My First Hand Guide To The Old West

Many people my age learned about the old west from Death Valley Days, a television show that ran from the time I was the age of four until I was in college.  It was hosted briefly by Ronald Reagan the future President’s last gig as an actor before he became a politician… or is that redundant?

But I had a personal guide to the old west during that span, one with first hand experience.  The youngest of my great grandparents, Ralph Messersmith, was born in 1879 just two years after Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was succeeded as President.  He lived until 1973 while I was in law school.

Most of my family were staunch, very conservative Republicans, but it is from Ralph, a proud F.D.R.- Democrat, that I gained an appreciation for more progressive policies, especially toward American Indians and other ethnicities.

He was a genuine progressive era progressive and very close friends with George Dern, a progressive governor of Utah and Secretary of War under Roosevelt.  Ralph pulled my sensibilities to the center, where they remain today.

He was born and lived all of his life in and around a valley where the Pony Express had skirted the sound end of the Oquirrh Mountains to head west along the edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert, a series of salt flats including Bonneville made famous since the 1930s for land speed records.

Many times Ralph drove me along the old trail, pointing out where the Express riders would change horses at the old Faust Ranch before it became a stagecoach route.

He would always describe how my great-great grandfather Thomas had passed the ranch as he rode east along the trail in 1862 as a Union Cavalry trooper in the 3rd California Volunteers, having recently saved the life of commanding General Patrick O’Connor during a skirmish with a band of Shoshoni.

Their mission was to protect the overland stage route used to ship gold east to fund the war effort to preserve the Union.  Thomas had enlisted following a not-so-successful mining venture with his soon-to-be famous friend Samuel Clemmons, pen name Mark Twain.

As his son would do, Tom went both by Messersmith and Smith, and both variations appear in Twain’s letters home.

They (and I) descend in part from German Palatines, who fleeing the frequent invasions from the French emigrated to America in the 1700s.  They settled in Pennsylvania, migrated to southwest Virginia and then to Missouri where my great-great grandfather was born and raised prior to accepting Twain’s invitation to join him out west.

Ralph brought to life his father’s memories of riding as a cavalry trooper through the adobe buildings of deserted Camp Floyd.  Until the year before it had encamped nearly a quarter of the entire U.S. Army at the time including the Second Dragoons, Fourth Artillery and Fifth, Seventh and Tenth Infantry units.

Ostensible they were deployed to put down a so-called Utah rebellion but historians now speculate that the Secretary of War at the time and namesake for the camp had sent as many federal troops as he could west because as a Virginian he anticipated the Civil War.

At Camp Floyd, the military units had been led by soon-to-be Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston.  At the outbreak of the Civil War, these troops headed east with a third of the officers and a quarter of the troops joining the Confederacy.

By the next year when my great-great grandfather’s Union cavalry arrived, General Johnston had already fallen as a casualty at the Battle of Shiloh, a pivotal Civil War engagement along the Mississippi-Tennessee line with Union generals Grant and Sherman.

My great-great grandfather would have also ridden past Fairfield and Cedar Fort where he would eventually settle, marry, raise a family, ranch and herd sheep.  Ralph gave me a New York Times clipping describing that Fairfield, a village across the creek from the Camp Floyd, was also known as “Frogtown” because at the time it was “wholly inhabited by gamblers and “grog-sellers.”

For two generations of students, 1926-1944, Ralph had driven the first school bus from Fairfield to Cedar Fort, stopping along the five mile route to teach the kids how to properly and safely handle a rifle for target shooting and hunting.

He also shared with me his genuine affection for Skull Valley Indians, a band of Goshute, part of the Western Shoshonis indigenous to the Great Basin.  This band would bring their horses to Cedar Fort when Ralph was the age of my grandsons now and hunt in the nearby canyons.

A soon-to-be chief tragically died on one of these visits and the burial made a lifelong impression on Ralph who would always care for their graves on “Decoration Day,”  along with that of his parents.

On one trip to show me the narrow and stream-filled Skull Valley bookended by the Cedar and Stansbury mountain ranges, he stopped to point out what as he was growing up had once been the Iosepa (pronounced Youseepa) Agriculture and Stock Company.

By my visit it had become a somewhat eerie ghost town. The areas streams had also drawn herders such as my great-great grandfather.

The ranch was run by Polynesians he called Kanakas.  They had met with discrimination when as Mormon converts they had emigrated to Utah in the 1880s so the church established the ranch and nearby town for them in August of 1889.

But the harsh climate took its toll on a people native to places such as Hawaii.  It became a deserted ghost town by 1917 when most Kanakas had returned to the islands of the Pacific because the Mormons had erected a temple there.

Ralph admired their tenacity and gentleness and music.  He often used their story to reinforce upon me that discrimination such as the Kanakas and Goshute experienced was morally wrong and un-American.

It wasn’t until 1978 that the Mormon Church returned to the ethnic tolerance and acceptance of its roots.  A few weeks ago a new introduction to its scriptures notes that “records offer no clear insights into the origins” of that span when it wasn’t.

Even churches are subject to internal politics and factions. It is nice to see one that can overcome them.  However, that period may be the reason my great-grandfather was never active in the church.

Four years before he was born, his parents and other Mormons in Cedar Fort listed all of their property on a notification to the church that they were going to live the United Order, a religious collective. 

However, while many communities experimented with this approach at the time, Cedar Fort was cautioned to wait with the words – “Wait till the head moves, before the tail starts to wiggle.”  Within a few year the movement faded.

Ultra-conservative now, the Mormon Church has a long tradition of social and cultural innovation.

By the time I was in college the Skull Valley Indian families Ralph would visit a few miles from the Kanka’s ranch had dwindled from 20 families to just 2 but he continued to regale me with stories about the chiefs he had known such as Old Moon, William, Dick Mooni and Johnny Bear.

Each year when I was young, Ralph would go out before Christmas and buy several pair of beaded gloves as gifts for friends and family, one of several treasures I have lost during various moves.  He was also sure to stop and pay respects to 53 Kanakas graves on the old ranch.

Other than the kids buried in Cedar Fort during his youth, he never learned where the Skull Valley band buried their dead.

Sometime after my first year of college and one of Ralph’s final visits, more than 6,000 head of sheep mysteriously died in the area where my great-grandfather had herded his.

It turned out that the day prior, an F-4 Phantom strike fighter like the one my uncle was then flying over North Vietnam had dropped chemical weapons as an open-air test over the Dugway Proving Ground, a practice banned in 1969.

In his twenties, Ralph went up into the Oquirrah Mountains mining districts.  In Mercur he bought and managed a herd of horses for the Golden Gate Mining Company.  He also rode shipments as a sharpshooter and ran a livery stable in town.

Ralph was also elected to the City Council there and worked to run electricity to what is now a popular ghost town.  My maternal grandmother Erma Deane was born there.  It is probably also where he became close friends with soon-to-be Governor Dern.

Prior to that Ralph had served earlier in a similar capacity three miles south at Sunshine Mine where his lifelong friend Will Evans also ran the M & M Saloon.  Ralph definitely found more success in mining the old west for silver and gold than his father had with Mark Twain in Nevada.

He went on to own real estate and ranching interests.  During the Great Depression he ran the Lehi Rolling Mill, later famous as a backdrop in the 1984 movie version of Footloose with Kevin Bacon starring as a character with my first name but without the “y.”  A long way from his current roll in “The Following.”

During my great-grandfather’s time at the mill, my mother remembers her mom making underwear for her from used grain sacks with the logo of the various cereals still showing across her bum.

I gleaned even more insight from Ralph during weekend pancake breakfasts with he and and his son-in-law, my maternal grandfather Mark White while I was in college.

They were widowers and I wasn’t yet married.  Having grown up on a ranch near Yellowstone Park in Idaho, this is as close as I had lived to them.

Those times were priceless even if I had heard some of the stories countless times by then.  After breakfast we would sometimes take a ride out along the old Pony Express trail but this time I would drive.

In their 70s and 80s, Ralph and his friend Will, friends since they were seven and ten years of age respectively, would sit in their old sedan parked nose-in to “watch the girls go by” on Main Street in Lehi.

Ralph’s favorite song was The Tennessee Waltz and he often wore a black flat-brimmed, buckaroo style cowboy hat popular with Shoshoni.

During my last year in college, Ralph had to move from his tiny, one-bedroom house into a nursing home across Utah Lake in Pleasant Grove.  Will didn’t need that level of care but he asked to move into the same room to keep Ralph company.

Ralph began to fade during my last few visits, often confusing me with my mom.  My great-grandfather died a month after my daughter was born in 1973, one of his three great-great grandchildren at the time.

Unlike many who never know a great-grandparent, I got to know him for the last 25 of his 93 years on earth.  I’m fortunate to be one of the 24 great-grandchildren he had at his passing and even more fortunate for the lessons he gave me.

RIP great-grandpa – I wish I could visit on “Decoration Day.”

Billboard Nazis

As I was walking my dog through the natural stand of mature trees between my house and the street yesterday, a whitetail deer ran down my street in broad daylight, making the turn west down a busy street that drops sharply from a ridge a mile from downtown Durham, North Carolina.

Putting the sighting on my neighborhood listserv would in any other community incite extreme reactions on both ends of the ideological spectrum and probably result in efforts to “out-extreme” one another.

As a political independent I may be more sensitive to how absurd these reactions can seem and when stereotyped, they fuel the craziness we see in North Carolina’s legislature today.  You can see it in reactions to wildlife management and fracking.

By 1900 with a population just shy of 1.9 million people, unchecked “market hunters” had reduced the population of whitetail deer in North Carolina to fewer than 10,000 animals, one for every five square miles.

North Carolinians cared. The first game laws had been enacted here in 1783 but they weren’t enough to prevent market forces from nearly wiping out the deer population.

While North Carolina became the cradle of forest conservation in 1898, it wasn’t until 1937 that whitetail deer restoration efforts took hold and even today there is a lack of understanding, especially among many in high office, about the importance of nature and biodiversity and the ecosystem in general to human quality of life.

Today, we’ve gone from one deer for every 190 North Carolinians in 1900 to one deer for every 9 residents.  That’s a lot of deer when you consider we have five times the human population today and it is five times as many per square mile at a time when a much greater proportion of the state is urbanized.

With natural predators all but extinguished and farmland no longer buffering cities from wildlife habit, we have a deer problem which manifests itself in risk of disease and damage to vehicles and property use not to mention the deer themselves.

The number of deer is far exceeding biological and social carrying capacity in much of the state.  Efforts at management are politicized by extremist reactions on both ends of the ideological spectrum.  We see the same thing happening with the issue of hydraulic fracturing of shale to access natural gas.

Each side of the debate seems far too dominated by people who seem determined to out-extreme and demonize those on the other side of the issue, including many flush with the ability and hubris to dominate the North Carolina General Assembly.

“Fracking” as it is called, is a technological revolution that promises to temporarily roll back harmful emission of greenhouse gases, as least until these new sources are also depleted.  It may make us more energy independent but it won’t roll back the price of gasoline.

The price will be kept high here while exporting most of the new-found energy supply where it will reap greater stockholder value.  If we are smart, this boom will only intensify research and development of more sustainable alternatives.

Evidence is that many of the other benefits from this boom are canceled out by harmful side effects, lax regulation and unintended consequences.  Reduce these concerns by half and they still warrant extreme caution.

Just less than a year after oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens prophesied that converting the nation’s 8 million 18-wheelers to natural gas would eliminate eliminate 75% of our reliance on OPEC countries, news reports suggest that transformation is already underway.  This will also curb harmful emissions.

One of his companies already has 400 natural gas filling stations and earlier this month he proposed how to incentivize the transition.

But the real impact of fracking on global climate change will be the transition it will create on countries such as China and India away as they shift away from coal.  It may not reduce the price at the pump that much but these changes could ostensibly lower the costs, especially those not captured by businesses failing to use full-cost accounting, of other consumer goods.

It may eventually help reduce the amount we fund our military to serve as security guards for oil shipments from the Middle East to non-contributing countries throughout the world.  However, this may only intensify uncertainty and instability in that region.

As an op-ed in the New York Times two weeks ago explained, our so-called energy independence will undermine stability in that region and create even bigger problems for the U.S.  And this impact won’t be limited to the Middle East.

Reduce the euphoria and any related hyperbole by half as many insiders do and it may still be worth pursuing.  The real question is how to make fracking much safer and far less desecrating than it is now.  There is a value to clear air and water and scenic infrastructure and view-sheds.

Unfortunately, instead of refereeing between extreme positions, our legislature seems to have abdicated the true purpose of representative democracy on this issue as they did a few years ago when they surrendered trees and related curbs on soil erosion and water and air pollution free of charge to out-of-state billboard companies.

The photo below shows an example in Charlotte, where the now obsolete form of advertising has already clear cut nearly 5,000 trees, scarring the “Queen City’s” sense of place and releasing toxic waste all for the benefit of one fifth of one percent of consumers and less than 3% of small businesses.

This was the antitheses of capitalism, seeking to tilt the playing field to a few and for what reason, spite?

What the legislature did at the behest of billboard companies is a type of “legal corruption” and in my opinion an absurdly extreme reaction to the views of a few they considered just as extreme.   But this defiance of the wishes of nearly 9 out of 10 North Carolinians is inexcusable.

The answer to what they may consider eco-Nazis is not to counter as billboard-Nazis as these lawmakers have become but to make principle-centered decisions that benefit all North Carolinians.

One lawmaker was quoted in reports as saying that the giveaway was to teach communities a lesson, further proof that instead of rising to principle and good governance, many lawmakers are just trying to prove they can also take pettiness to an extreme.

The issue for me on fracking is less clear-cut (no pun intended.)  It isn’t “whether or not” but “how.”  It has been a little more than a hundred years since Americans rose in revolt against the desecration industries such as this imposed.

Hopefully, those setting the standards for fracking haven’t forgotten those lessons and begin to govern from the center.

Strategic Introspection

It’s been twenty-four years since I was recruited to Durham.  A friend who is also retiring recently surmised it was probably because I already had various levels of experience at founding and growing community-destination marketing organizations (DMOs.)

Others during my now-concluded career credited me with strategic vision, something that always made me feel humbled and a bit awkward to describe when asked, often even now in retirement. 

Maybe that is part of what fueled my interest in how researchers and other experts describe strategy, insight and vision beginning with a keen interest I developed in strategic geniuses such as Napoleon, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant dating from college days and before.

Start-ups are chaotic.  In the first few months a lot revolves around what Dr. William Duggan at Columbia Business School calls the “expert intuition,” that comes from being able to make quick decisions based on repetitive personal experience and practice.

This is what a hitter uses in baseball.  In his incredible book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, neuroscientist Dr. Robert A Burton explains that at the minimum it takes 200 milliseconds to react to the typical major league pitch traveling between 80-100 miles per hour which will cross home plate in approximately .380 to .460 milliseconds.

The ball travels nine feet before the batter’s retina can process that it left the pitcher’s hand.  There is no time for deliberation because the reaction time and swing alone equal the travel time to the catcher’s mitt.

However, there is some strategic thinking involved too.  The best hitters closely study the background and past performance of pitchers in order to make an educated guess about the kind of pitches that may be thrown in certain circumstances.  Pitchers do the same with opposing team hitters.

I was credited with the thoroughness of the various plans I cranked out for marketing, organization, performance metrics and decision-making within weeks of each of my DMO start-ups.  Of course people usually didn’t realize these plans were just a form of scaffolding and place-holders.

I needed time, not to do in-depth planning which would come later, but to get my head around the over-arching strategy unique during a given time to each community I represented.  According to Duggan’s books and lectures, this comes from what he calls “strategic intuition.”

Classes I took in the 1970s at BYU that touched on strategic thinking and planning took the approach still taught in many schools today: “figure out where you are; decide what you want to be; make a plan;” “set goals and objectives; then identify tactics.”

In other words “ready-aim-fire.”

As Duggan notes in several of his books, papers and interviews, the word strategy dates to 400 B.C. but it didn’t become a field of study until 1810, first related to the military, then by the late nineteenth century in business and by the twentieth century in social enterprise including the public sector.

The planning model I learned in my college days originated in the late 1830s.  However, lacking the resources of large organizations during my career and possibly due to proclivity,  I accidentally stumbled and bumbled into a very different - and according to Duggan - a far more effective and creative approach put forth a few years earlier.

The planning-first approach over relies on “expert intuition” which is based on what you know.  Using “strategic intuition” to first identify an over-arching strategy takes more time up front but you make up for it in effectiveness. It begins with scouring historical resources to find “what works.”

It involves disconnecting the dots and reconnecting them as informed by digging back into history, past studies and background with fresh eyes and then coupling your experience with the experiences of many others.  In the case of Durham, this process took me almost two years from the time we launched, but this aspect was also ongoing.

Some dismiss this as part of the creative process vs. planning.  I realize from reading analysts such as Duggan that strategic thinking for me was both/and but it always began with seeking “strategic insight.”  The flaw Duggan finds with the more wide spread “planning model” is that “learning what works comes at the end not the beginning,” what he terms a “fatal flaw.”

Many large organizations start a strategic planning process with top-down goals and objectives from a governing board and then add tactical elements.  Even after the fact, many fail to identity an over-arching strategy and the eventual outcome is these plans resemble operational plans more than strategic plans and fail to project into the future.

Even when predicated on “strategic intuition,” plans should be organic and updated in real time as new information is gathered and new “strategic insights” surface.  Having a plan is not an excuse to turn off strategic thinking.

Some organizations get by without any strategic planning or thinking required by their governing boards or stakeholders and a few may still consider their leaders to have strategic vision.

Ironically, these individuals unencumbered by structure may still benefit from some elements of “strategic intuition.”   While they may not be accessing background or data stored on the shelves neuroscientists tell us we have in our brains, they still have what Duggan calls “presence of mind.”

This means they can free themselves of goals and objectives and switch directions when an insight or new combination of elements occurs to them or is presented by others.  They must also have the resolution and drive to persevere.

Even so, without more accountability and a fuller approach to strategic thinking and planning it is likely their decisions will often be contaminated by what the new book entitled Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath describes as the “four villains” of good decision-making, “narrow-framing,” “confirmation bias,” “short-term emotion” and “overconfidence.”

By failing to anchor in what Duggan calls the precedents at the heart of “creative strategy,” they not only fail to be visionary but they miss a crucial ingredient for innovation.  They also risk being held hostage by special interests.

I never had the luxury to fly solo like that but I know from introspection and study more about why some people viewed me as strategic and visionary than I ever did at any time during my career.

To learn more about strategic thinking, one can do no better than to read Professor Duggan’s books Napoleon’s Glance, The Art of What Works, Strategic Intuition and Creative Strategy.  He’s also a great story teller.

Resurrection On Spirit Lake

Tucked into the mountains and forests of the upper Idaho Panhandle is Spirit Lake, about 25 miles from a lake where I rendezvous with family each year.  One of 76 lakes within a 50-mile radius of Spokane, it too was one of my favorites when I helped jump-start the community-destination marketing organization (DMO) there in the 1970s.

A construction detour stopped me from seeing another Spirit Lake on one of my cross-country trips but now I have another reason to there.

That beautiful, glacier-sculpted section of the northern edge of Iowa, another “I” state, is now the home of Indian Motorcycles, which along with Victory Motorcycles is now owned by snowmobile-rooted Polaris Industries.

Spirit Lake, Iowa is roughly midway between Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Clear Lake, Iowa which was made famous by Don McLean’s song American Pie as the place The Day The Music Died in 1959, six months after my tenth birthday.

That’s the night when rock and roll pioneers Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a light plane crash shortly after take-off in white out conditions when a wing tip caught the ground.

Coincidentally, two other personal favorites have connections to that tragedy.  Country-music legend Waylon Jennings played bass at the time for Holly and the other groups including Dion on the tour.  He gave up his seat on the plane to Richardson who was sick.

They were replaced on stage the following night by Bobby Vee, who as a 15 year-old was put on stage as a replacement at the next stop on the tour in Fargo, North Dakota along with a band of school-boys deemed The Shadows.

The Surf Ballroom where Holly, Valens and the “Bopper” had performed in Clear Lake the night they died held 1,100 for performances.  It was similar to three ballrooms frequented by and triangulating where my friend Harvey Schmitt grew up about an hour east.

Even seven years later, hugely-popular rock and roll bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Standells performed in ballrooms not much larger than the one in Clear Lake when I traveled from Idaho to northern Utah to see them at the Lagoon Patio Gardens on July 23, 1966.

I first became intrigued with Indian Motorcycles in the early 1980s when I completed the start-up process for another DMO, in Anchorage, Alaska.  There were stories that crates of unassembled P-36 fighter planes had been found in a ravine there after the war.

Even more intriguing, the friend who was the source of that information, Ken Taylor, had been one of the few to get off the ground in a fighter plane to defend against the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

He also told me of a story that a crate of unassembled Indian motorcycles had been discovered in a cave on the Aleutian Islands many years after they had been hidden away during Japanese occupation during the war.

People often assume I take my frequent cross-country road-trips on my Harley-Davidson Cross Bones.  There are several reasons I don’t, the most significant of which is that I would miss the company of Mugsy, my English Bulldog.

It certainly isn’t out of the question, though.  In 1914, “Cannon Ball” Baker went coast to coast on an Indian motorcycle in 11 days to set a record at the time.  I can’t imagine doing more than 300 miles a day even on today’s roads but “Cannon Ball” was half my current age at the time.

Harley-Davidson has 55% of the heavyweight motorcycle market today compared to 5% for Indian and Victory combined.  Harley’s and Indians both date their heritage to 1901 when William S. Harley first drew up plans for a motorcycle, but Indian already had a prototype that same year.

However, neither was first.  That honor belongs to Daimer in 1885 with its gasoline powered Reitwagen, but Indians were already popular in Europe before and during World War I.  The US Army had used Harley’s in pursuit of Poncho Villa and used them extensively in World Wars I and II.

Indian motorcycles gradually became extinct after WWII while Harley became iconic.  British motorcycles were rebadged as Indians for a time.  And the use of motorcycles overall went into decline from the late 1970s through the 1980s.

Harley-Davidson found its way again and the brand took off in the 1990s.  The Indian brand was resurrected in North Carolina in the mid 2000s before being sold to Polaris in 2011.  It is good for Harley to have some “made in America” competition.

Indian has a historic edge when it comes to styling.  But for me, my preference for Harley is in its very distinctive sound.

Lifetime Lessons From Synchrony

Watching a young friend perform recently for the last time as part of her talented high school chorus in Durham, North Carolina where I live reminded me of a 1995 book by Dr. William H. McNeil, now a professor emeritus from the University of Chicago.

Entitled Keeping Together in Time : Dance and Drill in Human History,  McNeil wrote about the “emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison…” as a “cultural ritual” and “muscular bonding.”

Both were demonstrated as I watched last week but I am sure there was plenty of typical high school drama going on behind the scenes.  A 2009 organizational behavior analysis by researchers at Stanford University shed light on the relationship of this type of synchrony and cooperation.

Dr. Scott Wiltermuth is now at the University of Southern California and Dr. Chip Heath at Stanford but formerly at Duke University here in Durham, is with his brother Dan the co-author of several books including the just-published Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.

In their joint study entitled Synchrony and Cooperation, Wiltermuth and Heath concluded that “people acting in synchrony with others [such as the highly-choreographed chorus I saw] cooperated more…even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.”

The study also confirms why this cooperation did not entirely mitigate negative behind-the-scenes’ emotions that night such as shunning, bullying and cliquishness common in every high school and far too common in life as well.

The synchrony learned in chorus, athletics, orchestra, marching band, drama and many other endeavors at elementary and secondary schools are teaching skills as important as any of the AP and Honors classes many of the performers last week were completing prior to graduation.

Learning how to work together as a team, to synchronize, even with people you may not like or who may not like you on a personal level, is an incredibly vital workplace skill.  Synchronous activities in school also foster creativity and collaboration with people who have different styles.

The conflict I am characterizing as drama may be hurtful in high school but overall it is also a vital experience for the workplace as illustrated so eloquently in a TED presentation by Willful Blindness author and former CEO Margaret Heffernan entitled Dare To Disagree.

The inability to engage and resolve the conflict of ideas and concepts is often at the root of the inability of so many organizations to be effective.

But feeling “part of a whole” as New York University Business School ethics researcher Dr. Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, doesn’t always require being in a festival atmosphere.

For much of the population it is one of the awe-inspiring by-products of nature.