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.

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.