Water

The photo is a bit of a cheat to make it work for Skywatch Friday (note the sky reflection), but it's also a fitting illustration of elements from earth to air to fire to water. The "birdbath" is actually a former copper fire pit, which was rendered useless as such when a huge branch from our neighbor's tree fell on it. But it makes a nifty spa for the feathered folk who visit my potager, and the sundial makes a nice launching pad for frolics. Earth is represented by the rocks (from a cairn of Sierra samples my father pinched from some hapless geologist's cache many years ago). The air and water symbolism is rather more obvious.

The coalescence of themes in blogs and life never ceases to amaze me. Here I am, sitting down to prepare this week's contribution to the Farm and to end my recent attempt at theme-blogging (The Elements Project). But during this week I've also been updating a course I teach on myth, and water--the element du jour--keeps showing up as I select new readings and augment the slide shows. Water is a pretty powerful metaphor, after all, and it's a basic component of stories about origins and creation. It's also a topic I've written about frequently on the Farm (Good News and Bad News in the Water Wars, among others), and it'll probably creep into future posts as well. If I'm repeating myself, think of this as an update.

Yesterday I got tired of heat and work, and indulged in a bit of what I call "Valley porn": looking through the Owens Valley real estate offerings and fantasizing about winning lotteries and settling down on a couple of hundred acres, preferably with a trout stream running through. Water (and sometimes the lack of it), in fact, has been an abiding theme in my love affair with my home ground.

I probably need not remind anyone that the sprawling southern Californian megalopolis we call Los Angeles owes its very existence to water that once flowed freely through the Owens River Valley. LA would have been much smaller had William Mulholland not purloined the rights to water flowing between the Inyos and the Sierras and built the aqueduct that enabled population growth to the south. The old adage "blood is thicker than water" was transformed into "blood is water" when it comes to making a huge city possible on land that could not otherwise have supported all the millions that now occupy the region.

There are, of course, many sides to this story, but I've lived with it for long enough to know that every time I travel home I see signs of increasing dessication, and for fifty years I've watched the joshua trees from the south marching up the valley, harbingers of encroaching desert. It's always been desert--but the oases are becoming fewer and farther between.

In fact, I love the desert. There's nothing like dry, granite sand, sagebrush, and creosote bush to make one really appreciate water in the first place. I even harbor a special fondness for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which flows by the Cottonwood Power Plant where I spent summers and holidays until my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to town. The "Innapennants" (Firefly joke) in my family had harbored no long-term animosity toward the city of Los Angeles, and my grandfather worked for them for over twenty years until, as my uncle recently noted after a visit to the old plant, he "left feet first, as did the chief operator before him." My uncle also reported that the city had put up water meters next to the houses there--no more free water for anybody.

As I mentioned in the introduction to More News From Nowhere, the water situation in the Valley isn't all bad news--at least for the nostalgic few like me who are glad it didn't turn into one big long city on the way to Reno and Tahoe. The median income in the area is low, but there's work in the tourist industry, and a few ranchers and others make decent enough money to build half-million dollar houses up in the Alabamas (as I discovered in my romp through the properties-for-sale ads).

One of the more ironical aspects of valley life is that a fairly new employer has set up shop in Olancha, just south of Owens Lake: the Crystal Geyser water bottling people, who truck water pumped from underground snow-fed springs down to folks in LA who apparently don't like the taste of the river water.

As I've recently been reminded, the relationship between water and life shows up constantly in creation myths, and these stories have been around for as long as human beings have been around to tell them. Like fire, water has both its creative and destructive elements; although life comes from water, nearly every mythic system contains a flood story. When the gods don't get it right, they send a flood to wipe the slate clean so they can start all over again.

Every religion I've ever been involved in also uses water as a symbol of birth and rebirth. When I was six months old, I was baptized with water from the River Jordan (according to the certificate) in the First Congregational Church in Pasedena, California. In Japan, at age 7, I was re-baptized Catholic (my mother had converted some years earlier, and my brother had been baptized at birth), and then in my mid-twenties I got the Christian all washed off in a mikveh in Allentown Pennsylvania while three Orthodox rabbis waited politely behind a door to hear me say the blessing that made me Jewish.

Just a couple of weeks ago (in the Air post) I was grousing about how water has been responsible for the increased use of air conditioning by raising regional humidity, and lamenting our inability to use evaporative cooling instead of heat pumps around here. Thanks to my daily dose of Good, however, I'm now aware of a new technology that promises to reduce electric power use by 90%, and that uses a system descended from the old swamp cooler--and that "works well in both Gulf Coast humidity and desert heat." Systems like this could also make it easier to get off the grid, since (according to the Miller-McCune article), 14% of American electrical use goes to air conditioning.

As most of Texas continues to suffer drought ranging from severe to exceptional (except for our little area of north Texas where we've had enough rain this year to move us out of any category), the wild fires will continue to burn, and water shortages will make it harder to endure them. I feel a little guilty when I water the veggies, but try to make up for it by not taking showers when I don't have to go out in public. Only a year ago, I reported (in the above-mentioned post on water wars) that Texas as a whole was drought free for the first time in recent history.

If we don't get rain soon, we'll probably be nudged back toward the "abnormally dry" or "moderate" drought categories; but McKinney seems to have learned some hard lessons about water, and wise-use policies are now part of everyday life. Some fairly effective television ads from the Water IQ campaign have started appearing, too--with coins representing water, flowing, for example, into a storm drain. Even more evocative, I think, are the Save Water, Save Life ads that are showing up all over the world--one of which quotes Ben Franklin: "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."

Lets hope that all those folks who're anxious to adhere to the tenets laid out by the Founding Fathers can be as frugal with their water use as they want to be with my tax money. The deficit that really endagers our children and grandchildren involves water, and I can't think of a better example of a public good than making sure we use what we have wisely.

Image notes: the photo was taken with the Camera+ app for my iPhone4. It doesn't quite make the smart phone into an SLR as it claims, but some of the features are very useful (zooming, for instance, and the cute borders). I'm really enjoying the higher resolution, which can be augmented even further by another app: 8.0 MPX Simulator.

Fire

Human beings are always trying to figure out all the ways in which we're not only unique, but uniquely unique (different in ways that no other species is) among others in the animal kingdom. But as each of the previously identified means of being special have either evaporated or diminished, the fact that we cook our food seems to be holding. As far as we know, there isn't another species that deliberately starts a fire in order to hustle up some dinner.

We once thought that our possession of language was a significant marker, not shared even by other primates; but Koko the Gorilla and other apes after her have shown that they can communicate not only among themselves but with us, using a form of human language, and can pass that knowledge on to others. I used to think that the truly remarkable talent possessed by homo sapiens sapiens was not simply language, but the ability to make and use metaphors; I dubbed us homo translator, and built a good many lectures about human nature upon that seemingly clever designation.

But, alas, Koko also devised some nifty metaphors (her little roly-poly kitten was "All Ball"), so there went that theory. Since then we've discovered chimps (and even birds) that use tools (bye, bye, homo faber), long the measure of human specialness.

Human culinary proclivities, however, have held up pretty well over the years as a measure of human-ness. Claude Lévi-Strauss's important study of myth, The Raw and the Cooked, focused on the symbolic aspects of cooking, and a rather wonderful book that came out a few years ago--Food and Culture: A Reader (edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, Routledge, 1997) --includes most of the important anthropological musings on the topic by the likes of Margaret Mead, Roland Barthes, Marvin Harris, Mary Douglas, and Lévi-Strauss himself. The book has recently been updated (2008), which attests to continuing interest in the topic.

More recently, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009) poses the possibility that moving from raw to cooked food actually promoted the transition into full humanitude, bringing with it all manner of social consequences. It's an engaging book, and even though I'm always suspicious of single-impetus theories, this one's more convincing than most. That may be because I'm such a foodie, but Wrangham does back his hypothesis up with substantial evidence and a good argument.

The cooking-made-us human notion also ties in with the cultural importance of fire--the main topic of today's musings. Few natural phenomena manage to connote both warmth and comfort and abject fear and dread at the same time. But fire does this: the cozy campfire all too often turns into the killer wildfire, as seems to be the case in Arizona's ongoing Wallow fire (which began a month ago and still isn't 100% contained). However it started, the currently burning Las Conchas fire is threatening Los Alamos National Laboratory's nuclear materials--piling one concern on top of another.

As I've been prepping for my up-coming class, Myth, Mythography, and Mythology, I keep coming across interesting articles about myth and natural phenomena--not the least of which is fire. One of the more potent symbols in human cultures, fire takes many forms in the stories people tell about themselves and nature. Our ambivalence about it shows up famously in the story of Prometheus (who steals it from the gods and suffers dire consequences), and I frequently remind students that the disastrous eruptions of Vesuvius and Thera are what preserved significant aspects of Roman and Minoan culture for us.

Just yesterday I discovered an article in Mosaic by the philosopher David Farrell Krell and his actor/producer daughter Salomé , "Why Santorini? A Response in Two Voices," in which he considers the caloric (and metaphorical) aspects of energy--produced by the heat of the sun, but more so by the underlying seismic activity in the Mediterranean. It was the continuing interaction of tectonic plates, after all, that produced the massive Bronze Age eruption that left behind the remnants we now call Santorini. The poetic value of marrying heat-driven energy to human hospitality brings us back to cooking: "human energy," Krell notes, "passes in good part through great food."

When I was thinking about how to illustrate this post with something appropriate for Skywatch Friday, I kept remembering a photo I took in Riverside, California about forty years ago, of the U. C. campus carillon tower against a flaming sky. When I found it, I realized that my memory was far more vivid than the actual image, which wasn't even worth scanning. But my evening sojourns in the back yard in recent years have contributed a large number of much more appropriate images, like the one I ended up using (taken last summer)--the kind of photograph that immediately brings fire to mind.

Fires are breaking out everywhere, both in nature and in politics. A world in which suicide bombers ignite hotel fires, demonstrators throw Molotov cocktails, planes drop bombs, human beings light barbecues for patriotic holidays and set off fireworks (which can, in turn, set off wildfires), is one in which fire holds power far above its physical presence. Few symbols maintain such an uneasy balance between the beneficial and the baneful. And as we settle into yet another very hot summer, the likelihood that the world will end in fire--in any combination of its many forms--seems entirely possible, if not inevitable.

--Since I haven't posted in a while, I thought it worth noting that the Farm turned five on June 22. To those of you who've read these "pages" on and off over the years, thanks for keeping me going.

Dirt

Many human creation stories start with dirt, with our having come from the earth. The god of the Judaeo-christian tradition makes the first man from Eden's red earth and names him Adam after it. Native American stories from the Southwest see the attachment as more communal in the sense that human beings as a whole emerge from under the ground, making the earth a literal home. The small depression called a sipapu in Basketmaker pit houses and their descendents, Pueblo kivas, symbolizes this emergence; and the houses themselves are partly dug into the ground, providing a physical connection between earth and sky. At any rate, this is my excuse for starting with earth, rather than air, in this series of (be)musings.

In the modern world, connections with the land seem to have taken on the cloak of commerce. The preoccupation with "property values" has little to do with anything but finances--nobody's really talking about moral value. Around here, a common practice after the tax bill comes is to refute it, and the newspaper always includes advice on how to challenge your home's "value" on the tax rolls. Never mind its worth to one's family, and to life and memory. But this makes a certain amount of sense in a world where housing has more to do with status and fad than with the idea of home, the art of architecture, and the building of stable, sustainable communities.

When white folk decided that manifest destiny decreed ocean to ocean occupation of what became the United States, we took over other peoples' homes, evicting them from their property, and imposing an alien culture on land that had been sparsely but deeply occupied for thousands of years. And then we began building in places that most sensible natives wouldn't have chosen or, if they did, they would have been acutely aware of the danger of doing so and built accordingly. So upstart Europeans decided that they liked living by rivers, on bluffs overlooking the sea, in balmy climates, and other spots where nature periodically unleashes catastrophe in the form of floods, earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like.

Some people try to mitigate the effects of natural weather extremes by building houses on stilts, or by creating tornado shelters, but many more don't. Some accept the possibility of disaster as part of the cost of living along the Mississippi or in the earthquake-prone regions of California, or along the Gulf coast, but many more seem shocked when inevitable natural processes finally catch up with them.

Sometimes we can prevent disasters by building and planning wisely, but more frequently, it seems, desire gets the better of us, and we build unwisely, we over-graze, over-build, over-plant, or otherwise abandon common sense for reasons of ignorance or general lack of wisdom.

In west Texas this year, the juniper forests that had grown up over former ranch land (where cattle and selective burning had kept the problems at bay for generations) exploded into wildfires that destroyed thousands of acres, and hundreds of homes. The desire for shade in a hot climate meant that the well-adapted junipers were cultivated and encouraged; few seem to have paid attention to the chemical properties of juniper species. As one article on fire prevention in Nevada notes, "Firefighters often refer to ornamental junipers as little green gas cans."

In much of Texas, prairie grasslands have been replaced by the heat- and drought- tolerant junipers, and in some areas have been left ungrazed in order to conserve the land. However, as land gets sold off and parceled out to developers, fewer preventive measures are taken, and people end up living in a tinderbox.

Fire-climax vegetation such as juniper, chaparral, and pitch pine has to be carefully managed if people are to live on or near it--but human beings cling stubbornly to the notion that they can build any damned place they want to, only to weep at the loss when the inevitable overtakes them.

There are, in fact, few places that don't come with some kind of potential disaster attached. But some places practically beg for catastrophe because they're built up in areas that just aren't suitable for huge populations, such as Los Angeles--laid out as it is on its net of earthquake fault lines and with little in the way of water resources--or seaside communities with nuclear power plants in eastern Japan, or cities in Florida built on drained everglades and lying in the path of frequent hurricanes. Smaller populations or wiser fuel sources might well mitigate some disasters, but we insist on being stupid and ignoring probability.

In cultures where earth is seen as sacred, and viewed as the mother of us all, populations have traditionally remained small and people tend to know their environments much more intimately than the city- and suburb-bound throngs of Americans that pile up in cities. I actually don't have that much against cities (because concentrating the humans in smaller areas leaves more land open), except when they're inappropriately located. Cities might also have a deterrent effect on some kinds of weather (such as tornadoes), and localize damage rather than spreading it out over large areas as the recent tornado cluster in Joplin, Missouri did. The notion that tornadoes don't hit big cities is based on bad understanding of what tornadoes do (as this list of myths about these storms form The Tornado Project indicates), but urban sprawl does mean that more populated areas are subject to potential damage from big storms.

In my last post, I proposed a series of discursions on earth, air, fire, and water--but realized almost as soon as I started taking notes that one really can't consider any of these ancient "elements" in isolation from one or more of the others. Add in the related concepts of heat, drought, wetness, and cold (plus aether, the quintessence), and the whole project gets even more complicated.

Fortunately for us all, Richard Hamblyn has written a book, Terra: Tales of the Earth, Four Events that Changed the World, a much more ambitious exploration of the formative effects of natural disasters on modern conceptions of such things. The link is to Jonathan Keats's October 2009 review in the London Telegraph, which itself provides some interesting context.

So I'll continue my elemental meanderings, but don't expect anything too profound given the end-of-quarter load, the onset of summer home-improvement efforts, and my own ongoing struggle to cope with dirt. Meanwhile, I'm off to a bookshop to see if I can snag a copy of Hamblyn's book.

Image notes: This is my cheesy effort to link this post to Skywatch Friday, which I visit all too infrequently these days, but is a wonderful place to see skies from all over theworld. The photo was taken in 2004 in the Owens Valley. The dirt road seemed an appropriate illustration for the topic, but the sky dominates--as it usually does in the Valley. Just another example of how hard it is to separate the elements. The four elements representation is from Wikipedia, because I was too lazy to draw one myself.

Home Fires

Friday, after the previous night's lovely Thanksgiving meal at our daughter's loft, we celebrated my night off (I usually teach my Visual Anthropology class from 6-10 pm) by building a fire and enjoying the balmy evening.

I had been out with the camera taking shots of frolicking squirrels (to be posted next Friday for Skywatch) and when the Beloved Spouse came out bearing my evening adult beverage, he suggested that we just enjoy the weather and use up some of the brush pile while we were at it.

This fire pit (the successor to the one our neighbor's tree demolished) has been the centerpiece of several enjoyable moments when the weather's been cool enough. But we don't burn things frequently because as peaceful and primal as they are, wood fires pollute. The only thing that justifies the occasional pit or hearth fire is the fact that we try so hard to reduce our particulate emission elsewhere. In addition, all of the wood we burn comes from this property: mostly fallen pecan branches, but other trees contribute as well.

So we sat sipping wine, and later I brought out a plate of Grandma's dinner rolls, cheese, and apples. Despite the three huge streetlights in the neighborhood, the main illumination came from the waxing gibbous moon, and quite a few stars were visible. They were the usual culprits, but at one point we noticed a star-like object moving across the sky rather quickly. I remembered the satellites my Grandmother and I used to watch from her porch in Lone Pine, and wondered if that's what we were watching. Then it struck me: this was the International Space Station, which a bulletin from Space Weather had noted was going to be visible in our area over the next few days.

After it was gone, I went in to check, and sure enough, according to the Flybys page, we had been treated to something I hadn't seen before, and will be looking forward to spotting more frequently. Too bad we missed the double-flyby when Atlantis was still in the vicinity of the Station. But this was good enough for now. It'll be clear again tonight, so we may get another chance--but the temperature has dropped significantly, and the evening won't exactly be as amenable to sitting out.

I think that what strikes me about noticing tiny details in the sky is the rather poetical connection with our distant ancestors. Hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists all over the world were far more aware of the night sky than we (who can't often even see much of it), and relied on it, surely wondered about it, and were probably quite a bit more amazed by it than folks are in so-called civilized modern times.

Never mind that the object I was watching is a product of our highest levels of technology: it's still a wonder, and it still amazes me. When I can get out where there aren't three gi-normouse mercury vapor street lamps generating another kind of pollution (light), I have a hard time not gazing for hours at the heavens.

The low-tech pleasure of sitting next to a wood fire ties me to our primal past. But I'm also reminded of Jack London's melancholy tale (To Build a Fire) of a man in the wild, realizing the enormous value of fire to human survival. And I can't help but cheer for the dog at the end of the story, who doesn't need the fire and who knows instinctively how to make it through the cold.

As comforted as I was as I sat enjoying the company of my husband and my own dogs, I also knew that the following day I'd be reading about political squabbling and human misery, and would undoubtedly wonder (as I'm doing now) about whether or not we really know any more of real use than we did when we were still few, fragile, and much more mindful of the environment in which we lived.

The fire pit itself points to another irony. We bought it from Smith & Hawken, which was originally focused on craftsmanship and sustainability, but was sold to the Miracle-Gro people a few years back. By then it had gone through several owners and ended up a kind of cartoon version of itself. It's now being closed, which it richly deserves, and so if another tree falls on this one, I guess I'll have to just bang it back into shape and make do. Had I realized that the original owners of the company had urged a boycott after it was acquired by an outfit that espouses chemical pollution on a grand scale, I probably would never have replaced the first one.

Still, there's something unmistakably pleasant and reassuring about enjoying a fire, even when it's burned down to the coals and is getting ready to go out. The warmth abides, and follows us back into the house. I'm pretty sure I sleep better afterwards, too. And there are still a few Sunday-morning fireplace moments to look forward to over the winter--even though we limit those as well.