is justified, I’m all in.  When one of our own tarnishes his or her badge, my badge is also tarnished.

The left-leaning USA Today story began with the following headline.  “We found 85,000 cops who’ve been investigated for misconduct.  Now you can read their records.”  (Story by John Kelly and Mark Nichols)

First of all, let’s just get this out there.  Personnel records are supposed to be internal records and not available for public review.  It appears that this is no longer the case.  So, if police confidential internal affairs records are subject to public review, you can count on your private “confidential” personnel records being open to public scrutiny some day.  But this is not the main issue here.

The article explains that 85,000 police officers have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade.  We are talking about a ten-year period.  While the authors mention such things as drug dealing, theft, DWI, and spousal abuse, they fail to mention that misconduct can also include violation of department policies, rules, and procedures, all of which can lead to discipline up to and including termination.

Their report goes on to explain that they had uncovered another 200,000 acts of police misconduct that included 110,000 internal affairs investigations resulting in 30,000 officers who were decertified in 44 states.  That translates into 170,000 of reports of misconduct that came up empty-handed and 80,000 internal affairs investigations that didn’t result in officer termination.

On the surface, these numbers paint a terrible picture of police in the United States.  But let’s put these numbers into perspective.  Those 200,000 acts of misconduct include not only crimes but also violations of department policies and procedures and over a 10-year period.  Essentially, they are saying that there are 20,000 yearly acts of police misconduct.  In 2013 there were a total of 15,388 state, local, and county law enforcement agencies across the country.  (There are an additional 2,597 special jurisdiction police agencies such as campus, railroad, housing authority, port police.)  This means that on average, every police agency in the country had 1.3 officers engaged in police misconduct each year (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2015).

Another way of looking at these statistics that the USA Today authors are putting out is to look at the number of law enforcement officers in the United States and stacking that number up against officer misconduct reports.  There were 701,169 state, local, and county law enforcement officers, not including the special jurisdiction police, in 2016 (BJS, 2015).  Going on the average of 20,000 reports of misconduct per year, this would amount to 2.85% of officers being disciplined for misconduct each year.  Throw in those additional special jurisdiction numbers if you want and the numbers go down.

There are at least two more factors that need to be considered as we look at the numbers of police misconduct.  One has to do with the distribution of police officers across varying sized departments.

There are 83 police departments across the country employing over 1,000 sworn officers.  At the same time, there are 13,096 police agencies employing 24 or fewer officers.  There are 2,125 agencies that employ only one (1) officer!  (BJS, 2015).  It is a sad day indeed when 1.3 officers are disciplined for misconduct in a police agency of one (1).  In other words, more police misconduct is going to take place in increasingly larger agencies.

The second factor to be considered is the attrition rate in law enforcement.  Various studies have been conducted over the years into this issue.  The Vermont Criminal Justice Center reports a 51% turnover rate in the first two years of employment.  North Carolina reports a 14% turnover rate with new officers averaging a 33-month tenure.  Perhaps the most comprehensive study on police attrition, Koper, Maguire and Moore (2001) report that two-thirds of all officers in small agencies and one-third of officers in large police agencies resign within the first five years of employment. 

These last two factors alone confuse the narrative of a crooked law enforcement community.

Now, without a doubt, there are hidden numbers related to misconduct.  Some acts of misconduct go unreported.  Other acts of misconduct are handled by police agencies in a way that do not get included in the reports.  And without a doubt, police should be held accountable for misconduct.  But when we talk about police conduct, let’s at least be fair about it and put misconduct into proper perspective.  Especially in a time when police departments across the country are begging for people to join their ranks, we need to honesty in reporting.  And before the journalistic finger is pointed at law enforcement, perhaps it would be good for the media to clean up its own act.  Just exactly how many more media monsters (see, I can use inflammatory language, too) are there out there like Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Price, James Toback, Mark Halperin, Kevin Spacey, Michael Oreskes, Brett Ratner, Russell Simmons, C.K. Lewis, Jeffrey Tambor, Glenn Thrush, Charlie Rose, John Lasseter, Matt Lauer, and the venerable Garrison Keillor are out there?

Want to know why there is friction between police and the media?

Thomas Black Jack Ketchum

From most accounts, Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum and his brother, Sam, had been
welcomed by the ladies at dances and social gatherings.  But that was before he and
his brother decided that their need for cash outweighed their ability to acquire it
through legitimate means.  Tom had worked on his brother’s ranch, but decided that
cow punching was not for him. He turned to banks and the railroads for revenue.

His first train robbery was outside of Deming, New Mexico, where he netted about
$20,000.  Robbing trains was so appealing to him that he extended his range through
the rest of New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming.  But it was New Mexico
where he built up his best, or perhaps his worst, reputation.

The brothers rode with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, but Black Jack had shown
himself to be so ruthless that it appears that he was invited to leave Cassidy’s gang.  
Back Jack and Sam had their own gang that met with various level of success.
Eventually, Thomas “Black Jack” and his brother had a falling out and they went their
separate ways.  Sam ended up getting himself apprehended and sentenced to the
Santa Fe State Prison where he later died. Black Jack on the other hand had
managed to escape capture.

Acting now as a lone train robber, Tom decided to rob the same train he and his gang
had previously robbed near Folsom, New Mexico.  As he made his approach to the
train, Frank Harrington, the train’s conductor, saw and recognized Ketchum and
greeted him with a blast from a shotgun.  The wound nearly severed Ketchum’s arm.
He fell back, and unable to get onto his horse and escape, he found a nearby
tree where he propped himself up and waited for rescue.  When a couple of men
saw him and went to render aid, Black Jack drew down on the men. One of them
said, “If that’s the way you feel about it, we’ll just leave you here.” Ketchum threw his
gun aside and allowed himself to be taken into custody.

He rode the train to Trinidad, Colorado, where his arm was amputated and was
then sent to Santa Fe.  From Santa Fe he was sent to Clayton, New Mexico, to face
trial for train robbery, where he was convicted and sentenced to hang.

At the hanging, Black Jack allegedly made two statements.  He is credited with both
telling Sheriff Garcia to hurry up and get it over with.  He is also credited with telling
the sheriff that lunch was served promptly at noon in hell and to hurry up as he didn’t
want to miss lunch.  Garcia struck the hanging rope twice with an ax and the deed
was done. However, Clayton’s only hanging did not go quite as smoothly as hoped.

The inexperienced hangman had left a 200-pound bag of sand attached to the rope
overnight, causing the rope to become as stiff as a wire cable.  When the rope was
cut and Ketchum fell through the trap door, the stiff rope decapitated him.

Ketchum is buried in the Clayton Cemetery.  As you enter the cemetery and go down
the main road you will find his plot all by itself, separated from all other graves by two
roads, one running into and the other out of the cemetery.  It seems that no one
wanted to be buried next to Black Jack. His grave is located just a few hundred feet
into the cemetery. You can’t miss it.

If you visit his grave, you might find coins tossed onto his grave.  When I visited
his grave there was a couple of dollars worth of quarters, nickels, and dimes.