Well, Here I Am

Even though I haven't been posting lately, I've been preoccupied with events and notions closely related to typical Farm content. The combined influences of Hurricane Sandy, the recent election (and the particular Texan brand of whining that accompanied the results), and my continuing ambivalence about where I want to spend the rest of my life have brought me to the point where I've just got to get some stuff off my chest.

As much as I sympathize with those who lost land and property as a result of Sandy and its aftermath (the "superstorm"), I can't help but wonder why we do this to ourselves.  Human beings seem incapable of choosing wisely where we live. We like mountains, we like proximity to water, and we like nice views--whether or not there's enough potable water to support a substantial population. So we live in earthquake- or avalanche- or fire-prone foothills and valleys, or even in cabins on mountainsides. Or we build lovely beach houses on earthquake- or hurricane-prone seashores. Or we build in sunny deserts with little or no water, and have to import it. Or we build in impossibly beautiful river valleys and suffer devastating floods.  Or we live in Tornado Alley.

Of course there's no perfectly safe place to live. Anywhere.  And civilization makes it even worse, because if we should happen upon an area with little potential danger from major disasters, we pipe natural gas into our houses, or build them with wood shingled roofs that catch fire when neighborhood kids shoot off bottle rockets on the Fourth of July.  Or we build a house on a prairie and then dig that up, precipitating a dust bowl in times of extreme drought. (Yes, I have been watching the new Ken Burns series.)

Climate change appears not only to be real, but really caused by us, and it looks as though we're going to suffer increasingly over the next fifty years or so, no matter what we do now to mitigate the damage.  Sandy, it seems, was probably a harbinger.

Before I began this post, I spent some time looking at YouTube videos of Sandy's impact on Long Island, where I lived when my son (now 36) was born.  We lived in a tiny town about halfway out toward the Hamptons, and later moved to a little resort house on  Lake Panamoka nearer the north shore.  We withstood a couple of hurricanes in situ without much damage back then, and the area doesn't seem to have been much harder hit this time. I could have lived there forever, in the middle of the Pine Barrens, on the glacial moraine that marked the outermost edge of a Pleistocene glacier.  But the necessity of work drove us to Texas, and (as Jubal Early says so poignantly at the end of the final Firefly episode) "Well, here I am."

I was born on a major earthquake fault, near some dormant volcanoes, and moved to others (Japan and Taiwan) as a child.  These latter islands presented a possible triple-whammy: earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons.  We never were in any danger of a volcanic eruption--even on Yangmingshan, near Taipei, which simmers visibly.  The mineral and sulphur springs that fed our bathtubs and made for luxurious soaks apparently vented enough of the volcano's energy that only minor earthquakes occasionally reminded us of what lay beneath.  I do have photos of post-typhoon flooding in Taipei, but in those days houses were built behind eight-foot stone walls, with three-foot forgiveness under the floors.  Folks seemed to know what needed to be done to keep the water from washing the whole city away.

Now, at the southern edge of the tornado belt in north Texas, the biggest danger we face is wind, hail, and other such weather-related damage.  During the renovation this past summer, we had a high-impact, fire-proof roof installed (paid for by our homeowner's insurance because of several years' worth of hail dings), but we still face the possibility of having a tree fall on the house during a storm.  Things would be a lot more worrying if we lived out in the open on flat prairie land, but the bit of topographical relief we enjoy in this area makes us slightly less prone to direct tornado impact.  So I pay for my relative safety by sacrificing my innate longing for big sky.  The house is surrounded by, in my father's estimation of any place not in the desert, "too many trees."

And I do long for the desert.  During my frequent romps into real estate porn ("owens valley california real estate" pops up in my search window if I simply type "o" into it) I can almost smell the granite sand of acreage in places like Olancha, Lone Pine, or Benton.  I can hear the crunch under my feet as I walk through clumps of sage brush and old jackrabbit bones.  Sometimes I ache for it--but never manage to arrange my life for even a visit.  I think I might be afraid that going home could make it even harder to come back.

So I do understand why people will rebuild in Rockaway, Staten Island, and on New Jersey's barrier islands.  The Beloved Spouse knows well that if I go to a beach I will wander off for miles along the shore, completely losing track of time and any sense of needing to be somewhere else for any reason at all. I've spent hours walking along beaches from Fire Island, to Tamsui (Danshui) near Taipei, to Galveston, to Virginia Beach, to Big Sur, to Bermuda (although I was so young there that I fell in the surf and almost drowned).  Even though I'd rather live in the desert, I could use a good long stretch of time on a quiet island in the middle of an ocean, and surrounded by sand.

Only, I live here. In north Texas, where a not-insignificant portion of the population now wants to secede from the Union and doesn't want to provide health care for the less fortunate among us.  But McKinney is also #2 on Money Magazine's list of Best Places to Live. It does, in fact, have some nice amenities, like an historic downtown and a decent used bookstore. It's also a little easier to live in, now that the house is painted, there's a perfectly delightful bathroom upstairs, and the living room has gone all wabi sabi  (I'll explain that in a later post). But I'm still coming to terms with the fact that my little half-acre oasis is just that: a tiny space in an intellectual desert without the charm of the real thing.  Sandwiched between hostile neighbors, we work (when we can) to shore it up, and hold out against the local universe.  But as long as my daughter's around, the dogs are happy, the Beloved Spouse has the tennis coaching to alleviate the pain of trying to teach philosophy, and I'm still (mostly) enjoying what I do to earn the mortgage payment, I'm okay.  For now.

When a colleague asked me yesterday how I was doing, with my usual snark I replied, "Well, I ain't dead. Any time I wake up not dead, that's a good day."  Fuss as I might, my troubles don't amount to much when compared to those whose house on the beach is no longer there.  I'm thinkin' that they should probably rebuild elsewhere, but I do understand why they might want to chance it one more time.

Image note: This was created in the kids' app, "Drawing Box" for the iPad.  I played around with two others--Paint Tools and Art Set--both of which are less silly, but I liked this one best.

Skywatch Friday: Desert Longing

Seasonal Affective Disorder grips me from time to time, usually after a long, dreary, cold week in January. But climate change has produced some interesting effects in north Texas, not the least of which is the succession of rainy weeks that has filled the reservoirs but severly dampened (ahem) my spirits.

I get predictably homesick in the fall anyway, because the change of seasons in the desert usually happens quite suddenly. The Owens Valley would change colors from the green/brown/beige of summer overhung with clear blue skies to the gold, red, orange, yellow, and beige of autumn (and the arrival of clouds along the ridge line of the mountains) in a matter of a few hours. The temperature typically drops from 90s to 70s in the daytime, and the nights get cooler as well.

In north Texas, where I've spent most of the last thirty years, the change is less obvious--except that this year the transition from summer (hot, sultry, muggy, and bug-filled) to fall (usually less hot, less muggy, with fewer bugs) has been just plain wet. I think we've only seen three or four sunny days since the equinox, and have measured over six inches of rain. It's not that I don't appreciate the rain, since it promises a longer, greener, cooler spring. But for a desert rat, there's such a thing as too much water, especially all at one time.

I can be excused, I think, for succumbing to nostalgia--especially since I haven't spent much time in the desert since 1999, when my husband and I visited my folks on the western side of the Sierras, and then traveled over the mountains, through the sequoias, and down into the valley in which I was born. We then traveled out again over the Inyos to Death Valley on our way back to Texas. The photos for this post were taken then. At least I can enjoy the sun and the clear desert air in memory, until things get a bit crisper and more autumnal around here and I can start to appreciate what the prairie has to offer.

The opening shot was taken from Uhlmeyer Spring (named after the great uncle who prepared his ore there after prospecting) looking toward Big Pine and the Sierras near sunset.

We then traveled out over Death Valley Road, and arrived at the north end of the monument at Eureka Valley, near Ubehebe Crater, and took some photos while overlooking some pretty amazing geology and a nicely contrasting skyline.


On our way back through Pueblo country (Petrified Forest) we stopped to see some relict walls and rock drawings (peckings, really). I remember hearing a child ask his mother why the bird was carrying a baby--but I'm pretty sure it's a frog.


At the very beginning of this year (during one of those dreary weeks in January) I posted on "Desert Love" in response to a wonderful film a Brazilian friend recommended to me. This time my nostalgic musings took me back to my own desert, and I'm glad I remembered the trip.

Before I had a chance to post this, the sun finally came out, and by the time I got home the temperature had dropped (it was warm enough this morning when I left, in the dark, at 6:30 am to cause a heavy fog), so that I was considerably cheered by a sunny, fall evening. I have been promised sun tomorrow by the local weather wonks, but rain may return at the weekend. Hope everyone else has a happy Skywatch Friday.

Desert Love

Rather than spending the evening carousing, Beloved Spouse and I celebrated New Year's Eve snuggled up in front of an amazing film: House of Sand (Casa De Areia), Portugese director Andrucha Waddington's beautifully shot story about three generations of women in northern Brazil.

The setting is utterly unearthly--which makes sense because of the many references to the moon and space exploration scattered throughout. The landscape becomes another character, and that character is The Desert. I've never wanted to visit a place quite so badly after seeing a film, even though films shot in the desert tend to be among my favorites.

According to the "making of" feature on the DVD, the desert location, in Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, actually helped to write the story, which was initially inspired by a snippet of a legend Waddington heard (I forgot where). Desert landscapes can both inspire awe and signify profound isolation and loneliness, as they do here, but I never tire of seeing panoramas of dunes (think of the opening scenes in The English Patient, or some of the magnificent shots in Lawrence of Arabia).

I once thought that the ideal place to live would be in a desert on the edge of the sea, with impossibly high mountains in the background. This film contains two of these elements, and the conjunction of water and sand punctuates its languorous pace (which I know many would find tedious; "too long" is a judgment passed on many of my favorite movies by critics with abysmally short attention spans). I'm reminded of the occasional moments in Death Valley, after abundant spring rains, when the desolation of the sand dunes is framed by seldom-seen fields of wild flowers. The contrast is breathtaking, and only hinted at in photos like the one below.

Alien landscapes abound on this planet: that is, "alien" in the sense of "otherworldly," even though they're very much the product of home planet forces. They're only alien because most people choose not to live in them, or they are so remote and inaccessible that few encounter them. There must be an initial bond, I think, between human beings in the desert in order for them to love it, precisely because it's so difficult to live in. The granite sand in the high desert of the Owens Valley is in my blood, and probably accounts for my affection.

For those of us who find transcendent moments not in the worship of deities but in the very idea that our existence is accidental, the desert--and films that recognize its visual power--serves as a reminder of our sheer luck. We don't live on Tatooine or Arakkis, and so our lives aren't controlled by sand. But we can get an inkling of the fragility of existence by spending some time, even virtually, in one of these places; perhaps if more people were to do so, we could better appreciate this planet's luxurious abundance and variety, which our modern ways of life have threatened so significantly.

Photo credits: "Photo of one of the lakes of the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park. This particular lake is close to Lagoa Azul (blue lake)" by Vitor. Dunes at Lençóis Maranhenses by cigh_66. Death Valley Dunes by Urban. All via Wikimedia Commons

Writing the Desert

Three years ago, American desert writer Ellen Meloy died at home in Bluff, Utah. She was only 58. By the time I “met” Meloy, when I happened on a copy of The Anthropology of Turquoise at the local Half Price Books, she had already been dead several months. But her impact on my understanding of the world—especially the world of the west where we were both born—has been considerable.

Small coincidences drew me to her work; we were both born in California, at opposite ends of the aqueduct that deposited Owens Valley water into the San Fernando Valley. We were about the same age, and both solstice children (she summer; I winter). But most of all we were both desert rats. Drawn to the stark drama of the landscape, we both felt out of place elsewhere. I still do, of course, here in exile on what’s left of the prairie. But Meloy was the best interpreter of the desert I’d come across since Edward Abbey and Joseph Wood Krutch, and although I’ve read only two of her books (Turquoise, and the last book—published posthumously—Eating Stone) I have thought of her every year since, near the anniversary of her death. I’m saving her other two books, Last Cheater’s Waltz and Raven’s Exile for when I retire and can savor them without distractions. Preferably I’ll take them to Independence, California, and hole up in the Winnedumah Hotel for a couple of weeks to read them on the front porch, or up on the road to Onion Valley.

Every self-respecting, budding environmentalist (including, I think, Meloy) read Edward Abbey in the seventies. Of course, I didn’t really become a budding environmentalist until I moved to Long Island, and spent a few years raising a son in the Pine Barrens, taking courses in regional geology at Stony Brook, and later moving to Texas where I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to learn to love the prairie. Any time I made a trip west, however, I’d bone up on the desert and hoard books like Roadside Geology of Arizona and John MacPhee’s Basin and Range in preparation. So it was that I finally came upon Abbey late, when I read Desert Solitaire in anticipation of a trip home. And thus began my political awakening.

Abbey was only two years older than I am when he died in 1989. Someday I hope to come upon the stone that’s said to mark his grave, out in the Arizona desert somewhere. Before he and Joseph Krutch died, though, the former interviewed the latter, and published it in the collection, One Life At A Time, Please in 1988.

Joseph Wood Krutch, about whom I had once planned to write a master’s thesis, was born on November 25^th, 1893. He became a kind of public intellectual who began by writing significant books like The Modern Temper (1929) and then fell in love with the natural world. By the time he died in 1970, he had written books like The Desert Year (1951), The Voice of the Desert (1954), a “biography” of the Grand Canyon (1957), and one of my favorite books, The Gardner’s World, a compendium of garden writing from Homer to modernity. One of the very first bits of nature writing I ever encountered was “The Day of the Peepers” (1949), which was recommended to me in the early seventies by my boss, Daniel J. O’Kane, who was then acting Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Penn. O’Kane is a microbiologist by trade, and had already introduced me to the Pine Barrens in New Jersey—thus fostering an interest that blossomed later when I moved to Long Island and could explore them at will.

One more recommendation: Mary Austin. I once came upon a real estate ad offering for sale the house where Austin lived in Independence, and fantasized about buying it. There’s a honking great huge historical marker outside it now, and it’s sort of possible still to imagine how it looked when she was writing Land of Little Rain (1903)—a book my grandmother nudged in my direction the minute I showed the slightest interest in such things. Austin had married in Bakersfield and moved to Independence, but after the Valley lost the “water wars” to Los Angeles, she moved back over the mountains to Carmel. In the meantime, however, she had written the first and one of the most evocative accounts of the desert and the valley that my family had then only just begun to inhabit.

There are other such writers, of course, and I’ll consider them another time. But for the moment, I’m remembering Ellen Meloy, and others of her ilk who have enriched my reading life immeasurably, and who have significantly deepened my affection for the land of little rain. While I was looking through the books mentioned above, I noticed that my copy of Krutch's The Voice of the Desert was one I had sent my father in 1992, as a Father's Day gift, and in which he had made a number of notations. On the last page he had highlighted the following passage, and I think it makes a fitting end to this post:

Of all answers to the question, "What is a desert good for?" "Contemplation" is perhaps the best.

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.