A winery hike – Joyous return to Rappahannock Cellars – Kim Jong-Un sheds some poundage – A North Korean’s perspective on American college campuses – Evening statistics
I returned to Shenandoah National Park today to hike with LM and four others, with a visit to a winery afterwards. We started from the Dickey Ridge Visitor Center and covered the Fox Hollow and Snead Farm loops, returning via the fire road from FAA tower at the summit. It was a fairly brief hike, about 6¼ miles and 1200 feet of elevation gain, but it was not without adventure. At one point we saw a bear in the distance on the trail. It was no more eager for an encounter than we were, and immediately turned his back to us and went off into the bushes. The trails were well-shaded, but we did not receive the refreshing breezes of yesterday. Still, it was not unduly hot at the elevation where we were hiking.
Afterwards we repaired to the winery – none other than the Rappahannock Cellars, where LM, LH, MM, and I had received so welcoming a reception nearly a year ago in July. There were more customers today than there had been during our previous visit, and as a result the attention we received was less personal than before; but they were very polite and helpful nonetheless, and we had no difficulty in securing a table in the covered patio on the third floor. There we laid out the provisions we had brought for the occasion: various cheeses, bean dip, fruit (including some excellent sour cherries that LH had picked up at a farmer’s market), crackers, lunch meats, and cookies. There were a few other customers who came up to the patio at times, and the display of eatables that we had assembled seemed to inspire an emotion akin to awe: one young woman asked, in a voice of wonder, “Are you all retired?” and another customer actually took a photo of us to send to her relatives. As before, we sat about two hours together, animatedly discussing both political and personal matters while we repeatedly filled our glasses with the wine we had purchased before ascending to the patio. Social gatherings such as these are now easier to obtain than they were earlier, but they are to be cherished nonetheless.
North Koreans are reportedly concerned about Kim Jong-Un’s “emaciated” appearance. Kim, who is 5’8” tall, previously weighed about 310 pounds, but now seems to have lost 30-45 pounds in recent months. His compatriots’ solicitude seems somewhat misplaced: even with the maximum amount of weight loss he would still amply qualify for the “obese” category. It is true, however, that no one knows whether this relatively rapid weight loss is the result of deliberate changes in his diet to slim down or the result of health problems. Both his father and his grandfather died as a result of heart issues.
Yeonmi Park, a defector from North Korea who eventually made her way to the U.S., says that her new country’s future is as bleak as that of the country she left behind her. She became a student at Columbia University, where, according to her, she was subjected to the same “anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness” that she received from her North Korean educators. During orientation at Columbia, for instance, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen. Then, too, she was nonplussed by the deliberate confusion of language, with every class requesting students to declare their preferred pronouns. “English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?” Yeonmi added that after getting into several arguments with her teachers she “learned how to just shut up” in order to maintain a good GPA and thereby to graduate. “Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she said. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.” Having myself received an education at an Ivy League university, I can readily understand her dismay; although I’m bound to say that the oppressiveness was less apparent at the graduate level. I believe that she is mistaken in taking the Ivy League campus as representative of the U.S. at large; but there can be no doubt that the amount of double-think that goes on within these campuses has to be heard (and read) to be believed.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 182,173,963; # of deaths worldwide: 3,944,908; # of cases U.S.: 34,509,025; # of deaths; U.S.: 619,568.