There is a wonderful 9 acre lake in the western Cascades. To get to it is a 2 hour drive, 45 minutes on gravel roads, and then a 7 mile hike. This lake empties from the bottom, a spring flowing from a steep, rocky hillside about 200 yards away. There is another trail which goes within a mile and a half of the lake and then cuts away. The creek which comes from the lake cuts across that trail.

I tried hiking from that lower trail up to the lake one time. It was steep, rhododendrons so thick that the 4 times I fell down I didn't touch the ground. There were 5 different separate and distinct waterfalls in the 1/2 mile I got in 3 hours, one 80' to 100' high, the rest 40' to 60'. It was spectacular. I took pictures, lost in a box with several thousand others.

I don't know if anyone else would have ever seen those. There is no reason for anyone go go there. And it haunts me that those waterfalls are there, alive and active, with no one to see. Every once in a while I lay awake, imagining that hiking day, those waterfalls. I also remember the ground-welling bees which could and did sting multiple times through jeans, bing-bing-bing-bing in a line. Hurt so immediately and much that one jumped and fell, onto the rhododendrons and tried to get away. That's one reality, those waterfalls.

Expanding outward. Each person on this board has a remarkably similar background. Speak English, public schools, raised with newspapers reporting the same events. There are minor differences, for sure. College, military, foreign countries, families, jobs, parenthood are all varied. Only the values we were given as children are different.

And yet each person's reality is real to them. As much as I have difficulty understanding it, as much as I'm repelled by their values, as much as I'd hate myself if I had the same view, I can't deny that is their reality. They believe them, to the exclusion of all others, just as I believe mine, to the exclusion of all others especially theirs.

"No man is an island, entire of itself" as John Donne wrote. And yet we are all islands, each with our own reality, all by ourselves in separate bodies and minds.