Prairie Wind

I always seem to find myself living in places where, at times, the wind blows ferociously, as it has been around here this last week.

For example, in the Owens River Valley in California, where I was born, northerlies blow down between the Sierras and the Inyos, stirring up granite dust from the alluvial plains and laying a quarter-inch of residue on every existing interior or exterior horizontal surface by the time they blow themselves out. At the southern end of the valley, Owens Lake used to contribute to LA’s pollution during these winds (it’s their own damned fault—if they hadn’t started syphoning off the water from the river, the lake wouldn’t have dried up in the first place), but the powers that be finally realized that some water let into the lake would solve the problem.

Both Taiwan and Japan, where I spent most of my early life, sit in typhoon territory, and I remember several fierce storms that took place in the sixties. One blew off part of our roof and soaked the ceiling of the living room so that great chunks of it landed on the floor. One flooded Taipei, and only the fact that the house we then lived in had been built by the Japanese during the war and was thus raised on piers a couple of feet off the ground saved us from a good floor-soaking. We never did evacuate (I have no idea where we could have gone), and after we moved out of the city, the aftermaths were always interesting because of the length of time it would take to clean up. Trees fell onto roads, isolating communities for days, and electricity was often off for even longer. We didn’t miss television, because there wasn’t any then, and even telephones were seldom used (ours had a crank, and our number was “Yangmingshan 13”). Eventually everything went back to normal, just in time for the next big blow.

When I lived in Southern California, the Santa Ana winds blew dryly and predictably in the fall, often fanning wildfires the way they did this past year.

Hurricanes produced the major wind-related weather when I lived in the eastern United States. Both Philadelphia and Long Island lay in predictable hurricane pathways. One summer in the early seventies, a tropical depression lay over Philly, making everyone cranky and overheated. We all ran around with fans, wearing as little clothing as we could get away with, because air conditioning was far from ubiquitous then, even in some of the wealthier sections of town. My office at Penn had it, so grad students would wander in to visit and cool off. I remember not getting much work done for several days. I think we’d have been happy for a hurricane by the time the depression moved on—just to stir things up a bit.

Long Island is really just a terminal moraine, which sticks out from the “mainland” like a hurricane trap. I only lived there for a couple of years, but often visited during the summer when hurricanes were always a possibility. I don’t ever remember evacuating then, either, even though the in-laws lived less than half a mile from the water—but that was probably because Blue Point was protected by a barrier beach and a segment of the Pine Barrens. Even so, there was serious window-taping and battening down going on days before a potential hit was even confirmed.

By now I’ve officially spent most of my life on the prairie, and the wind that blows here is often relentless. When my children were growing up, we lived on the only bit of relief in the area, a small hill above a creek. When we had a fence built, I insisted on spaced pickets, even though the prevailing fashion was six- to eight-foot solid “privacy” fences: stockades to keep out the barbarians, I suppose. But I did have the last laugh several times when neighbors’ fences were blown down; those same winds blew right through my pickets. Even they didn’t resist one big storm, though; it moved the back gate open just enough for our twenty one year-old dog to escape. We never did see him again.

During the last week, the prairie winds have been tearing through town, knocking limbs off our pecan trees, toppling outdoor furniture, stirring up brush fires in the few areas that aren’t filled with houses. So I slipped Neil Young’s Prairie Wind album into the car CD, and started thinking about the elemental aspects of wind—and about George Stewart, whose novel, Storm (1941) is still one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s not only a great read (it’s protagonist is a windstorm) but it begat the naming of hurricanes, and inspired the Lerner and Loewe song (from Paint Your Wagon), “They Call the Wind Maria.”

While googling around on wind and fire as I thought about writing this post, I came across a wonderful article by Jan Null called “Winds of the World” (2000). In the essay, Null notes that winds have frequently been named by the people they affect. I discovered, for example, that what blows down the Owens Valley is a probably a manifestation of winds that can cause a great deal of trouble elsewhere:

“Californians refer to their great katabatic wind as the Mono wind. It originates from the cold air over the Great Basin, particularly in Mono County, that spills out of high mountain valleys at over 9,000 feet and streams down the canyons on the west slopes of the rugged Sierra Nevada. Mono winds have knocked down 100-foot trees and have been clocked at 100 m.p.h. in Yosemite Valley.”

Katabatic winds, Null explains, are downslope, fall winds—such as the Mistral that blew the bejeezis out of Peter Mayle—the experience of which he recounted in A Year in Provence.

The article also contains juicy bits of etymology and local color, such as the fact that the word “monsoon” comes from the Arabic “mausim,” which means “season,” and that a common name for a twisting storm in Australia is a “cock-eyed Bob.” Rather more interesting a moniker, perhaps, than “blue norther,” or even “typhoon” (which simply means “big wind” in Chinese).

In the end, however, I’m not sure that it was such a great idea to give big storms people names—especially since the names themselves seem so random (“Well, we need a K this year, so it’ll be ‘Katrina’”). We should spend more time thinking up impressive names, especially now that the potential exists for more and more destructive storms. If a hurricane is going to go down in history and folklore, and cause major political and cultural upheaval, it would seem to command a more important-sounding name than, say, “Hurricane Tom.”

That said, I would like to mention that today would have been my father’s 87^th birthday, and his name was Tom. He also used to fly weather reconnaissance into hurricanes, so maybe it would be fitting, some day, to have one with his name on it.

Photo: What the prairie wind did in my back yard.

The Mine-Affected World

Photo: an abandoned mine near Independence, California

I apologize for the title pun, but it seemed destined after yesterday’s post. The topic of mining has fascinated me ever since I was a child, when I read Enid Blyton’s adventure novels—many of which took place in the mining regions of Great Britain. Children in these stories found themselves trapped in smugglers’ caves and abandoned mines (most of which contained stores of tinned food, providing the kids with a ready source of nourishment during their adventures). Later, Daphne du Maurier’s novels, set mainly in Cornwall and Devon, often used the mining tradition as a backdrop. Still later, when I began to study the development of technology after the Industrial Revolution, mining kept reappearing as a major theme—one of the unfortunate, but necessary, byproducts of the human “need” for more (and more complex) sources of energy. Even my studies of William Morris touched on the mining industry, since it was his father’s shares in the Devon Great Consols Copper Mine that “earned” the income that allowed him to pursue his interests.

As a child, growing up in Japan and Taiwan, the smell of coal (the primary source of heat and cooking fuel in many of the houses we lived in) burning in the grate made me feel comfortable; it meant warmth. The first coal fire was a seasonal beacon, and the shiny bits in the scuttle next to the pot-bellied stove were fascinating to a five-year old. That stove was the single source of heat in our first house in rural Japan; the goldfish bowl was often placed nearby during the winter—until one night the fire went out, and the goldfish froze.

Years later, in a philosophy of science course, I was introduced to Susan Griffin’s poetic exploration of the connection between Woman And Nature, in which—among many other such meditations—she considers how men have perceived the earth through time: there for the taking, conveniently stratified, so that minerals can be extracted for use in machines.

Perhaps my interest in mines is congenital. My ancestors first moved to the Owens River Valley in California to mine silver; Uhlmeyer Spring, near Big Pine, marks the spot where my grandfather’s uncle washed the ore he took out of the mountain behind the spring. Owens Lake, because of its location near the end of a long Pleistocene drainage system, contains myriad metals and chemicals, and steamboats once plied the lake servicing the mining town of Keeler. My father, as a young man, worked at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant on the western side of the lake, helping to harvest potash out of the drying lake. The Inyos, forming the eastern ridge of the basin/range complex that includes the Owens valley and the eastern Sierra Nevada, are studded with abandoned mines. Once, in my teens, I spent a year living with my grandmother, and I remember scaring the living bejeeziz out of her when I came home covered in powdered Dolomite after having spent the afternoon sliding down piles of it outside a mine near Keeler. I looked like somebody’s ghost (not Vonnegut’s, though; he was very much alive and influencing my sense of humor at the time). A recent blog in Mental Floss notes that there are about 40,000 abandoned mines in California alone, several of which are visible from the highway that bisects the valley. Mining was a significant factor in the building of California, and a major constituent of the economy for about a hundred years.

Only recently I came across Wallace Stegner’s novel, Angle of Repose, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, and which generated a measure of controversy because it was based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote. She was the wife of Arthur deWindt Foote, who managed the North Star Mine near Grass Valley, California, at the turn of the nineteenth century, and she made a small career for herself writing and illustrating articles and novels that recounted the life of a miner’s wife during the period. Stegner’s novel uses Foote’s letters, often intact, as the basis for his novel, and they’re frequently riveting. She had met many of the great personalities involved in the world of mining geology, including Clarence King, and her letters about these encounters make the “moment” truly immediate. [One of her articles for Scribners, “A California Mining Camp,” and other works are available through Prof. Donna Campbell’s pages at Washington State University.] Living among mines and miners seems to be a character-building experience second to none.

The trouble is, of course, the cost. As the events at Utah’s Crandall Canyon Mine during the last two weeks illustrate, this is a dangerous business, and potentially the source of real tragedy, in the Greek sense. It’s even more hazardous in this case, as Kirk Johnson notes in his article for the New York Times on Thursday, because of the method used to extract the coal from this particular mine: “there is little doubt, mine experts said, that retreat mining at extreme depth in Utah, where mine-produced tremors are common, creates a tapestry of forces that adds to mining’s inherent hazards.” And the results are tragic, not just because people have died (three rescuers so far, and any hope for the original six trapped miners has all but evaporated)—tragedy wasn't about ordinary people—but because the protagonist of the story is Big Energy and because of the tragic flaw that’s becoming increasingly apparent in human interaction with nature: the overweening arrogance and faulty sense of superior wisdom the Greeks called hubris.

We think we can control nature, use it however we want, and somehow come out ahead. Never mind that deep mining causes lung problems, that jobs disappear when veins are tapped out, and that miners are rarely paid wages that actually compensate them for the dangers they face, or that another technique (strip mining) leaves the landscape barren and polluted. Never mind that the coal extracted from these mines is used in power plants that spew particulates into an atmosphere already so burdened with greenhouse gasses that we’re probably dooming our grandchildren to lives dominated by cancer and lung disease (not to mention irreversible climate change and its consequences). We think (using those big brains) we’re in control. And then the god of the mountain burps, and men with families lose their lives, and towns with few other sources of income lose their economic base.

The only real solution is to lessen our dependence on energy, period. But we’re addicted to the stuff. One wag in the local newspaper (sorry, it was several days ago, and I forgot whose column) commented that we were sacrificing human lives so as not to annoy a few caribou—as if drilling in the Arctic were really going to solve anything. And few of us seem to be getting the message that all of these energy sources we pull out of the earth are finite, and extremely difficult to access. We’re clearly not smart enough (or at least we lack the imagination and political will) to create safe, non-polluting technologies to feed our energy “needs.” So maybe what we really need to do is to carefully assess how much energy is actually necessary, and to think about how to reduce our dependence not just on coal or oil or natural gas, but on what we do with all the energy itself.

Walk more, eat less, grow some of our own food, eat local produce, work when it’s light, sleep when its dark, limit our use of electronic devices, talk, learn, understand.

When William Morris's "Guest" returns to Hammersmith after his adventure upstream in News From Nowhere, rather than being discouraged by the fact that his “epoch of rest” has been a dream, he muses that “if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.” The true visionaries today will have to be those who can see beyond what simply is. Just because we live the way we do doesn’t mean we can’t live differently.

So now I’m going to turn off the computer, go out into the accidental garden, and check on my tomatoes.

Fire and Water

Even though I live in north Texas, for some time I have regarded doing so as a form of exile. I followed a husband here, and raised my children here, and (partly from inertia) I stay. I will probably die here, but my ashes might ultimately be tucked into the family plot in a little town in eastern California, among those of my father's family.

Last week, the family plot itself was threatened by this season's biggest California wildfire--a 35,000-acre conjunction of lightning-caused fires among the sagey open spaces and canyons of the Owens River Valley, and on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The fire, known as the Inyo Complex, is now under control, but at its height it closed U. S. Highway 395 and forced the evacuation of 200 residents in the county seat, Independence. Popular campgrounds west of Independence and northwest of Big Pine were closed, and one was burned over by the blaze. The Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery and its surroundings were damaged while firefighters were trying to protect this historical site from being incinerated. The fire damage to the local environment led to severe damage to the hatchery and adjacent buildings when torrential rains caused a debris flow that killed all of the trout and buried the rearing ponds. As a result, the site no longer hatches fish, and the main building remains as a shadow of its historic past. I have photos of both my grand father and my father, and my father and my son sitting on the hatchery steps. 

I have often railed (and have witnesses to prove it) against the propensity of human beings to build homes in areas demonstrably prone to disasters of one form or another. It seems to me that we're asking for it when we build in flood plains, fire-climax vegetation areas (like many of those near Los Angeles), some types of forest (like the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and Long Island), and especially on the edge of the ocean in places subject to periodic (and inexorable) beach erosion and/or hurricanes. As much as I love the idea of New Orleans, the human engineering at the mouth of the Mississippi doomed the city, and it should never have grown up where it did, and certainly not as large as it has. Los Angeles is another example, not only because it was built on or near the conjunctions of several earthquake fault lines, but also because the region couldn't possibly sustain the population it has acquired without pulling water from the Colorado and Owens Rivers--both of which had other communities to support, thank you.

But the original inhabitants of the Owens River Valley (Payahuunadu, as it was called by the Numa, members of the Paiute and Shoshone tribes) and early white settlers must have thought that they had found an idyllic home. They may well have known about the earthquake hazard there--at least, they did by 1872--but there was abundant water to support a farming/ranching economy, and they probably didn't suspect that a behemoth of a city would grow up to the south or that one of capitalism's great heroes would arrange to carry away most of the river's water by the 1930s and cause the great Owens Lake to dry up.

Don't get me wrong. I love L. A. Not nearly as much as I love the Owens valley, but it does have its charms. I graduated from high school near there (Orange County) and began my academic career not far away (Riverside County). I always returned to Inyo County, however, in part because my family had inserted such a palpable sense of place into my genes that even when I lived in Texas for a while as a teenager, I would hop on a Greyhound bus every holiday break and take the two-day ride to L. A. and then to Lone Pine to stay with my grandmother (who was largely responsible for my developing a healthy curiosity about history and the natural world). Sometimes I'd spend 4.5 days on the road just to spend 3 days breathing the granite- and cottonwood-scented air that meant "home."

I'm also fully aware that if Mulholland hadn't arranged for the aqueduct that still pumps millions of gallons of water out of the valley daily, the towns for which I hold such affection would probably have grown into a massive metroplex of expensive homes and resorts, instead of making a living for themselves by providing backdrops for science fiction movies and SUV commercials, and acting as a gateway to the national parks and campgrounds of the eastern Sierras. But my grandparents' photographs of the early homesteads and Owens Lake when it was deep enough for steamboats, and even Ansel Adams's photos of the infamous Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II, evoke a sense of open spaces, clear air, purple mountains' majesty--and all the nostalgia anybody could ever want (unless, of course, you were interned during the war; but I've met people who spent several years at the camp, and they remember the valley itself fondly).

A few years ago, on a trip home from Texas, we drove by Owens Lake, hoping to see the results of the new wetlands project. I noticed that an imposing new building of corrugated metal had sprung up just outside of Olancha, blocking the view of the lake. A somewhat ironic development had brought to the valley a new industry: bottled water from the Crystal Geyser people. So now the thirsty minions of L. A. can help themselves to even more water--from the mountains above the lake they had already drained.

The fact that people have built and continue to build homes in the valley indicates to me that there are many others who are still drawn to this very place. Infrequent wildfires are much less of a threat than inevitable hurricanes or--here in exile--tornadoes, so that living between two mountain ranges that frame the clearly visible Milky Way at night seems a far better choice. The valley is pretty arid (even though the city of Los Angeles has been forced to allow more water to flow into Owens Lake to eliminate the pollution it causes when it's dry)--but then so was north Texas until this spring. The impending climate crises will affect everyone, and the outcome of global warming is largely unpredictable. (I wasn't going to plant tomatoes here this year because we all expected the drought to continue--and then the rains came.) I can't even begin to imagine what will happen in the valley as the temperature rises.

Many strategies exist to mitigate the problems brought on by climate change. We could, for example, learn from past mistakes that building huge, ungainly cities that drain natural resources of their value and require huge investments of technology and capital cannot provide a sustainable future. Small, self-sufficient communities based on appropriate technologies and minimal exploitation of local resources might help see us through another century. Siting these communities should also include risk-assessment so that we don't try to mold the environment to satisfy perceived human "needs" by abdicating common sense. We don't have to build houses on the beach in order to enjoy the ocean. We don't have to build expensive wooden cabins in areas prone to forest fires, just so we can get away from monotonous nine-to-five jobs. While it's certainly not possible to prevent natural disasters (the high desert does burn on occasion), we can certainly avoid the obvious locales (flood plains, hurricane-prone shorelines) or at least build houses designed to withstand the inevitable. And perhaps if we were to spend more time trying to develop meaningful work-lives, the need for "vacation homes" might be reduced.

The earliest examples of "civilization" (from the Latin civis, "city") were built along rivers: the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Hwang Ho, the Indus. Carefully tended (rather than ruthlessly exploited), rivers can provide many of life's necessities (food, water, plant materials, natural beauty) for as long as their sources exist. But they can also become polluted, over-fished, over-traveled, or generally over-used. Studying the various "collapses" of ancient civilizations (in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, North America) inevitably leads to the conclusion that misuse or abuse of an area's water-sources is always a major factor. Although human beings seem to be drawn to riverine environments (only to exploit them ruthlessly), imagine what would happen if we learned to use our rivers lightly and well. The Thames, for example, may not be the pristine stream Morris imagined in News From Nowhere--but it's far cleaner than it was in the nineteenth century. And New York's Hudson River has undergone significant improvement thanks to groups like the Hudson River Foundation and new efforts to clean up toxic dump sites. Hope abides.

So what does any of this have to do with utopia? In my thought experiments regarding "how we might live," I always conjure up a prelapsarian image of the Owens River Valley: pre-Mulholland, pre-aqueduct, even pre-mining days (although they didn't last long and didn't do all that much damage). This version of the valley is a bit like the New Zealand of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films: open valleys, impossibly tall mountains, rushing rivers, expansive landscapes. Morris imagined his utopia along a clean, unpolluted Thames, on which he traveled and re-imagined London after the "revolution." A free, unfettered (un-pilfered) Owens River offers similar opportunities. I'd build a mote house near Uhlmeyer Spring, overlooking the river and the valley (see the photo, above), and like-minded folk could discuss and practice sustainability, permaculture, social responsibility, and other "utopian" ideas to their hearts' content, while breathing clean, desert air.

That is, of course, as long as the whole place doesn't go up in smoke.