My wife and I suffered a near-bear experience while camping in New Mexico.

Actually, I’ve had several near-bear experiences in my travel life.

The first was in Tennessee, when I was camping with a college buddy in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We were staying at Ice Water Springs on the crest line of the mountain range when a bear charged me. It was a young bear and I was photographing it and I guess it wanted to let me know I was too close.

In my defense, I must say, I did not approach the bear; he approached me.

But I was too close for his comfort nevertheless, so he turned and ran straight at me, loping from side to side as he did. You read about people saying their hair stood on end and I had always thought it was just a metaphor. No, it’s real. My hair stood on end. At the last moment, no more than two or three feet from me, the bear veered off and ran away.

I was so dumb, I actually stood there and snapped the picture.

My buddy, an old hand at camping, told me his secret for dealing with bears. “Just treat’em like a big dumb dog,” he said.

Years later, in Seattle, I got to know the bear-keeper at the zoo and I sometimes went with him to the back side of the bear cage at feeding time. The female grizzly bear loved to sock down a dozen or so hot dogs for a treat. I would toss them down her gullet, where they disappeared like raindrops in the ocean. A grizzly bear’s gullet is a prodigious thing.

Well, my wife has a thing for bears. She loves them. Every time PBS runs a nature program on bears, I have to videotape it. I don’t know how many times we’ve see the feature film The Bear.

And when we go camping, she is likely to walk to the edge of the camp ground and yell into the woods, “Here, Mr. Bear! Here, Mr. Bear!”

It actually worked once in the Canadian Rockies. Fortunately, we were driving at the time. We were in Jasper National Park and she had the window down, yelling for Mr. Bear. A grizzly showed up along the roadside and we stopped to enjoy his company for a while from the safety of our Chevrolet.

I’ve tried to discourage this practice in campgrounds, though, but she just suggests that maybe if she tied a string to a peanut butter sandwich and trailed it along behind her, she might attract one.

Visiting our friends in Maine once, my wife baked two coconut cream pies. A bear smelled them and came up to the house. He couldn’t get the pies, so he raided the bird feeder outside the kitchen window.

We named the bear Tupai for the two pies. Later, Tupai came back with another bear, looking for pie. My wife, who is an artist, made a paper cut of the event (see above).

Well, we were camping near Cloudcroft, N.M., in the Lincoln National Forest and in the middle of the night I was awakened by a noise outside the tent. There was a slow rummaging through whatever items we had left outside the tent. I looked over and saw my wife still asleep. My hair was standing up again.

My first thought was how I would protect my wife if the noise turned out to be a bear, and if the bear wasn’t satisfied with turning over the Coleman stove and water bucket.

The only weapon I had was a Swiss Army knife and I found it in the darkness and opened it in my sleeping bag. My plan was to attack the bears belly and try to find his heart with the blade. I knew it was a long shot, but I also believed it was my only shot. Big dumb dog, indeed.

Luckily, what really happened was that the sound went away and it was spookily quiet in the woods. I didn’t get much sleep that night and by morning I finally relaxed my grip on the knife.

Over breakfast, I told her the story and she broke out laughing. She had been awakened by the same noise and thought I was asleep. She went through the same reaction I had had and armed herself with a fingernail clippers, planning to save me from the beast.

It all reminded me of the old joke about two guys camping when a bear comes into camp.

“What should we do?” asks the one.

“Run for it,” says the other.

“You can’t outrun the bear,” says the first.

“No, but I can outrun you.

When you think of Los Angeles, the word “nature” comes to mind about as often as the combination of Genghis Khan and the word “delicate.”

LA is one of the world’s great cities, and one of the most artificial. It is all pavement and minimal, parking garage and chain store. I will cede LA no quarter when it comes to magnificence, but when it comes to nature, you’re barking up the wrong stop sign.

Or are you?

There is actually a lot of nature in LA, but like so much else in this sprawling, hazy, energetic city, it is sui generis — in a class of its own. And if you love LA and its artifice and unreality, then you may love its nature, too.

That includes the La Brea Tar Pits, the stuffed animals at the Natural History Museum, the concrete-lined Los Angeles River.

This isn’t nature all cute and cuddly like the nature films show. It is nature covered with graffiti, smelly with escaping gas, and turned into a simulacrum of itself.

But if you are in the right spirit, gravid with irony, there is a lot to love. Like the infamous LA River, a 50-mile-long concrete gutter paralleled by railroad yards, high-tension lines and freeways.

It provided the surreal landscape where giant ants built their nests in “Them!,” the 1954 sci-fi classic about giant ants.

It was also the racetrack for the great chase in “Terminator 2.” It can be seen as an integral part of the anomie in “Repo Man,” “To Live and Die in L.A.” and “Escape From New York.”

It is hard to imagine, but the river is the reason the City of Angels is where it is.

In 1781, the pueblo of “Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula” was founded on the banks of the free-flowing sweet-water river by Spanish settlers moving up from Mexico. That lasted 157 years, until the Army Corps of Engineers, reacting to a series of devastating floods, turned the river into a sluice, beginning in 1938. The river as we know it dates from then.

And what had been a common, nondescript — if pleasant — Western river became an icon for the city.

There are activists trying very hard to return the river to its natural state, and there are a few short sections — called “soft bottomed” — where the river is free from cement. One of the most pleasant borders the eastern edge of Griffith Park, paralleling Interstate 5 and its screaming-banshee traffic.

One has to admire the pluck of such civic-minded groups as Friends of the Los Angeles River, founded in 1986, but one also worries that all over the country, good-intentioned people try to change exactly those things that make their cities unique.

Like the tar pits.

Now part of the city’s Hancock Park, the remaining sticky-holes are surrounded by grass, trees and cute animal statuary. But the heart of the La Brea Tar Pits is the black asphalt, where countless Pleistocene mammals met their gummy end.

The pond at the entrance to the park, with its bronze elephants, is filled with water covered in a film of petroleum. In places a layer of tarry foam collects, and great bubbles of methane blub up like boiling oatmeal, filling the air with stink.

Researchers still are digging prehistoric bones out of the pits. There are more than 100 tar pits in Hancock Park, and Pit 91 is worked every summer, with an observation deck for visitors to watch the volunteers as they scrape goo from their findings.

You can see them below, tarred black and brown, with their shoes glued to the boards thrown across the excavation.

“The stickiness is part of the fun,” one of them says. “We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t enjoy getting sticky.”

The bones dug from the tar are stored and exhibited at the George C. Page Museum on-site, where you can see hundreds of dire wolf skulls, a reconstructed mammoth skeleton and the whole panoply of Cenozoic life from the LA area.

Farther south, you can see more animals at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, one of those old, dusty antiquarian museums with high ceilings and marble floors.

The Hall of North American Mammals is a series of dioramas with the gems of the taxidermic art in situ: There are grizzly bears, bison, elk, weasels and Dahl sheep, all in amazing lifelike poses.

Ah, wilderness!

At the other end of the building is the Hall of African Mammals and a giant elephant at the watering hole.

This is show business.

There is also “megamouth,” a 14.5-foot male shark pickled in a bathtub of formaldehyde, which is always a favorite with schoolkids.

Nature lovers often are horrified by Los Angeles. The blue-white haze that leaves Angelenos wheezing and their eyes stinging. The pavement where chaparral should be. The ubiquitous power lines blocking the greenish skies.

But perhaps we simply have the wrong idea about nature.

If you want cute furry animals and fields of wildflowers, you’ve come to the wrong place. Try Maine, at the opposite corner of the continent.

But the Bambi vision is only one version of nature, and it is a conventional version, and LA is anything but conventional.

We should think of nature as anything that reminds us we live on a planet. That includes geology, climate, hydrology.

LA is a city inescapably bound up with the real effects of nature. LA is the city of earthquakes, mudslides, ozone and haze, the city of Santa Ana winds and wildfires, of mountain lions attacking joggers.

Despite its reputation, LA is all nature all the time.

That’s why I love the Baldwin Hills, a geologic bump south of Rodeo Road and north of Slauson Avenue. It is covered with pendulating oil rigs, like giant iron birds dipping their beaks to the ground for worms. Los Angeles is built over several oil fields, and these gritty iron industrial monsters are almost all that is left of what was once LA’s other great moneymaker.

You can see the landscape in the photos of Hollywood from the 1920s: It was a landscape prickly with stickleback oil derricks. It was a hell of industrial devastation.

But the oil under the rocks is also the source of the tar for the tar pits. And the geology that gives the oil also gives us the San Andreas Fault and the frequent earthquakes in the city. Small ones don’t even warrant a mention in the newspaper.

You look at the geology and you see the city built in a basin spreading like spilled ink on every flat surface south of the mountains.

There are the Santa Monica Mountains and Mulholland Drive, with its many turnoffs and vistas — smog depending.

And when the weather is clear enough, you can see the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, with peaks rising as high as Mount Baldy’s 10,064 feet and covered in snow as late as July.

If you take the Angeles Crest Highway north from La Canada Flintridge, you can drive the 20 miles or so to the Mount Wilson Observatory, where so much of the astronomy of the 20th century took place. It is at Mount Wilson that Fred Hubble first discovered the expansion of the universe, that the distance to the stars first was measured accurately, that the new science of astrophysics was developed.

The 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson was the largest in the world from 1917, when it opened, to 1948, when the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar was finished. Some of the most aesthetically satisfying photographs of distant galaxies were taken at Mount Wilson.

If nature is about reminding us we live on a planet, Mount Wilson is a great place to start.

Or you could take a longitudinal section starting in San Pedro at the ocean.

The city begins in the sea, and at the

(1) Cabrillo Marine Aquarium you can see not only tanks of fish and invertebrates, you can walk out into the tide pools at the edge of Point Fermin.

Travel north on Hawthorne Boulevard and it becomes La Brea Avenue and takes you up over the Baldwin Hills, where you see the result of eons of squeezing and distillation on the ancient sea creatures that lived where LA now sits: the pumps that extract the oil from under the ground. The Baldwin Hills also are the home of the

(2) Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, where, in 1963, subsidence caused by the extraction of oil triggered an earthquake that breached the dam of the Baldwin Hills Reservoir and sent about 250 million gallons of water down on the city, destroying 277 homes.

Nature is always an instructive teacher; we are not always such attentive students.

A side trip to the east takes us to the

(3) Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where the exhibits range from pickled fish to dinosaur fossils.

Back on track, headed north, there are the

(4) La Brea Tar Pits in Hancock Park, with its

(5) George C. Page Museum of prehistoric finds, one of the uniquely LA natural landmarks.

Further north, there is LA’s

(6) Griffith Park, with golf courses, riding stables and picnic tables and the famous Griffith Park Observatory and the LA Zoo. The LA River shoulders the edge of the park, with one of its more attractive stretches.

(7) Mulholland Drive heads west atop the Santa Monica Mountains, affording views of Los Angeles to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north, with frequent vista stops along the way.

If you stop at

(8) Laurel Canyon Park, along Mulholland Drive, you can get out and hike along hillside trails and enjoy all of the other hikers with their dogs. But starting at the park, you also can drive down the little-traveled Laurel Canyon Drive back to Hollywood Boulevard and get an intimate look, among the homes, at the city’s geology.

Take the Glendale Highway north to La Canada Flintridge and visit the beautiful

(9) Descanso Gardens, with its forests of camellias, lush rose plantings, California chaparral section and Japanese Gardens. This is nature the way we usually think of it.

Then continue north on the Angeles Crest Highway for 16 miles to the

(10) Mount Wilson turnoff, and another five miles up mountain roads to the great observatory, where you can look north into the wilderness of the San Gabriel Mountains and contemplate how the city sits at the feet of such glory.

Or you can look south and see the smog.

How many sides does a triangle have?

Don’t be too quick; it’s a trick question.

Usually, math is not thought of as something where you can have opinions over answers. It’s one of math’s most reassuring qualities.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t alternative views. Artists’ math, for instance.

Artists have a different way of counting, of doing arithmetic and of contemplating geometry. It’s what makes them artists.

For an artist, one plus one equals three. It is a very clear formula: There is the one thing, the other thing, and the two together — a knife, a fork and a place setting. Three things.

And a triangle has five sides. There are the normal three, and then the front and back. You can turn any triangle over from its back and lay it on its belly.

Computer programmers talk about fuzzy logic as if they discovered it.

It is artists who wake up each morning in a Gaussian blur, after all. It is artists who first understood that all numbers are irrational numbers.

The primary difference between a mathematician’s logic and an artist’s is that the artist is unable to leave the world behind: The mathematician, the logician, the philosopher deal in abstractions; the artist deals in plums.

The artist lives in a world of things. Real things: palpable, noisy, smelly, difficult and beautiful. He mistrusts any answers not rooted in them.

The sentimental view of artists has them constructing “castles in the sky,” but the artist scratches his head over this, because to him, it is math and philosophy that are constructed out of air.

“No ideas but in things,” wrote poet William Carlos Williams. Like the plums that were so cold and so delicious in his poem.

Don’t get me wrong: One should not dismiss the practical world out of hand. It is good to know how to balance a checkbook, and artists’ math does not carry much clout with the bank.

I know, because my wife, who is an artist, uses something she calls “gut mathematics.”

But she also knows, as a banker usually doesn’t, that the shortest distance between two points is a leap of the imagination.

She also knows that three is more interesting than four. It just is. Ask any artist.

And when an artist talks of pie charts, she wants to know if it is cherry or lemon meringue.

Like the old math gag: “Pi R square.” “No, pie R round, cake R square.”

It’s fun to joke about artists’ idiosyncrasies, but there is a serious side to all this.

When we see yammering faces on TV shouting each other down over ideology, the artist is the one who can remind us that the world isn’t made up of theory or system, but is made up of hubcaps and clamshells. Ideology means very little to an asparagus.

The world falls into peril every time a system denies physical reality. It is abstractions, after all, that fueled the Cold War, abstractions that justify suicide bombing, the theory that built Auschwitz.

Artists remind us of flannel, of smoke, of mud. These are the things we share with our family and our friends. These are the things that ultimately count.

No ideas but in things.

It reminds me of a line written by the poet Tom Brown:

“The more perpendicular a line is to a curve,/ the more it is an orange slice.”

The field was green, the sky was blue, the chalk lines were white, and the announcer was Red Barber.

This was heaven for baseball fans in midcentury America, as the Ol’ Redhead crooned his way through nine innings of the game that defined the country, providing play-by-play that we recognize now was more poetry than prose, more evocation than flat fact.

“Preacher Roe is sitting in the catbird’s seat,” Barber would say in his smooth Florida drawl, as the count was 0-2 and the score was 6-1 in the ninth inning.

Red Barber was bringing poetry to an audience that, more than likely, would never pick up a volume of Shelley or Milton.

It was a style of talking one cannot imagine accompanying Monday Night Football, for although football is a fine sport with lots of excitement, it does not provide the deep soulful resonance that baseball does.

That is because football is just a sport. Baseball is life.

This is why there are so many great baseball novels and movies, and why there is memorable baseball verse by Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams — all major-league poets.

“Baseball is ballet without music, drama without words,” said another announcer-poet, Ernie Harwell.

Football and basketball together would have to dig deep to find a tenth of the literature that wells up naturally from baseball. Of all major sports, only boxing carries with it the metaphorical punch of baseball.

It is ritual: Each batter re-enacts the motion of the heroes that preceded him. It is not necessarily religious, despite the monologue of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham, but it’s the repetition of solemn rites: the tapping of the bat on the plate, the pitcher’s windup, the pantomime of signals from the third-base coach.

It is drama: Like a play divided into acts and scenes, a game is divided into groups of threes: early, middle and late innings, and in each inning, three outs, and in each at-bat, three strikes. There is an aesthetic symmetry at work, like the formal plan of the best theater.

And each subset of the game has its own exposition, crisis, climax and denouement. Each pitch, each at-bat, each inning, each game, each homestand, each season, each career, and the whole long toss from Abner Doubleday to this year’s rookie. Wheels spinning within wheels.

It is poetry: Each game has its own rhythm, and there is the rhyme of inning-couplets. It is poetry, too, in the grace and beauty of the slide into second base, the suddenness of the unassisted triple play, the conjunction of time and space that meets for the play at the plate.

“Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself,” said baseball’s greatest owner, Branch Rickey, “but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of a hit-and-run.”

It is history: Part of this is the historical hold baseball has held on the American imagination. If it is losing its grasp in the new century, for the past century, baseball was America.

But it is also the fact that baseball’s gaze is the long gaze over decades and centuries. In football, every new hotshot is a headline. In baseball, every accomplishment is measured against Ruth, Gehrig, Mays, Musial, Williams. There is a continuity in baseball that rivals continuity of genealogy or language. Football may keep us in the moment; baseball connects us with the past and reminds us that we are sons as much as we are fathers. Granddaughters as well as grandmothers.

But more than that, baseball is a metaphor for life.

“It’s about entering the game young and innocent and leaving older and wiser,” says Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini. “That’s what baseball has that football never will.”

Or, as the greatest baseball poet said — that would be Vin Scully, longtime Dodgers announcer — it has “the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers.”

What makes it Greek tragedy, too, is its acknowledgment of failure. Baseball is the game where the best players are expected to fail two out of three times. There is doom in the game.

“If you play this game 20 years, go to bat 10,000 times, and get 3,000 hits, you know that that means? You’ve gone 0 for 7,000,” said all-time hits leader Pete Rose.

“Baseball is a lot like life,” said one-time Mets secondbaseman Ron Kanehl. “The line drives are caught, the squibbers go for base hits. It’s an unfair game.”

Cubs fans and Red Sox fans aren’t the only ones who have learned to live with years of disappointment; it is the nature of the game.

“Baseball breaks your heart,” wrote baseball’s intellectual commissioner, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti. “It’s designed to break your heart.”

Giamatti wrote poetry. Can you ever in your wildest imagination conceive of former NFL president Pete Rozelle doing so?

Talk of breaking your heart, is there any moment in sports more wrenching than Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech: “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

This is the stuff of tragedy. Life, death.

As Scully once said, “It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timer’s game.”

It is important to note that Barber or Harwell or Scully never, ever, seemed like they were trying to write poetry. Their figurative language and metaphorical approach is the natural language of baseball.

In the ninth inning, as the great southpaw Sandy Koufax worked toward his perfect game in 1965, Scully’s play-by-play caught the teeth-gnashing excitement of one of sport’s mightiest accomplishments in a masterpiece of wordcraft. It has been anthologized many times, and it was a first draft, live, extempore: “There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies,” he said.

You can read and re-read Scully’s account, the way you can read and re-read a favorite sonnet.

It is only natural, then, that writers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, poets and above all, filmmakers have turned to baseball. It is all there, waiting to be mined.

“Is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than, say, the smell of the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, that resinous, sultry and exciting smell of old dry wood,” wrote Thomas Wolfe.

Or as eventual Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby answered when asked what he does in winter when there is no baseball:

“I’ll tell you what I do,” he said. “I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

It takes someone really whip-cracking smart to be so dumb.

I remember the first time I lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and spring morphed into summer and there was the kind of glory only a Dante could describe, and a friend of mine came to visit to see the spring wildflowers.

He was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.

The wildflowers in Ashe County are lush, blinding, thick — the planet in rut.

But he went from patch to patch in an abandoned apple orchard with a Peterson’s guide in hand, checking the flowers off as he named them – Claytonia virginiana, Rhododendron nudiflorum, Trillium erectum. The quicker he identified them, the quicker he could get on to the next specimen.

We ID’d more than a hundred flowers in one morning, but didn’t see any of them.

I notice the same phenomenon every time I visit an art museum. People walk from picture to picture, identify what the picture is and move on to the next one.

First-timers name the pictures by subject – ”That’s a horse, that’s a tree.” More sophisticated types name the artists – ”That’s a Degas, that’s a Borofsky.” The really educated may name the style or era. But whatever level of education they bring to the work, the result is the same.

They have not seen the art.

‘Only a sunfish’ 

I remember the anecdote about the Swiss-American scientist Louis Agassiz and his hotshot graduate student.

One day, Agassiz put a fish down in front of the student and asked him to describe it. The student said, ”That’s only a sunfish.”

Agassiz said, ”I know that. Write a description of it.”

So the student came back with the scientific name for a sunfish. The scientist told him, no, describe it.

So the student wrote a four-page essay, covering everything that could possibly be known about the fish. Agassiz told him again to look at the fish.

As Ezra Pound relates the story, at the end of three weeks, the fish was putrid, but the student finally knew something about it.

Learning to see is hard work. We are not trained to see in this culture, but to make decisions and solve problems. When just enough information has been gained to make a good — yet quick — decision, we move on to the next problem, like the next painting. It is the mark of a good executive.

But seeing is much more than that. And it requires more time and effort. And it requires that the result of the process never be made more important than the process itself.

Imagine telling a corporate VP that the point of being in business is not making a profit, but the pleasure of committee meetings and phone calls. He will look at you like you’re an idiot.

But this is art, not business. In art, the profit is in the process.

When you go to the museum, don’t check paintings off on your ”life list,” but rather, spend an hour — a full hour — looking at just one painting. Come back another time to see a second painting. The museum’s not going anywhere.

Time to really see 

Here’s good practice: Stare at an apple for an hour. I dare you.

An apple is simple, available and familiar. But have you ever looked at one?

Put it down on the table in front of you when you are alone, and without any music or the TV on. Concentrate.

”I see it,” you say. ”It’s an apple.”

Bingo, you have named it, and you are immediately bored by this whole exercise. You want to get back to your e-mail or iPhone. Keep it moving, you say. “I don’t want to be bored.”

Good. You are supposed to be bored. Boredom is your friend. It is life’s great teacher, perhaps its only real teacher.

You have bottomed out with boredom.

Keep staring. Your brain won’t let you remain bored for long. You will break through the boredom and will begin seeing things you hadn’t noticed: An apple isn’t red, for instance. It is purple, yellow, green, blue, white and red. The colors are not on the surface of the apple but at different depths. The red seems to lie on top of the yellow. And all colors are under the thin layer of shiny cuticle. The surface of the apple is a pool your eye can dive into.

The ‘discovery’ level

The colors tend to run in streaks from top to bottom. The streaks break up into spatters of tiny dots of color, like airbrushing.

Hundreds of yellow dots cover the darker red like nighttime stars. In this case, the yellow seems to lie on top of the red.

The apple isn’t smooth and shiny, but has a lot of tiny flat spots on it, and the dimples at top and bottom are matte rather than glossy — actually seem to be covered with dust.

There is a navel at the bottom, amongst the four or five bumps that the apple sits on. It is filled with the remains of the sepals that originally protected the flower bud.

If you tap the apple, it thumps with a particular pulpy resonance that only an apple can make. And there is that multilayered apple smell.

This ”discovery” level is good for several minutes, as you get past the verbal level and pay attention to the apple.

But you reach boredom again. Good. You’re supposed to — again.

Keep staring. There are many more levels to reach. They needn’t follow the order I’m giving here. Everyone’s reactions will be different. But you have to trust your own boredom.

At one level your brain begins to wander, even as you concentrate. It will glue associations to your apple. You may remember Eve and Adam, New York City, the Beatles, apple bobbing, William Tell, Snow White, Atalanta, selling apples in the Depression, Isaac Newton, worms, an apple for the teacher, Alar, keeping doctors away, waxed fruit on top of the TV, the Osmonds singing “One Bad Apple.”

Or you will create constellations from the star-dots. Or count the number of lights in the room by the number of specular reflections on the apple.

You may start writing your own story about an apple.

But eventually, boredom returns. There is surely nothing else to see.

Keep at it. At one point the apple will disappear. Literally. The process of retinal fatigue will make the apple invisible. Twitch your eye just a hair, and the apple pops back into view. Stare and it fades, twitch and it pops back.

This eventually becomes only a party trick and you are bored once more.

A verb, not a noun

At another level, you will recognize that the apple is only a freeze-frame in a continuous process. Looking backward, you see the sepals at the apple base turn back into a blossom, back into a bud. In the other direction, the fruit browns, rots and frees the seeds inside.

Those seeds grow into sprouts, the sprouts to saplings, the saplings to trees. The trees flower, the flowers fruit, the fruit ripens and falls. Humans are born, they grow up, they have children, grow old and die, leaving the children to have children.

You recognize that nature is not a noun, but a verb.

An apple is not a Platonic “thing,” but a Heraclitan flux, always changing from one thing to another. Staring at the apple, you see the whole thing spread out like time-lapse photography.

Near the end of this exercise, when all your normal conscious functions have bugged out, unable to take the boredom, the apple may begin to glow from inside. Every electron in every atom vibrates.

This is the Blakean level, the mystical level. It is at this level that revelation occurs. If you can hold on to it, the entire world alters, not just the apple.

It is this level Dylan Thomas means when he writes, ”fire green as grass.”

This is the level of the art we as a culture most admire: Beethoven’s Ninth, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Dante’s Paradiso, the second part of Goethe’s Faust.

”If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” wrote William Blake.

It is the point you realize that every bush is the burning bush.

Whether it is mystical revelation or merely hallucination hardly matters. It changes the way you see an apple.

And is there a boredom beyond that — a mystic’s boredom?

If there is, I suspect it is broken through also, and probably by the Zen state: The apple turns back into an apple.

But a very different apple.

I watched a filthy video the other day. It was made by my twin 12-year-old granddaughters. They made a video with their iPhones, a giant doll house and a bunch of their dolls. The scenario was not unusual, but the dialog was filled with four- and 12-letter words, often tangentially referencing the sacred institution of motherhood, and it was hilarious.

I doubt they understood most of the words they studded their screenplay with, and sometimes the words were used in ways that didn’t actually make sense. But they are words they have heard and words they understand are not used in polite company. Their mother has given them permission to use such words once a week on “Cussing Day.” It gets it out of their system. We hope.

At any rate, they reveled in them, spitting them out in the voice-over dialog like tobacco shots into a cuspidor. It was simultaneously shocking and cute. Mostly, it was funny.

But it made me worry about the state of cussing in America.

From bumper stickers to sitcoms, America is suffering an epidemic of nasty language. It is on TV, on ”shock” radio, in every best-selling novel. Stand-up comics make their reputations with it. From Nixon transcripts to Dick Cheney on the Senate floor, you can hardly escape a herd of discouraging words.

What is discouraging is not the words themselves, which are wonderfully functional, but the dilution of overuse.

Four-letter words are a treasure of the English language. They have the abrupt, plosive power of Anglo-Saxon, the redolent, atavistic force of Stone Age life breaking out of the grave to horrify the faint-eared. They are ruddy survivors of that time before the Latin invasion of the language in 1066.

Our language needs the ability to shock, and our four-letter heritage has done an admirable job until recently. Now they are endangered.

No, they are not dying out, like some verbal snail darter; they are everywhere, but they are enfeebled. When mothers show up at K mart trailing a half-dozen kids all in T-shirts with four-letter slogans printed on them, those slogans no longer mean anything. They might as well say ”Drink Coca-Cola.”

In their way, four-letter words are sacred. They need to have the awe of taboo around them. If a good, punchy epithet doesn’t make the ears of a schoolteacher turn red and heat up in embarrassment, what good is it?

Historically, it’s the difference between Lenny Bruce and Andrew Dice Clay. Bruce meant to shock you with his four-letter punch lines. He was making a point with them.

For Clay, the expletives were little more than shibboleths, letting you in his ”club.” And they don’t shock, they glut. After five minutes, you no longer hear them; they disappear like so many ”uhs,” ”likes” and ”y’knows” — the background noise of not-very-articulate conversation.

When George Carlin used those words, they had bite.

In this, the fate of the rougher language of our mother tongue has become much like that of organized religion: What once engendered the fear of eternal damnation now has become for some a Sunday social club and for others a 12-step program for ‘getting in harmony with the universe.”

When the deity begins to sound like Andrew Weil and an undeleted expletive cannot scare even little children, what power is left in the universe?

Yet, we will always have expletives: There is a primal need for them. But if we lose our Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage, we will be forced to use Latinized, bureaucratic curses.

To forestall that, we need to conserve what juice is left in our swear words.

As for me, I would like to see less obscenity in American culture, not because I want to offend less, but because I want to offend more.

Some people collect stamps; others collect coins. I collect place names.

There are some odd ones out there, such as Odd, West Virginia, and some normal ones, like Normal, Illinois.

In my retirement from the newspaper business, my wife and I moved to North Carolina, which is a bonanza for the goofy gazetteer.

When we lived in the Blue Ridge for the first time, many years ago, we lived in Meat Camp, just north of Boone, so, I’m not casting stones here. This is just my hobby.

But North Carolina can claim: Bloat Springs Landing; Chuckle; Lizard Lick; Canal Gut; Sandy Mush. There is Whynot, Stumpy Point, Frying Pan Landing and the ever-popular Forks of the Pigeon.

Among the state’s watery ways are Greasy Creek, Cuckold’s Creek, Bawdy Swamp, Stinking Quarter Creek and Pinchgut Creek. Cudda Bum is a stream named for an old geezer nicknamed Cudda whose favorite expletive was “Bum.”

There is Bachelor’s Delight Swamp, Heartsease, Honeypot Swamp.

Short names that come spitting out of the mouth are among my favorites. North Carolina has Brief, Emit, Few, Alert, Askew, Aho, and Duck.

If you are a nervous sort, you can take your vacation at Boring Creek. If money is a problem, you can go to Budget Falls.

The state offers, too, Easy Street, Frog Level, Hairy Bear, Hanging Dog, Graphiteville, Airbellows, Cane Bottom, Brittle Ordinary (and its cousin, Burnt Ordinary). There is Cash Corner No. 2, but not No. 1. There is Radical, Gobble Creek and Kill Quick.

But names all across the country speak eloquently for the spirit of America: Accident, Md.; Bivalve, N.J.; Coupon, Pa.; Dwarf, Ky.; Oblong, Ill.; and Waterproof, La.

Then, there’s Looneyville, Mud, and Sod, W.Va.; Oiltrough, Ark.; Peculiar, Mo.; Bad Axe, Mich. Can you imagine what the good ol’ boys are like in Cat Mash, Miss.? Or in Frogmore, La.?

Texas has a few, like Cut and Shoot, X-Ray and Goodnight, but isn’t Damsite better?

Texas is big enough for both a Frog and a Frognot.

Numbers are surprisingly popular: Eighty-Eight, Ky.; Eighty-Four, Pa.; Ninety-Six, S.C. But Arkansas wins with both Fifty-Six and Forty-Four. A high-school sportscaster’s nightmare: “And here is a late score, Forty-Four over Fifty- Six, 75 to 68.”

The numbers can add up, too. Starting with Zero, Miss., and climbing the ladder through One Horse Store, Ark., and Double Run, Ga.

Three Lakes and The Four Seasons are both in Washington; Five Corners and Sixes are in Oregon. There are Seven Devils in North Carolina and Octavia in Nebraska. Nine Mile Corner in Colorado and Tenville, Iowa.

Leavenworth, Kan., comes next, followed by Twelve Corners, Wis.

But the inflation gets going after that, with Centennial, Wyo., Gross, Neb., Thousand Oaks, Calif., Four K’s Estate, N.D., and Million, Ky.

Somewhat more modest is the ambiguous Many, La.

You can plot these names thematically. Start with food, for instance: Spuds, Fla.; Cookietown, Okla.; Noodle, Texas; Celeryville, Ohio. There are dozens more.

A whole subsection can be given over to our favorite steaming beverage: There are Coffee counties in three states. Also: Coffeeville, Miss.; Coffeyville, Kan.; and Java, S.D. If you can’t get enough of the Hot Coffee, Miss., go to Coffee Springs, Ala., where it must flow from the ground. And if you have problems sleeping after all that Coffeen, Ill., try a little soothing Cocoa, Fla., instead.

There are towns out of place. Manhattan shouldn’t be in Kansas; Philadelphia shouldn’t be in Mississippi; Madrid shouldn’t be in New Mexico. And what is Mexico doing in Maine? Probably the same thing that Jersey Shore is doing in the middle of the Pennsylvania mountains.

Miami is in at least six states; Dallas in eight, not counting Dallastown, Pa., and Dallas City, Ill.

You can drive from Saginaw to Reno to Omaha to Nome, and take side trips to Detroit and Barstow and never leave Texas.

There are Minneapolis, Kan.; Atlanta, Mich.; Duluth, Ga.; Boston, Pa.; Baltimore, Ohio; and Taos, Mo. Phoenix shows up in Phoenixville, Pa., Phenix City, Ala., Phenix Mountain, N.C., and Phoenix, Ill., N.Y., and Ore.

Even whole states get misplaced.

There are Florida, N.Y.; Vermont, Ill.; Ohio, Ky.; Mississippi, Mo.; Dakota, Neb.; and Wisconsin, Pa. Nevada and California each show up in four states; Delaware shows up in six. The champ is Wyoming, which you can find in 10 states and the Canadian province of Ontario.

There are Nevada, Ohio, and Ohio, W.Va. There are Wyoming, Del.; Delaware, Ind.; and Indiana, Pa. There are Colorado County, Texas; Texas, Okla.; and Oklahoma, Pa.

To say nothing of Owyhee, Idaho.

Before I get down to unveiling my Top 10 list, I want to say a few words about some very special places. I haven’t been to all of them, but I have at least passed through a good many of them.

They all have names that make you sit up and take notice. Places such as Whynot, N.C.; Humptulips, Wash.; Box Springs, Calif.; Nameless, Tenn.; and Scarce Grease, Ala.

Americans have shown an amazing inventiveness for naming the places where they live. You wonder just how much civic pride there can be in Bummerville, Calif., or Worstville, Ohio, but you have to wonder even more why such names were chosen.

I’m sure each name has an interesting history, if you have the time and inclination for the research.

Take Toad Suck. Please.

There are people who don’t believe Toad Suck, Ark., is real.

Well, I’ve been to Toad Suck. It is a lovely little place, stuck on the tree-lined sides of the Arkansas River about 8 miles west of Conway.

There isn’t much there, it is true, but there is a state park, a convenience store and gas station, the Toad Suck Embroidery Shop and a big sign on the local real estate office that says, in big, friendly letters, ”Welcome to Toad Suck.”

The reason the town is there is also the reason it was named: There was a ferry here that was once the only way across the river between Memphis, Tenn., and Hot Springs, Ark. The mail had to go through, so in 1823, the Toad Suck Ferry started operation. It was a skiff just large enough for the ferryman and a horse and rider. It was poled from shore to shore.

Among the notable people we have records of crossing the Toad Suck Ferry are Sam Houston, Washington Irving, Zachary Taylor and Jefferson Davis.

The location also became a wood stop for the steamboats that ran up and down the river, and sometime before 1850, a tavern opened up to irrigate the steamboat crews.

There is no certifiable explanation for the name of the ferry and the town that grew around it, but the official version goes thus:

The drinking was so heavy at the tavern that a traveler remarked on seeing it that ”those fellows suck at a bottle till they swell up like toads!” And the name stuck.

Well, I’ve been reading place-name origins long enough to recognize a folk etymology when I see it. I don’t believe it at all, but I have no alternative.

There is also the Toad Suck One-Stop, a convenience store and gas station where you can buy a T-shirt emblazoned with the town name for $14.99 or a ballcap with the same for $8.95.

The most I can tell you about the people who live there comes from Glenn Peters, who was selling watermelons off the back of his pickup truck. It was nearly 100 degrees in July, with humidity nearly 100 percent. Peters sat in the shade of the One-Stop sign behind the truck.

He’s a meatcutter by trade. I know because that was one of the first things he told me. He also said he keeps his hand in a little farming. He’s not from Toad Suck, he said, but from about 40 miles north. This year, he thought he’d try some pumpkins and watermelons. He had hoped to have them ripe in time for the Fourth of July, but the wet season slowed their maturity, so he is hawking them instead two weeks later.

And why did he drive his watermelons all the way to Toad Suck to sit in the awful heat of midday?

”There’s a lot of melon-eating people around here.”

But it isn’t the perfectly reasonable explanations for the names that interest me, rather, it is the names themselves. Correctionville, Iowa. Jot ‘Em Down, Texas. Yelling Settlement, Ala.

All of which brings us to the list:

My Top 10 most peculiar place names in the United States (not counting Peculiar, Mo.)

10. Waterproof, La.

9. Cheesequake, N.J.

8. Oblong, Ill.

7. Humansville, Mo.

6. Odd, W.Va.

5. Imalone, Wis.

4. Monkeys Eyebrow, Ky.

3. Toad Suck, Ark.

2. Chicken Bristle, Ill.

And the No. 1 Most Peculiar Place name: Brittle Ordinary, N.C.

There is no question but that women and men want different things out of life.

If you need proof, just spend a night with your wife at any bed-and-breakfast and watch her coo.

They’re all over the country now, old houses that have been gussied up and turned into estrogen fantasies for weary travelers to spend the night. There are bunnies on the wallpaper, hearts on the bathroom mirrors, antique family photographs — bought at thrift stores — on the hallway walls. Every corner of every room is taken over by doilies.

The four-poster beds are so soft they engulf your sleeping body the way a bowl of whipped cream swallows a stone dropped into it. Under your head is a goose-down pillow with frilled edges and over your torso is a flowered quilt. None of this seems to have any weight at all.

And beside the bed is a comment book with a pen so you can enter your own purred murmurings of contentment.

A whole magazine industry is supported by the retro-Victorian tastes of middle-class women; Country Living, Victoria and Martha Stewart Living are the samizdat that spreads the word.

It’s the kind of thing women — my wife included — seem to enjoy, but I squirm when I see it. I feel like Jiggs at the opera.

It’s just like the fragrance-larded soap gel in the shower. It left me feeling like I was covered in fish slime.

“It moisturizes,” my wife assures me.

“It grease-turizes,” I reply. I needed a bar of soap to rinse myself clean, but there is none.

I spent a very pleasant night at the Goose and Turrets, a bed-and-breakfast in Montara, Calif., south of San Francisco. It was run by a quirky, quiet, little woman named Emily and her never-to-be-seen husband.

The parlor was drenched in crystal and oak-framed art. Mozart played subliminally, perfuming the air with sweet harmony.

The front yard was crowded shut with flowers, which Miss Emily watered every morning after breakfast as the geese ran free. It was a scene from a Tasha Tudor book, only Miss Emily was no longer a little girl.

The building was built in 1908 as a post office. It later became a guildhall for the local Sons of the Spanish-American War. It also served for a time for illegal things although Miss Emily wasn’t specific. I inferred she meant it had been a bawdyhouse.

Breakfast was a four-course vegetarian affair, with a fruit course of perfectly ripe cantaloupe, a second course of Scottish oatmeal sprinkled with cinnamon, a third course of Yorkshire pudding topped with banana slices and strawberries and a final cheese course, with homemade mozzarella and Cheddar served with toast and crackers. Earl Grey tea and cranberry juice filled out the menu.

Such breakfasts thrill most of the women I know. But it is not a man’s breakfast: Where’s the sausage? Where’s the gravy?

So what would a man’s bed-and-breakfast be? What would it take to make the husband happy?

A bed, some breakfast — that about covers it. Everything else is indulgence.

Except possibly for a fridge full of beer.

If we have to have decor, let’s put a moose head over the fireplace and some dark pine paneling on the walls and a stainless-steel basin in the bathroom.

And forget the push-nozzle cleansing gel and drop down a square of Lava soap next to it.

I made my living with words, and whenever my corporate overlords sent us mere workers a memo, I cringed. Because, if I wrote the way they do, I’d have been out of a job.

Recently, as newspapers face doom, and their CEOs try to figure out how to stay afloat, the memos they have sent have become increasingly divorced from reality. We hear a lot about “content monetization” and “content platforms,” but precious little about “content.”

It has probably always been true, but the fact is, the corporate world has a language all its own. It is a kind of “management English” that I call “Manglish.” The implied fragrance of “mangle” is not a coincidence.

This hit me profoundly once as I sat in on a meeting of business people who volunteer in the arts.

According to Manglish, one never plans anything, but rather ”sets in motion the long-range planning process.” I heard one panel member say she wanted to ”micro into the epicenter.”  Another mentioned ”infrastructures in different configurations partnering with organizations to improve our base of communication.”

There was ”the question of an inheritor is a second-tier question” and ”I just want to expand on that follow-up.”

It ”interfaces” and ”synergizes” and generally obscures the agent in favor of the passive voice – ”mistakes were made” is the most infamous example.

It can stretch simple words into rococo phrases – or rather, phraseologies – and it absolutely Osterizes metaphors. Somehow an ”umbrella organization” can have ”legs,” but ideally it should ”sunset” itself.

One explanation for the wordiness of Manglish that I like posits that it allows the speaker to fill the ether with words while giving him time to figure out what he wants to say.

But most plausibly, in the corporate world — where these volunteers spend most of their lives — if you are going to give a million dollars to someone, you want to know you can trust them, that they will know what to do with the money and won’t blow it all, like an artist might, on tinfoil and licorice.

So, the Manglish speaker actually uses his lingo as a shibboleth, letting others in his business-government circle know that he can be trusted for he ”is one of us.”

Artists do that too with their own bizarre lingo. Rock musicians do it, carpenters do it. Lord knows, journalists do it.

There is a particular place in Hell for purveyors of academic art criticism.

Reading most art criticism is like eating an old mattress.

A case in point is the impenetrable mush written by the author of the one exhibit catalog. I don’t wish to name her, because she may have recovered the use of her tongue.

One prime section reads: ”It shared minimalism’s insistence on easily graspable gestalts that were reductive in their geometric simplicity and total non-referentiality.”

Talk about total non-referentiality!

The next sentence is almost as funny: ”But, paradoxically, minimalism shifted the emphasis from the autonomous artwork to the environmental context and the act of visual apprehension.”

Anyone have a shovel? Surely this can be said in plain English.

But the fact is, whether it is academic mush or corporate Manglish, it is language that businessmen, bureaucrats and academics understand and is mutually intelligible to them. But to the rest of us, it might as well be Finnish.

I say this not to make fun of Manglish, although it is often a hoot, but to point out that the corporate people who provide the money for arts organizations and the artists on the receiving end tend not to speak the same language. Artists have their own dialect, and it is just as opaque to the non-artist and often just as full of hot air.

Thank God the managing directors of theater companies and symphonies are bilingual. After years of talking with museum directors and artistic directors, I have come to have a deeper appreciation for their ability to listen with one ear to the jargon of the artist and with the other to the lingo of the banker and meld them together to create an organization that makes good art and survives doing it.