DRIED UP ALL WET

Things have gotten very weird in a hurry. People insist upon being confused. Basic, fundamental, scientific realities are now open to debate. For example, are you a man or a woman?

Forgive me, but this seems like an amazingly stupid thing to argue about. As a “child care professional” I see very small children are very aware if they are born into a male or female body. Their “science” is simple. As they gain coordination, their hands become able to feel between their legs, and they understand, “This birth I am born into a male (or female) body.” If a two-year-old can arrive at such a simple conclusion, how amazingly stupid are those who can’t?

This stupidity has been a sort of blindness which has ripened like a cataract over the years, (and hopefully now can be operated upon and removed.) It is due to a simple mathematical equation: Science + Politics = Politics – Science. (Also: Science + Politics = Politics.)

A true scientist in some senses is like a poet, in that his thirst for Truth tends to cause him to neglect fashion and proper grooming, and he tends to walk about in a disheveled state with a wild gleam in his eye. Also, he tends to be broke, and unattractive to women, or at least women who desire money, and consequently he tends to feel lonely and sorry for himself, which leaves him open to temptation. He (or she) may be susceptible to a bribe. Money may not slake his (or her) thirst for Truth, but may gratify his (or her) hankering for blonds.

That is where politics steps in, for politicians often deal in short, sound-bite solutions that sound good but are not deeply thought out. This is not a problem when the politician surrounds himself with people who do think deeply, and also is a politician willing to stand corrected. One of Winston Churchill’s aides once said something along the lines of, “Winnie has a hundred ideas a day, and three are good ones.” Churchill’s genius (in part) lay in being able to stand being corrected ninety-seven times a day without any loss of confidence (which some mistook as arrogance). Unfortunately, many politicians lack such genius.

Sadly, there are all too many politicians who so treasure their shallow sound-bite solutions that they become ruled by a dogma which is not feasible. Their focus is power, and they seek to overpower all who seek to correct them. Some scientists they bribe, and some scientists they bully, and some scientists they ostracize, but, in the end, they don’t stand corrected but instead they fall uncorrected; in which case they fall prey to stupidity.

I saw the stupidity a long, long time ago, when watching very intelligent minds burn out on drugs around Harvard Square in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Back then Harvard and MIT looked for merit in applicants, and the brains being burned out were brilliant. They were different from the brains of a good-hearted but very average lout. Where a lout on drugs merely commented, “Wow, man. Wow,” these youths with IQ’s of 160 flashed like setting suns, and articulated all sorts of amazing ideas, with around three out of every hundred ideas good ones.

Back in those pre-stupidity days there were time-tested ways of debating, and “peer-reviewing”, a brilliant-sounding idea to see if it was a good one. This was done formally in carefully written papers, but also occurred informally among students over drinks. The informal debates could get wonderfully rowdy at times, but the general assumption at that time was that everyone was interested in the same thing: IE: the Truth. It may sound prudish in our age of fraud and corruption, but the idea of intentionally lying was beyond the conception of many. Lying was simply not how the game was played.

I was privileged to be a younger person, eavesdropping on many of these debates. Initially I was a little pitcher with big ears listening to my parent’s generation. Later I became a little squirt listening to the societies of three older siblings. I basically shut up, and just listened. In general I learned far more from such situations than from any class in school.

Besides the topics at hand, I learned there were two sides to any debate. On one hand there was the person who dreamed up a new idea. On the other hand there was the person who tried to shoot it down in flames.

I tended to side with the dreamer. Some ideas were sound, such as the idea continents drifted, while others were not so sound, such as the idea you could invent a “dark light” which would direct a beam of darkness in the manner a flashlight directs a beam of light. But soundness didn’t matter to me. I liked the inspiration, the “high” of dreaming.

I didn’t like the “down” of skeptics, disbelievers who used cold facts to turn happy, buoyant balloons into blazing Hindenburgs crashing in disaster. To be a “down” seemed rude to me; it was far more polite to be a “high”. I did not like disagreeable people and preferred agreeable people.

Of course, Truth doesn’t care if you agree or disagree with It. Truth remains true even if the entire world denies it. And here’s the most mysterious thing: While people say, “Truth hurts”, in actual fact Truth is the most agreeable of all agreeable things. (However, you’ll have to trust me on this, for now.)

People say, “Truth hurts”, predominantly because their pride is wounded when their “high” is shot from the sky and becomes a “Hindenburg.” One moment they feel like a genius, and the next they feel like a fool and a laughingstock, “in error.” When egos are wounded in this manner, especially among young college students who are drinking or drugged, the subject can be dragged down from the pinnacles of Truth to the swamps of ill will and vengeance, all because of “hurt feelings”. Vanity leads people astray.

One knew they were completely astray when “hurt feelings” became the focus. Debates forgot the Truth, and instead became about who could make the other guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty of being a fool and a laughingstock. “In error.”

That happened to be what I usually was, as the youngest person in the room, more often than not. `Even the most stupid-seeming laughingstock in a debate could wheel upon me, should I laugh at their discomfiture, and snarl, “What are you laughing at, pea-brain?” And what could I say? The Truth was I was likely five to ten years younger than they, (for example aged fifteen when they were twenty-five), and in Truth I was a pea-brain, compared to them.

It was in some ways an unenviable position to be in, but in another it was a great blessing. It was a curse because “my feelings were hurt” and I could waste a lot of time licking the wounds of self-pity, but it was a blessing because being at the very bottom of the pecking order, a scapegoat even scapegoats could scape, made me aware how stupid the whole process was. It was a sort of blame game that wasted time and made no sense.

It would have been nice if, at that point, some wise adult had stepped in and stated, “It is wrong for them to treat you as an object of ridicule. They should treat you as a young mind, eager to learn, and as a potential protégé.” But of course, that didn’t happen. Instead I was repelled from the college-minded, into the travail of what I suppose you could call The School Of Hard Knocks, but what also might be called The School Of The Most Blessed, for in some ways I skipped a lot of the bother of the blame game.

How it happened is hard to say. I really can’t explain it, except to say Truth is the most agreeable of all agreeable things.

Someone told me, around thirty-seven years ago, something like, “When you point at others, three of your fingers are pointing back at you.” Someone else ruthlessly stated, around thirty-six years ago, “You are just blaming the world for being about to suffer an environmental collapse, because, if the world ends, it excuses you from having to get a Real Job”. Lastly, someone I respected greatly said, for the tenth time, around thirty-six years ago, simply, but with impressive authority and strength, “Don’t blame.”

I’m not sure why, but shifting away from blame brought a greater clarity to my thought. Rather than squealing about whether “my side” or “the other side” was “to blame”, I felt more able to focus on what the problem actually was.

I then noticed something odd. Often it is the people “to blame” who come up with solutions to problems, rather than the people who do all the blaming.

It seemed, for example, that the people who built power plants were more familiar with how power plants work, and therefore were better equipped to engineer improvements. Meanwhile, the people who merely blamed, squawking, “Your smoke is pollution!” never really lifted a finger. Blaming was not what created smoke-stack-scrubbers; the solution came through focusing on what the problem actually was.

Ask yourself, “Do I focus on what the problem actually is, or politics?”

When I was especially young, more than fifty years ago, to focus-on-what-a-problem-actually-was turned out to be difficult for me, as I was prone to running away from problems.

This escapism actually is a bit humorous to look back upon. In my youth a rock group called “The Jefferson Airplane” changed its name to “Jefferson Starship”, because they also wanted to run away. They planned to hijack NASA’s first interplanetary spacecraft, and head off into the void with poets and musicians and….um….mechanics and engineers. (I think they added “mechanics and engineers” because, even in their LSD-addled ambitions, someone understood the spacecraft they hijacked might develop engine problems, and at that point a poet would be of little use. You might need someone who could focus on what the problem actually was, and who could fix it.)

I think some of those Baby-boomers either took too much LSD, or never grew up, but they never got the memo about the importance of mechanics and engineers. And now they are old fossils in the “Swamp”, utterly engrossed in hijacking a different starship, (namely the United States), even though they haven’t got a clue how to run the thing, should they ever gain complete control. They are lost in some strange dream where, should they gain control, “mechanics and engineers” will magically appear and be servants who will do whatever they command, even if what they command is physically impossible.

You should notice I was careful to add the word “physically”. Some amazing things are spiritually possible, which are not taught at institutes of technology. For example, Jesus demonstrated it is possible to walk on water, and Saint Peter demonstrated he could follow, (albeit somewhat clumsily). Does this mean we should sink all our shipping, because such a physical dependence on ships is holding us back, spiritually?

I think not, for thousands of ships have sunk over the centuries, and you hardly ever hear of even a single passenger being freed from their dependence on lifeboats to such a degree that they could stroll blithely across the waves to safety on shore. In fact people usually drown.

In like manner, perhaps we ought not sink the “ship” of fossil fuels, so smugly certain freedom from such dependence will allow us to “walk on water” and create a life free of pollution. What the actual result may be is: Many people will drown.

Unfortunately, the smugly-certain lack such pragmatism. They tend to see in political terms, and envision Caesar crossing the Rubicon and burning all the bridges behind him. (As soon as Caesar crossed that river he was under the death penalty, as were all his troops. The Rubicon truly was “a point of no return”. There was no going back.) It was a daring step from safety to danger, and won Julius the crown.

All the stuff modern Rubicon-crossers are smugly-certain about is myopically focused upon power; they want to be “dictators for life” like Caesar became, forgetful of how Caesar died, daggered to death in the very hallways of power he lusted to abide in.

The people lusting for power now are ignoring fundamental realities, in their eagerness to control. In their desire to forbid fossil fuels (which allow liberty) they instead lust to make all electric (which controls all with the leashes of power lines and cords). To achieve this end they ask for the impossible from the “mechanics and engineers” whom they deem mere servants, mere peons who must do what they command. (But who can’t.)

The powerful are asking for the impossible, and, when reality hits home, the powerful are likely to face the wrath of a starved and frozen populace whom they, as powerful leaders, failed to serve and to protect. Then they, who were so swift to blame fossil fuels, (and to also blame any who said fossil fuels might have advantages), are liable to see an avalanche of blame come crashing back upon them. Some call this “rebounding Karma”. I call it the blame game.

The saddest example of such “rebounding Karma” I’ve learned of is the Christmas present the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu received in 1989. The poor fellow was so clueless about the rage he had created that rather than Christmas carols he sung communist anthems as he was marched to the wall and turned to face the firing squad.

To be honest, what the Swamp has set out to accomplish looks to me like it is worse than a detour. If it was a detour it would eventually get back to the right route, but the Swamp’s plots look like what the self-described “genius” Wile E. Coyote is known for: Inevitable Disaster.

Such cartoons get tiresome after too many episodes; one wearies of anvils always falling upon Wile’s genius. One yearns to just get down to earth, and down to business, and face what the problems actually are.

In the American Southwest one major problem is drought, for the area is basically a desert. Therefore the primary solution (get it?) for watering crops is not rain, but is irrigation, practiced even by the ancient, indigenous populations. The first hints of agricultural habitation exist 2000 years BCE, and the importance of digging canals to irrigate crops was apparent to inhabitants even before the culture described as the Hohokan appeared around 200 BE.

The Hohokan deserve an encyclopedia, as a people, and a remnant may still exist today as modern tribes, but they suffered a crash around the year 1350 for reasons that likely involve climate change, but likely also involved some failure of their leadership.

Such ups and downs are inevitable when a civilization such as theirs exists five times as long as the United States has existed.

Just as we had our Great Depression, the Hohokan had their mysterious equivalents, more than once. For example: A sort of capital city archeologists dub “Snaketown” was abandoned (with some buildings burned), even as the rest of the land prospered, around 1100 CE, and we know next to nothing of why. (I like to think some leaders got too smugly certain.) Over two centuries later a more recent downturn of their fortunes likely involved not drought, but flooding rains, which dug deep gullies which put the water levels of their rivers below the inlets to their vast system of irrigation. Faced with a massive engineering challenge, it seems likely that most of the people instead chose to migrate elsewhere.

Far more could be said; I only broach the topic of these past people to stress two things. First, the ups and downs of these people had nothing to do with white Europeans (at least before 1500), and second, floods, as well as droughts, were a reality that challenged them.

The situation in Phoenix today is not really all that different from what the Hohokan culture faced at its peak. A so-called “overpopulation” thrived/thrives in a desert that seemed incapable of feeding so many, but the genius of the society allowed/allows the people to live good lives. Just as the Hohokan households held shells from distant seashores and jewels from distant mountains, modern Pheonix holds much that isn’t created locally, but is brought in by trade from places far away. Likewise, just as Hohokan culture suffered a downfall when its irrigation systems were not adequately maintained, the millions of people now happy in Phoenix could suffer, if our modern systems are not adequately maintained.

I hope you can see where I am going with this. What is important is to-focus-on-what-the-problem-actually-is, and not on some irrelevant topic. The problem is not whether one race owes another race because of “blame”, or whether driving a car that runs on fossil fuel is to “blame” for both droughts and floods. That stuff is just the blame game. The real problems are more down to earth: How are we handling the gift we are given, called water.

I am no expert on water management, but I do feel I should try to be an educated voter. In pursuit of such education I should be able to turn to the media to be fed the news, but we all shake our heads over what has become of our media. The media has basically become screaming meemies. Like an alcoholic in need of a drink, they see worms crawling from the woodwork and are reduced to hysteria by the slightest drought or slightest flood. Not helpful. So I have to do research on my own.

The irrigation systems devised by modern engineers are amazing, and contain more variables than most consider. Irrigation doesn’t merely involve impounding water behind dams, which can be allowed to flow downhill by turning a faucet. Such a simple system would be a win-win, for it would involve both irrigating crops (and people), and also generating electricity. However in fact the system also involves pumping water uphill, before it flows downhill in the aqueducts, and all the pumping uses amazing amounts of electricity. In fact the water pumps of Arizona’s aqueducts use more electricity than any other consumer. In other words, the flow of water both produces, and consumes, electricity. Therefore, the people managing the flow of water need to be knowledgeable about how much money turning on the faucet is making, compared to how much it is costing. The situation is not so simple as it initially may seem.

Another variable is how dry or rainy it has been. When it is dry, the demand for water grows, even if it is costly to pump water uphill. But if it rains the water is not needed, and there is not such a need for the expense. The supply and demand go through amazing swings.

A totally unforeseen variable, when the dams were first built, were that the lakes of impounded water would become a significant tourism industry involving people who like to boat, fish, swim, water-ski or simply sit in the sun on a small houseboat. Such people have their own economic power, and have their say about whether their marinas will have enough water to float boats or not.

Lastly, there is only so much water to go around during dry times, and this causes states and nations to quibble about who gets how much, and cooler heads must avoid war by writing treaties that decree who gets how much. Even if your state needs water, you must sometimes begrudgingly release a certain amount to flow from your dams downstream to other states, if the treaty says so.

But this diplomacy gets stood on its head when there is too much water. Then you can get in trouble if you are “generous” and allow too much to flow downstream, for you are then to “blame” for downstream flooding. Again, supply and demand has swung about dramatically.

In the past two years we have seen the wailing of Alarmists shift from freaking-out about a mega-drought to the recent concerns about a mega-flood which might have occurred due to Hurricane Hilary. What I want to stress is that such hysteria accomplishes nothing if it blames “Global Warming”, (which gets the blame regardless of whether it rains or shines, or whether we manage or mismanage).

I think that, in the end, what matters most is what accomplishes something, which is the current system of dams and aqueducts, turbines and pumps, which has allowed the desert to bloom in the American Southwest. That practical scheme should be the focus. We want the desert to continue to bloom, for the alternative would involve hardship for many millions of people.

Los Angeles is much like Phoenix, in that it is a so-called overpopulation thriving in a desert that seemingly should not be able to support so many. In terms of local rainfall and snow-melt, Los Angeles should only be able to support 300,000 people, and the fact that, including its suburbs, it now supports 13,000,000 suggests two things. 1.) Some amazing engineering was done, and 2.) if that engineering is not maintained, 12,700,000 people will swiftly find themselves in dire circumstances. It is therefore important to be pragmatic, and not off in some dream-world where the fact walking-on-water is a spiritual possibility becomes an accepted physical reality.

Los Angeles’ growth involved, as often is the case with big cities, water being imported from distant farmlands, which often angers the distant farmers. Even in the suburbs of Boston, as a boy, I heard grumblings from old-timers about how the Boston Big-shots “stole” water-rights from small towns, and that grumbling was occurring in the far greener and rainier landscape of New England.

In California the way water was removed from Owen Valley involved some brutal power politics, and destroyed a landscape once described as “America’s Switzerland.” Owen Lake, once fifty feet deep after heavy rains, became an arid flatland with choking dust-storms of alkaline poisons. Were it not for some artesian springs that fed a few remaining marshes, an important flyway for many species of migratory birds would have been completely wiped out. When Los Angeles began to pump out even Owen Valley’s ground water, and even the artesian wells began drying up, the howl of conservationists finally created enough push-back to halt the myopia of a civic Los Angeles leadership which was fundamentally selfish and greedy, more interested in making money through growth than in facing the problems inherent in growth.

Some of the problems should have been obvious early on, when the conflict erupted in “water wars”, with angry farmers actually dynamiting aqueducts. There were also angry businesses that made money extracting alkaline chemicals from Lake Owen’s water, who sued Los Angeles as the lake dried up. The fact water vanished drove one small business to build a new plant (using a new process) right onto the dried lake-bed, but then that business needed to sue Los Angeles yet again because, in a period of heavy rains in the late 1930’s, the balance of supply and demand swung so violently from drought to flood that those in charge of the aqueducts abruptly had to dump water down into the bone dry lake, flooding the new factory.

California is interesting, for diverse interests sought water, and all the quibbling actually did result in some serious thinking by smarter people, who sought to balance the thirst of migrating birds with the thirst of farmers and thirst of small businesses, and also with the thirst of those who wanted to see Los Angeles grow.

An important factor is that, without water, much of the land is worthless. Some land may support orange and almond groves, but beyond 300,000 people, there could be no suburbs. However, with water, that same land, bought very cheaply, could be sold at a huge profit. And once profits become huge, an insanity called “greed” appears.

California is even more fascinating when one stands back, and watches the mania of greed operate through its history.

Greed was there in the first gold rush, when men flocked into the hills to such a degree that boats docking in San Francisco lost their entire crews and could not depart. Greed was there in the Water Wars, that allowed Los Angeles’ population to explode and made real estate sellers into moguls. It was there when small-town men and women abruptly became idolized Hollywood stars. And it was there when intellectual geeks fooling about with computer hardware and software abruptly became the world’s richest men. Very few of these rags-to-riches stories involved slow and patient growth, nor the careful balancing of multifarious interests. Instead it tended to be a great, big, all-American, “Yippie!”

Now you are probably going to ask me to define “Yippie.” Sigh.

I sigh because, when you get all spiritual about things, greed is not usually a good thing. Occasionally love can cause greed to be greedy about others experiencing mercy and kindness, but more often greed is all about me, or “my side”, (which plays into the blame game.) Greed wants to skim the cream and leave others the milk, or even to steal the water and leave others the dust.

Greed tends to start small and then grow like a cancer. The simple grift of a carnival barker becomes the majestic graft of a state senator. It grows because greed can never satisfy the human heart, which wants to give and forgive. In fact the greater greed grows the greater the hunger of the heart gets, which makes greed want even more. (This is why you so often see crooked people, who could have gotten away with their petty crimes, instead overdo their robberies until they are so flagrant not even the most indulgent authorities can overlook them.) Greed is a sort of vicious cycle and becomes the author of its own demise. Eventually one can own the whole world but is reduced to a King Midas, weeping because he has transformed his favorite daughter into heavy metal.

Yet in a strange way this ugly, dog-like habit of greed is part of the American “Yippie”. It is a confession that part of being free is to be human, and part of being human is to be greedy. Liberty allows us to want what we want. We crave what we crave. We desire what we desire. However, (and this is very important), we also know such greediness can be rebuked. Part of the American “Yippee” is the knowledge we can be smacked on the nose like a bad dog by a rolled-up newspaper. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could be King George of England. The American “Yippee” will smack you. Even newspapers get smacked by a newspaper.

Europeans, who seem by and large more obedient than “Yippee” Americans, have every right to criticize Americans for being both greedy and rebellious, (which is likely why their souls were born in Europe). If you are born in America your soul is wild and free and yet fully expects to get smacked in the nose by a newspaper. And the reason is stamped into the very coins our greed likes to finger, as the motto, “In God we trust.”

What this suggests is that, hand in hand with deplorable selfishness, the American “Yippee” believes in Something higher and better, which will not leave a hole in the heart like greed does, but rather warms and fills the heart with giving and forgiveness. It may seem like an impossible contradiction, but it is what it is.

It may also seem ambiguous, but few people are more generous than greedy Americans are. If our prosperity is due to greed, why did we give so much of it away? If we were truly greedy we would just keep it for ourselves. Instead we have given not merely money, but our lives, to help others.

Of course, greedy grifters do tend to skim the cream from a charity. The graft starts out small, as a line-item called “administrative expenses”, and grows to the unholy insult to charity the Clintons enacted, when millions in donations to help out after the Haitian earthquake built an absurd, single, lone house in Haiti, as the Clintons kept all the rest of the money for themselves, (uttering the amazing hypocrisy that they, the Clintons, could be trusted with the money more than Haitian leaders, because the Haitians were corrupt.)

Outsiders wonder why Americans don’t rise in wrath. The simple fact of the matter is that Americans did; Americans have an intuitive understanding of greed, and how it grows grotesque, and of how it is healed by giving and forgiving. In any case, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, the election was “rigged” so she would win, but the overwhelming disgust Americans felt towards her greed outnumbered the fraudulent ballots, and, against all odds, Trump appeared.

At this point we can return to what actually matters, for Trump was a hard-nosed businessman who knew the ropes. He dealt with what actually matters. In terms of the American Southwest, what actually matters is dams that hold waters for droughts, canals that move waters from supplies to demands, and contingency plans involving what to do when times of drought give way to times of flood. The proper management of this infrastructure is crucial to the comfort and perhaps survival of around 75 million people. We are not in the moccasins of the Hohokan, who could just migrate somewhere else (likely down to Mexico) when their infrastructure crashed. We are in a situation we should take very seriously. And blaming light bulbs for Global Warming is not a very serious thing to do.

One thing I liked about Trump, in those long ago days when he ruled, was that he simply stated Global Warming was not worth our attention. He was correct. The infrastructure is worth out attention, and, in the case of California, the irrigation system is a hundred years old in places. Cement gets crumbly after that long; the wiring of pumps and turbines ages and metal fatigues, maintenance is a requirement which millions of people are dependent upon.

This past year has seen the weather of the west go through one of its typical swings from one extreme to another. A very dry time was followed by a very wet time. Massive Pacific gales dug far south of their usual abode up in the Aleutian Islands, directing a stream of moisture directly at California, and filling rivers with flood waters even as mountains all the way to Utah saw especially deep snows.

This should have embarrassed the media, which had been stating “Global Warming” was creating a “Mega-drought”, because rather than a drought there was a flood, and the flood would continue when all the snow melted in the spring.

In actual fact the Alarmist media then did what it accuses everyone else of doing; it went into denial. It insisted the rains were just a brief, upward blip in the downward graph of a terrible drought. Authoritative maps were produced, showing areas experiencing floods were still painted red, indicating drought. This became absurd. By last July twelve maps had been produced by various “authorities” showing all sorts of varying scenarios, with some maps showing drought in the same places other maps showed flood.

Apparently there were differing definitions of “drought”. (To resort to hyperbole, what is not a drought for a farmer growing cactus is a drought for a farmer growing watercress.) But the media chose the maps with the most red, as they had their propaganda to crank out, their narrative to reinforce, and their balderdash to support, to earn their pay. They were bought and paid for, and were handed the news they were to report, investigating nothing while pretending to be “investigative”. Meanwhile mechanics and engineers had to tend to reality; the infrastructure.

The infrastructure was stressed, just as it was in the time of the Hohokan, and in places levees failed and aqueducts crumbled. Owen Lake reappeared, as did Tulare Lake on the far side of the mountains.

The reappearance of Owen Lake had some benefits in terms of settling the clouds of alkaline dust, and watering migratory flyways for birds, but repairs to the aqueduct became more urgent, to supply Los Angeles with water. Meanwhile the reappearance of Tulare Lake had a very different effect, as rather than alkaline dust it’s lake-bed was excellent soil, and had become excellent farmland. When the lake reappeared the farmland was flooded and crops were lost.

California’s farmland is a blessing to the rest of the nation, for in places a 300-day growing season allows California (along with Arizona and Florida) to produce fresh vegetables when the rest of the nation is buried in snow. People who scorn California’s politics and state the rest of the nation would be better off without California are not thinking clearly about their food budgets. To lose vast acreages to floods has consequences. The mechanics and engineers in charge of how much flow is held back in dams wanted to hold as much as possible back to reduce river levels, and thus reduce the regrowth of Lake Tulare, yet at the same time they looked nervously at the deep snow in the mountains. Had nature been mischievous, a single warm rainstorm could have unleashed an amount impossible to contain.

A worst case scenario was possible to visualize because early in its history California was hit by a tremendous, once-every-500-year combination of rain, snow and snow-melt which very nearly ruined the entire state. Nearly the entire Central Valley became an enormous lake. The government had to be moved from Sacramento.

It is possible to map the flooded areas using old reports

And mechanics and engineers dub a repetition of such weather an “ARkStorm” and map how modern engineering might handle a similar fiasco.

So you can see that highly qualified mechanics and engineers are quite aware they can fail, and flood waters can be ten to twenty feet deep in the Central Valley. This is because they are not given enough money to prepare for once-every-500-year events. It’ too expensive. So negotiations tend to pare back the costs, until they are only preparing for once-every-100-year events. But they still are aware of how such preparations may prove inadequate, and think about what their responses should be when the s— hits the fan and the levees are not tall enough and Lake Tulare reappears. They have “contingency plans”, which are basically how to make the pain less when the s— hits the fan. Practical stuff.

Now please compare this with the demented response of the media, last winter, when Lake Tulare reappeared. It was not the slightest bit practical, yet they got paid well to produce pure pulp.

First, the media can never resist using the word “unprecedented”. This is just plain stupid. I have just shown you the precedent. Even if I couldn’t find the precedent on my computer, I could turn to my nine-year-old granddaughter and she’d find it. The California history regarding the terrible floods from November 1861 to March 1862 is right there in plain sight, at your fingertips. They even involve episodes of our national history having little to do with meteorology; IE: How did the Confederate forces escape the superior Union forces in Arizona? (Answer: The rivers were flooding and blocked the advance of armies.) The evidence of a far more severe flood are everywhere you look, and this proves the media does not look, when they use the word “unprecedented”.

When one looks at the flooding of Lake Tulare that actually occurred last winter and spring, and one compares it to 1862, it is obvious last winter and spring were small potatoes, compared to a worst-case scenario. It could have been much, much worse, if the mountain snows had melted faster, but the fact is: It wasn’t worse. So how in the world can the press call the event, “unprecedented”?

Obviously the press does not care if it is accurate. The press does not care about the Truth. So, what does the press care about? Greed. For greed it grovels. It grovels to get its next paycheck, which it can only get if it obeys a master who thinks lying to the public is good policy. Good policy? Apparently. Apparently it is good policy to make the public afraid. It is good policy to whip up anxiety about the weather. It is good policy to state the current weather is a sign that Global Warming is about to end life as we know it. But current weather isn’t going to do that. Far worse has been seen before. And it didn’t end life as we know it.

Besides ignoring the history which one needs to research, the press ignores the history it itself made. After all, it was the press that stated, in November, that the mega-drought was going to last. It was the press that stated that the mega-drought proved that Global Warming resulted in unprecedented weather. This wasn’t ancient history. It was recent. But now they abruptly forgot their own history and stated that it was the flooding which was going to last, and to prove that Global Warming resulted in unprecedented weather.

The press seems to think the public is amazingly gullible, and that they can “cry wolf” on and on and on, and the public will never become jaded. They have forgotten the fable. In the fable, the mischievous shepherd boy arrives at a day when a wolf actually appears, and the boy cries, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” but everyone is so jaded that that no one comes to his rescue. In the case of the modern mainstream media, “rescue” is the paychecks reporters receive each week, but such “rescue” can cease. The media have lost so many viewers with their dishonest hyperbole that their parent entities can’t afford them, and the reporters get laid off.

So far, news reporters haven’t learned their lesson. In fact they are doubling down, and are worse than ever. I have the sense they feel their power slipping away, and are desperately trying to bring things to a head, wherein acceptance of Global Warming (AKA Climate Change) is a prerequisite to being listened-to. If you don’t tow the line, thou shalt receive no funding. Thou shalt receive no publicity. Thou shalt be marginalized and ostracized and lonely as heck.

Oddly, this strategy is backfiring. Who receives no publicity? Increasingly it is the press itself. Who receives no funding? Who increasingly is lonely as heck?

What people seem to be interested in is: What is actually happening. To some degree there seems to be a bit of the mechanic and the engineer in the ordinary thought of ordinary people.

Of course, just as ordinary people are ambiguous in terms of greed and the rolled-up newspaper that smacks greed on the snout, the pragmatic side of ordinary thinking, which is like an engineer, must also deal with the “Karen’s”, who are not all that interested in what is actually happening. The “Karen’s” love to murmur and gossip, backbite and belittle, and in some cases badly hurt innocent people. (Likely this is why scriptures startle some people by, when defining certain behavior as “un-spiritual”, listing “gossip” right next to “murder”.) However, perhaps the hook of behaving like a Karen is a desire to learn the Truth, (even as it spreads a lie.) In the end, people seem interested in what is actually happening.

What was actually happening in the American Southwest was that a dry time was shifting to a wet time. But how long would the wet time last? It was obvious rivers would run high, as the tremendous snowpack in the mountains melted, but what to do with those waters as they ran, and what to do if the drought returned?

I think this is what we would be discussing, if we were a sane society with a sane media. And some people were sane, and actually dealing with the issues.

I was very curious about why they decided what they decided, because I am one of those people who ignores what the media blares, because they have violated my trust. Instead I look, when possible, to what reporters would look at, if they were something other than paid parrots.

At this point the general public can still access, to an amazing degree, the water levels of scores of reservoirs, and the flow rates of many rivers, and the level of snowpack in the mountains. (Those-in-charge haven’t yet shut such sources down, the way they closed down most ways an ordinary person could examine arctic sea-ice.) Therefore, without newspapers, one can see the situation in the Southwest for oneself.

The two largest reservoirs along the Colorado River are Lake Mead and, upstream, Lake Powell. Lake Mead was getting all the attention a year ago, as its levels sank so low sunk boats and mob-related corpses were exposed. The generation of electricity was curtailed. However, since then the levels have risen dramatically.

Lake Powell also showed a great recovery, as snowmelt poured into it last spring, but has dipped slightly more recently as some of its waters were released to Lake Mead.

Upstream of Lake Powell the 34 larger “tracked reservoirs” also recovered from low levels to what averaged out to nearly 90 % of capacity. In a few cases reservoirs were over 100% of capacity, which is not a good thing, for it demonstrates the reservoir has become useless in terms of flood control. Most never reached 100%, and the torrents released by spring melting were well handled.

The actual handling of the waters occurs below the radar of the mainstream media, which is only interested in the panic porn of sensationalism. However, there are true public servants working behind the scenes. As an outsider, some of the things they need to consider are puzzling.

For example, when the water had just started to rise in Lake Powell its floodgates were abruptly opened wide, to such an extent that its levels actually dropped. It was a five day event.

It took between two to three days for the torrents to flow down to Lake Mead, and then resulted in a very rapid rise in the levels of Lake Mead, for five days.

What was that all about? Rather than seek the mainstream media, it paid to seek the more local papers. The general public along the Colorado River needed to be warned the river was going to flood for five days. It would not hurt tourism, for it was during the off-season. But, as the flood was man-made, insignificant but curious local reporters asked the questions the mainstream doesn’t, and received an interesting answer.

Apparently, when a river moves around a bend, it erodes and scours deep channels to the outside of the curve, yet builds sandy, shallow beaches on the inside of the curve. These beaches were delightful places to stop, as people floated down the Colorado through the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but drought and low water caused the beaches to be degraded. The theory was that a flood would rebuild them. I never heard how the theory worked out. But it was interesting to read that someone decided a good flushing would do good, and could build as well as erode.

Another interesting disparity involved the treaties which require reservoirs to, in times of drought, release water for people downstream to use. Lake Powell easily achieved its quota, and currently has released more than 112% of the required amount. Yet Lake Mead has failed to meet the requirement, and currently has released just over 83% of the required amount. I assume this demonstrates how wet the year has been, and that rather than drought, flooding has been a concern downstream.

Downstream from Lake Mead are two large reservoirs, Mohave Lake and Lake Havasu. Lake Mead’s discharges keeps the level of these reservoirs fairly stable for irrigation purposes, while at the same time these two reservoirs stabilize the flow of the Colorado River, which otherwise would fluctuate wildly, because the demand for electricity varies hugely. If Lake Mead must release a set amount, they would not be prone to do it in a steady way. They would be prone to release lots all at once, when demand is high, and to release little when demand is low, which would make the Colorado flow in erratic pulses, but the downstream reservoirs smooth the flow out.

At Lake Havasu the waters of the Colorado are divvied up between the interested parties. 365 billion gallons a year head off to Los Angeles and San Diego via the Colorado Aqueduct, 488 billion gallons flow to Pheonix and Tuscon via Arizona’s Aqueducts, and the remaining 488 billion gallons flow to Mexican aqueducts, which leave not a drop to flow to the sea. Men have been so efficient that not a drop is squandered. A riverbed which once saw over a trillion gallons of water flow by becomes bone dry.

The same efficiency can have the bed of the Gila River bone dry, where it enters the Colorado at Yuma, south of Lake Havasu. Originally the Gila ran so deep that paddlewheel steamers ran between Yuma and Pheonix, but now all that water is used for crop irrigation and drinking water, golf courses and swimming pools and whatever men desire, upstream.

Before modern people say rude things about the mentality of people of the past, one needs to understand these past people were doing things on a scale never seen before, and were naive concerning consequences. They were simply doing what people had always done, but doing it better. The Hohokan had irrigated their crops for two thousand years; they just never did such a good job that they stopped the Colorado River, and the Gila River as well. Nor were modern consequences immediately obvious: The populations (and therefore thirst) of Los Angeles and Pheonix were much smaller when the projects began, and some projects, such as water for Tuscon, were not even completed until 1970.

Simply planning the construction of Hoover Dam took nine years, beginning in 1922 when Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Construction began in 1931 when Hoover was president, and was completed in 1936 when FDR was president, and FDR saw to it Hoover’s name was removed. (A bit ungracious? But an example of the petty politics involved.) Only after FDR was dead was “Boulder Dam” called “Hoover Dam” again. Hoover lived to see his vindication, dying in 1964.)

It would be a glorious sidetrack to plunge deeply into the history of the dam builders, but what is important here is that the project was gigantic and straddled the desperation of the Great Depression. Even before the project began thousands of unemployed workers had shown up, with their families, in a desert where temperatures exceeded 110 degrees, that had no housing. Workers were dying of heat stroke even before the first worker was hired. Thoughts about native species of fish such as the “Boney Tailed Chub” and the “Razor Backed Sucker” were not on people’s minds. Nor was the nation of Mexico, at first.

However, you cannot just dry up a major system of rivers without suffering environmental consequences. People began to understand there was a price to be paid downstream for efficiency upstream. Plants and wildlife and fish and birds all suffered, as did people depending on them, when the Colorado stopped flowing. When the population of fish in the Sea of Cortez south of the Colorado River Delta crashed, dawn broke on Marblehead. Mexicans began to do calculations on the back of envelopes. They wondered if the protein they gained through irrigation matched the protein they lost through a decreased catch of fish.

It is important to remember our modern environmental awareness came from elders who learned things the hard way. For example, the United State’s EPA was not created until a river was so polluted it caught on fire in 1969. In like manner, the concept of “wetlands” being important simply didn’t enter ordinary thinking, a century ago. People saw a marsh as a stinking place of no value. They had no idea smelly places fed so many baby fish, which fed the bigger fish.

Becoming aware of unforeseen consequences is no reason to glue yourself to a highway, or enact some other overreaction too often seen in the antics of radical environmentalists. More moderate conservationists often propose solutions that don’t involve dynamiting Hoover Dam, and in some ways Mexico has been a better example of such sanity than the United States.

Rather than just blaming the United States for using water upstream, some Mexicans faced the fact that their politicians had fought to get 488 billion gallons of Colorado River water delivered across the border, and, if none of that water reached the delta, Mexico deserved some “blame.”

At this point some Mexicans wondered, “Couldn’t we allow just a little to flow down the parched riverbed to the sea, as an experiment?” The experiment was done, largely using wastewater from irrigation ditches, and, even with such cruddy water, the scientists taking measurements were amazed at the positive results, which allowing even a little water to flow down to the Sea of Cortez, achieved. When paired with tree-planting along the scorched banks of the river, barren stretches of land became verdant. Fish populations rebounded.

What is important about this experiment is that the blame game was avoided. Rather than pitting the desires of farmers against the desires of fishermen, the desires of both were met. It was a case of having your cake and eating it too; (IE: Impossible, in the eyes of some radicals.)

It should be noted that to the north conservationists, concerned about the decreasing populations of fish native to the Colorado River, (especially the “Boney Tailed Chub” and the “Razor Backed Sucker”), discovered they did not need to blow up Hoover Dam. Instead, the level of Lake Mohave began to be dropped and raised ten feet, each autumn, simply to help these obscure fish. We humans can behave sanely, if we work at it.

I bring this up because it demonstrates how, quietly and behind the scenes, sensible people tweak the system, even in a time of drought, to make it more productive. It is counter-intuitive to think that, in a time of drought, allowing any water to escape the “efficiency” of the upstream system would be a good thing, yet the level of Lake Mohave was lowered and water was allowed to escape irrigation and flow down the dry Colorado to the sea, and the benefits were, if not immediately obvious, obvious enough to vindicate the daring thinkers who dared challenge the “efficient”.

The simple fact of the matter is that the marshes and wetlands of a delta are swarming with life and feed the nearby fish to a degree where there is a population explosion, if the dry Colorado Delta is allowed to again be wet. An increase in the catch of fish becomes an economic fact practical people notice. Making money with fish must be weighed with making money with irrigation. And this can lead to further thought, such as “Can we irrigate without the Colorado?” Which in turn has Mexicans considering something perhaps California should consider: The economic feasibility of desalinization plants.

Desalinization is a topic one needs to keep abreast upon. Back when I originally researched the topic in 1970 it was not feasible except in extreme cases, such as on desert islands where it almost never rains, or ships at sea for long periods of time. But that is fifty years ago, and a lot has been learned, especially in very arid Arab lands, where they had lots of oil money to pour into research, or in Israel, where their very survival depended on water. The US Navy has also researched the subject. Both the subjects of distilling and osmosis have evolved to a degree where desalinization is only a tenth as expensive as it once was. To be an old hippy who researched the subject in 1970, and who therefore thinks they know all about it, is to be a fool.

Unfortunately, there is a certain mindset which made up its mind in 1969, concerning environmental issues, and hasn’t grown. (This failure to grow may well be an insidious side effect of seemingly harmless “recreational” drugs.) (People like to say, “There is no sign the drug changed me.” What they fail to see is that you are supposed to change. If Beethoven didn’t change, his ninth symphony would sound the same as his first.)

A more mature mindset sees Desalinization is important for a reason people failed to foresee, in the past. And what is that? It is that the irrigation of deserts has a habit of making soil more and more salty, for there is a little salt in the “fresh” water of the Colorado River, and when that water evaporates the residue of salt is left behind, until the salt in soil can reach a level where it kills the very plants you are attempting to irrigate. In other words, irrigation results in the “salinization” of soil, and flushing the salt from that soil with fresh water makes “desalinization” important, even miles from the sea.

So which mindset talks about blowing up Hoover Dam, and which mindset investigates desalinization? California’s or Mexico’s? Or even, California’s or Arizona’s?

What a joke it would be if Arizona, which doesn’t even have a coastline, invested in desalinization when California didn’t!

If it was Mexico that made choices that led to prosperity, as California made choices that led to poverty, a tide could turn, and people could be seen sneaking across the border in a southerly direction. After all, the grass is always greener….

Actually I’m perfectly fine with Mexico becoming prosperous. I cheer the successes of other people. What bugs me is the failures of my own people. And there is something prone to failure about the obstinate attitude of an American media which can’t budge beyond its fixation on Global Warming.

To me our American problem, to some degree, seems to involve semantics. We lack the words that adequately describe why it is spiritually true that unselfish behavior is far better than selfish behavior. I resort to clumsy images of people going “Yippie” and then getting their snouts whacked with a rolled-up newspaper. Why? Because I lack the words that properly define an important distinction.

For example, consider the word “compromise.” Is it a negative or positive word? I would like to suggest it is very necessary in any negotiations, but that it tends to be burdened by the baggage of selfishness. People tend to see “compromise” as a sort of surrender, but only for a while. It is like a “cease fire” in the heat of battle; it is not a true peace, but just a pause in a fight which will resume at a later date. Maybe you will agree not to blow up Hoover Dam this year, but reducing Hoover Dam to rubble remains on your agenda.

Now consider he word “integration”. Is it a negative or positive word? I would like to suggest it takes opposing parties which apparently are at loggerheads, and instead puts them on the same page. Rather than seeing things in either-or terms, things are seen in terms involving the benefit of all. For example, in Mexico farmers did not need to “compromise” with fishermen, because they both wanted the other to succeed, because they wanted Mexico to succeed. What’s more, they have succeeded (so far).

To conclude this digression, the distinction I am attempting to make would put the word “compromise” on the selfish side as the word “integrate” would be on the unselfish side. And why is this distinction important?

It is because the mentality of communists, globalists, elitists and other dictators and tyrants seem incapable of anything other than the most degrading sort of selfishness. They do not value any view other than their own myopia. They cannot see the value of other views. They are so certain their views are superior that they inevitably fall into the repression of other views, which is a sickness like cancer that always seeks a “final solution” which involves actually killing those who differ. The fishermen must kill the farmers, or the farmers must kill the fishermen. I have even heard some go so far as to suggest it would be a good thing to kill 95% of the earth’s population, because “over population” is “the problem”.

Over population is not the problem. The more the merrier. The more we have the more minds we have working on true solutions to the problems we are faced by. In fact, if you take the time to bother with actually studying history, it is amazing to see the problems mankind has overcome, and amazing to see where the saviors have sprung from. Sadly, however, some think they already know it all, and they can’t be bothered with the elders of our past. They would rather rewrite history to affirm what they think they already know, even if they are dead wrong. Such souls are not mankind’s saviors, but rather mankind’s nemesis.

Such devils actually have little interest in what actually matters, in terms of the infrastructure which millions of lives are dependent upon in the American Southwest. They live in a far-away swamp they think is not low, but a high Elysium of god-like power and privilege. Dams and canals? Fishermen and farmers? Such low-brow considerations are delegated to the riffraff, to those boring mechanics and engineers who do not comprehend the intricacies of Washington power-politics.

Personally, I prefer the low-brow stuff, because in my humble opinions the high-brows make no real sense. Their heads exploded at some point, (perhaps during an LSD trip in 1969), and they are now convinced they are aboard the Jefferson Starship, which they have highjacked and are now confidently steering out into a lifeless void. I prefer more sane brows. So let us look at what is actually happening, in the American Southwest.

After the mountain snows are done melting, (they actually keep melting, but the majority of the snow is melted by late June,) the next best source of water is the so-called “monsoon.” These are summer thunderstorms which vary greatly in their intensity and coverage.

I think the variation reminded some of the variation in India between drought and flood. Because that variation hinges upon the strength of the Asian monsoon, it was assumed our variation must also be a “monsoon”. However our variation is different, and, if you want the honest truth, I think more research is needed, for I think a degree of mystery is involved concerning why it sometimes rains and sometimes doesn’t, in the American Southwest. It involves factors different from Asia’s, which leads some to argue about the definition of “monsoon”.

Pretty pointless, if you ask me. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. If you define monsoon as strictly the situation created by prevailing winds in Asia, our monsoon is not a monsoon. We must invent our own word for some-years-wet-and-some-year-dry. Call it a “monseen” if you insist. But then get down to the business of describing what is actually happening.

And it is here the wonder sets in. For the fact of the matter is that there is still much to be learned and incorporated into our understanding. The science is not settled. There are some excellent theories floating around, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of predicting whether it will rain or be dry, flip a coin.

Here is my layman’s understanding of the American “monseen”.

The Southwest lacks trees in many areas, and bakes under a summer sun that creates temperatures over 110 ( 44 Celsius) at the surface, and that hot air rises, which creates less air at the surface, which is a partial vacuum, so the barometric pressure falls. Nature abhors a vacuum, so air must come from somewhere to replace the air that has risen. Where does this air come from? And is it’s composition the same as the air that was lifted?

At this point you have to start to attend to the “partial pressure” of some air molecules compared to the “partial pressure” of other air molecules. And most important is water. Of course.

It turns out that, to a degree, when molecules of oxygen and nitrogen rise, their space can be taken by molecules of H2O. From where, in a desert? Well, from the surface of Lake Mead and Lake Powell and the 34 reservoirs upstream, of course. Vast amounts of water are available which were not available when the Hohoham scientists tried to figure things out.

But, if those lakes did not exist, the landscape would still be likely to find water, because the easiest route for air to replace the rising air is up the the river valleys. It is far harder to replace the air by pulling it up and over high mountain passes. Therefore, air is sometimes drawn from the humid Gulf of Mexico up the Rio Grande valley, or from the humid Sea of Cortez up the Colorado valley.

But you will notice I said, “sometimes.” On other occasions the air up the river valleys remains bone dry. Despite evaporation from reservoirs and from irrigated farmland, it remains a drought. Any rain that does fall makes long and beautiful purple streamers from the cumulus which fade, falling into the hot and dry air, and never reach the ground.

Although the rain does not reach the ground, the downdrafts associated with the wind do. As a young bum, attempting to write the Great American Novel on a portable typewriter in desert campgrounds, I had to keep an eye on the cumulus, for a calm, mild morning tended to be hit by a blast of wind around lunchtime, and such wind has no respect for piles of typing paper sitting on picnic tables without heavy rocks holding them down. A sign such a downdraft was imminent was the purple streamers appearing on the bottom of clouds.

These streamers, called “virga” by meteorologists, were called a word that meant “lady rain” by the Navajo sheep herders. When the clouds grew especially purple, lightning bolts could travel down the edge of the virga, hitting ground never wet by rain and igniting forest fires. These fires were so much a part of western ecology that some pinecones evolved to only drop their seeds when scorched by forest fires.

When the virga grew thick enough to actually reach the ground the situation could become dramatically different. Rather than “lady rain” it became “manly rain”, which the ranchers called “gully washers”. Dry gulches which had gone years never seeing more than a trickle of water abruptly became raging torrents.

At one campground I frequented I watched, during a 36 month period between 1984 and 1988, a sand dune be slowly extended across a gully by the persistent winds. This worried me, for I imagined the dune-dam might, in some future flash-flood, redirect the gully’s water right through the campground and wash away my tent. But I needn’t have worried. The dune was gone in five minutes, when the raging waters came down that gully.It made me understand the “flash” in flash-flood. The torrent was over in forty-five minutes, yet undid the work of three years of sand-drifting.

Spending so much time outdoors did seem to awake some sort of ability in me to forecast, but it seemed to be more like intuition than any intellectual science I could compile facts and figures about, and could use to produce a paper to be peer reviewed. Also the intuitive talent seemed to involve the immediate future more than the long range. I would never pretend to be able to forecast whether the summer would be droughty or not. The shepherds and ranchers might be willing to speculate, but some felt speculating might “hex” the weather; one might irk the gods if one pretended to understand them.

Meteorologists seem to be on better relations with the angels God charges controlling weather with; (either that or they just get used to being put to shame by the pranks of such “lesser” gods, zephyrs, and tricksters). They do make an effort to understand what makes some so-called “monsoons” wet and others be dry. The dynamics are different from Asia’s monsoons, and as far as I can tell there’s much more work to do before we understand them, and therefore the forecasts are often wrong.

To me there seems a great distinction between those who comprehend the magnitude of the work that needs to be done, and the fools who say “the science is settled” and who blame “Global Warming” for all the variety weather amazes us with.

My own experience with western weather was based upon the fact that, because I wrote nothing I could sell, and also because I found it very hard to write and also hold a job, I needed to find the lowest rent possible, if I intended to write. Cheapest was to sleep in my car, but the extreme discomfort (and the fact it often was illegal) tended to discourage that option except when absolutely necessary. Next cheapest was to sleep at a campground, which in those days only cost $25.00/week. However, I learned firsthand one was unwise to attempt this too early in the spring or too late in the fall. In mid-October one should seek a camper or a $60.00/week motel unit, and hide indoors from Blue Northers and cold and wet weather until mid-May. It was in mid-May that the winter storm track seemed to retreat north. Then the “monsoon” started to develop, with dry “lady rains” at first, and the thundering “manly rains” later. June tended to be hot and dry and July saw the heat build a better chance of gully-washers.

Weather radars were often unhelpful, as they could show rain without indicating whether it was lady or manly. But they did show peculiar systems that I called “ghost-fronts”. Though fronts did not appear on maps, they seemed to be faint remnants of storms that traveled along the winter storm track during the summer, after they pushed south and became extremely weak. At times they formed small hooks of clouds, or even spirals, as they drifted across the desert from the Pacific. Not much rain reached the ground from them, but they did prove that moisture could make it over the mountains. This moisture, basically riding the weakest and southernmost westerlies, met the weakest and northernmost trade winds, basically coming up the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico, which also had to transcend mountain blockage to enter the Colorado Valley. The easiest route was up the Colorado River itself, though neither westerlies nor trade winds tended to go that way. I therefore decided to do a bit of b.s.ing, and proclaimed the south wind was created by the suction caused by so much air rising over the blazing hot deserts. Often there is low pressure just sitting over the Southwest for weeks on end, not due to any storm, but rather because it is so very hot.

A final factor meteorologists, mechanics and engineers need to consider seems unlikely in a desert: It is the remnants of tropical storms.

Atlantic hurricanes can head up the Rio Grande at Brownsville, and Pacific hurricanes can curve north and head up the coast of Baja California or the Sea of Cortez, eventually funneling moisture up the Colorado River valley, and , while these systems are weakened by the time they reach the deserts, they give surprising amounts of rain to areas that usually see little. When you read that blazingly hot desert communities such as Salton Sea or Palm Springs receive average of four inches of rain a year, you need to understand the average is lifted by such events; in fact they usually receive less, but occasionally receive far more.

Such events may be rare, but they are common enough to have a page in Wikipedia devoted to a “List of California Hurricanes”, though in fact it is largely a list of remnants. The very cold waters off California is death to hurricanes, and they fall apart with amazing speed as they approach from the south. Even so, the remnants are something engineers need to be aware of, for history warns us that a sequence of such remnants can afflict the Southwest. For example, in 1939 four occurred in four weeks:

• September 4–7, 1939: The remnants of a hurricane brought over a year’s worth of rain to parts of southern California.
• September 11–12, 1939: The remnants of a hurricane from the Gulf of California brought rain to parts of California.
• September 19–21, 1939: The remnants of a tropical cyclone brought rain to California.
• September 25, 1939: The 1939 tropical storm made landfall n ear Long Beach.  Winds were near 80 km/h (50 mph) and rain was near 12 inches (300 mm). At sea, 48 people were killed. On land, 45 were killed in flooding as an intense thunderstorm immediately preceded the tropical storm. This is the only tropical storm recorded to make landfall in California during the 20th century.

Considering we have such clear records of past events, it would be difficult to call a current event “Unprecedented”. My ten-year-old granddaughter could find the above picture, if my elderly internet abilities were weak. One could even find examples of “close calls”, where massive force five hurricanes threatened California. (Although such hurricanes always weaken greatly as they cross over cold waters, if they crossed quickly enough, a force five hurricane might still retain the strength of a strong force one, or weak force two.)

Such a storm would be truly “unprecedented” in terms of the brief historical record, but there is also a recent geological record which clearly shows such rare events have occurred in the recent past, and therefore meteorologists are always wary of massive hurricanes that blow up in the warm waters south of California ‘s cold waters.

By the way, the storm shown above was Linda, in 1997. In the warm waters south of California it exploded to a power that scared meteorologists, for it had a central pressure down around 26.64 inches (902 mb) and sustained winds of 185 mph. Lord knows how high the gusts were, but the winds were higher than many tornadoes, and even if it weakened and was only half as strong when it hit hit California it would have caused havoc. However it did not follow the path shown on the lower right of the above picture. Rather than slicing right it hooked left, and dwindled to a depression as swiftly as it as it had exploded to a force five hurricane. Despite the fact its core completely missed California, its outer rain bands caused mudslides east of San Diego, and its enormous waves washed away a house and killed a surfer.

Before you laugh at the way the meteorologists worried about Linda, be aware that, even before Linda faded, a new storm, Nora, was spinning up to its south, and Nora did slice right rather than hook left. Nora avoided much of the Cold water off California and used warm water in the Sea of Cortez and, though it did weaken greatly, retained enough strength to come north through Arizona as an actual tropical storm , with tropical force winds. Considering tropical storms need warm oceans to be created and to sustain themselves, to have one over a desert is a bit bizarre, yet Nora was a weirdo. One mountain in southwest Arizona saw a foot of rain, and, considering the landscape is officially “desert” and gets around three to four inches per year, the gully-washers produced by Nora there must have been surreal.

In any case, I only bring these examples up to demonstrate such unusual rainfalls are by no means “unprecedented”. They may be flukes, but they are a reality, and meteorologists deal with such strange realities. One thing they have noticed is such flukes seem to always happen when an El Nino is building in the Pacific.

And guess what? This past summer an El Nino was building in the Pacific. So it seems only natural that meteorologists would keep an eye out for tropical storms that might effect the desert Southwest. Even an amateur like myself did. But the media? It was still pounding its flabby drum and promoting panic about mega-drought, or maybe it was mega-floods, but in any case was mega-something.

Enter a tropical wave from stage right. Even before it crossed Mexico one of my favorite hurricane forecasters, Joe Bastardi, casually mentioned this wave might become a storm like Nora in 1997.

Bastardi is a peculiar mix of bombast and humbleness, and he can’t figure himself out, so I don’t try. I just am amazed by his insights. For example, one time a tropical wave was just coming off Africa and he published, “Houston, we have a problem.” Roughly ten days later that wave was a hurricane (Rita?) hitting Houston, but rather than gloating Bastardi was berating himself because he missed some detail and the storm’s landfall was the wrong side of Houston. Or, for another example, another hurricane carved from the gulf across the American southeast, weakening to a tropical storm, and was heading out to sea off Cape Hattaras, where 99% of all hurricanes head for Europe, but Bastardi said this storm was different. He said it would loop a clockwise loop and hit Florida and enter the Gulf of Mexico and then perhaps hit New Orleans. Initially such a zany forecast seemed preposterous, but that is exactly what this storm (Ivan?) did. But Bastardi did not give himself time to gloat over such an unbelievable forecast, but rather castigated himself intensely because he was incorrect about the storm’s intensity. Apparently he thirsts more for correction and improvement than for flattery, which I agree is a good thing, but I take this time to praise him because he deserves it, and also to explain why I listen to him when he has intuitions.

If you look back at posts from that time on his blog at Weatherbell, you will see that even as Hilary was forming Bastardi was posting the track of Nora in 1997. Therefore, as Hilary quickly strengthened just as many storms have strengthened over those warm waters, and then headed north towards California, there was no reason to call the storm “unprecedented.”

So why do they do it?

Next the weather bureau caught on, and predicted Hilary would strengthen greatly and then weaken greatly, as west coast storms always do, but that, if it came north fast enough, it might retain hurricane strength as a minimal hurricane . It stated no hurricane had hit California since they had west coast offices (which wasn’t until 1940, after the Long Beach Tropical Storm surprised everyone in 1939.)

So what did the media then report? They certainly didn’t bother to report that the storm would weaken greatly coming north, but did report it was strengthening to force 4. This created the panic the storm was strengthening as it neared, when the weather bureau was quite clear it would weaken. Then the press also reported this was “unprecedented”, as no hurricane had ever hit California. Then they added this was likely due to climate change or Global Warming or your vehicle, unless it was electric.

Why do they do it?

The media wound up looking like a cat with lots of feathers but no bird, as Hilary was a bit of a dud. It was not far enough west to be like the 1939 Long Beach storm, or far enough east to drench Arizona like Nora in 1997. It split the difference, was too slow to retain hurricane winds, and lost some moisture over the mountains of Baja California. It did drench some desert communities, and was a greater gullywasher than a desert thunderstorm is, but was nowhere nearly as bad as the weather bureau worried it might be. This actually pleased the weather bureau, which would (for the most part,) far rather err on the side of caution than to see people put in danger by a storm which surprises forecasters.

There were some cellars flooded, and some cars had engines ruined when foolish drivers drove in waters too deep. The media, meanwhile, did its best to get dramatic pictures and promote panic about Global Warming.

Perhaps the most dramatic video I saw portrayed the moment a stream which had been dry for decades abruptly faced waters charging down from the mountains, and those waters picked up every twig, stick and log that had fallen for decades, and flushed it all downstream. As the waters progressed, they picked up more and more wood, until you could not see water at all. All one saw was a tremendous amount of wood, coming around the corner of a canyon in the distance and bearing down on the cameraman, who wisely moved off the bridge he stood upon.

At this point one tends to hear a lot of second-guessing about the mechanics and engineers who designed the flood-control channels, (only budgeted enough to handle once-every-fifty-year storms), who perhaps did not foresee such amazing masses of driftwood, nor such wood’s ability to plug up even large culverts as swiftly as beavers. In any case the desert received a years worth of rain in six hours, and bridge abutments were washed away, but more annoying was what was brought in, which was mud. Yet this was expected, especially below areas where the soil was destabilized by forest fires, (and there were even road signs warming of such mud, weeks before Hilary arrived).

And the mud did mess up golf courses which were constructed on flood plains where it would have been unwise to build houses, (though perhaps such messes could be called a water hazard and sand trap all in one, by dedicated golfers.)

And some are tempted, of course, to test limits, and do build on flood plains.

However it wasn’t as bad as the media seemingly hoped. No one died, and in many places, though the media screamed they had received a year’s worth of rain, it amounted to only three inches. (It is a desert, after all.)

In places like Palm Springs there were actually far more people out and about, as Hilary passed through. Usually, the streets are deserted in the heat of the day, with temperatures often up as high as 115 degrees (46 Celsius). But the deluge dropped temperatures to a balmy 86, (30 Celsius), and the breezy rain didn’t stop people, who actually seemed to find the conditions refreshing.

Many went out in the rain simply to frolic in the delightful refreshment, which returns me to my original subject, which is why the media feels it must horrify everyone. Why can’t people focus on the technical details which interest mechanics and engineers. Why get so distracted…

…oh….yes…blonds.

If you look back to the third paragraph of this post you will see that I stated that when a scientist was feeling sorry for himself, he may be susceptible to bribes. I stated, “Money may not slake his (or her) thirst for Truth, but may gratify his (or her) hankering for blonds.”

This is true for humanity as a whole. We tend to pervert our healthy instincts. It is healthy to nourish our bodies, but we can turn that into gluttony. Rest is good for the weary, but we can create sloth. Even breathing can be turned, by certain forms of yoga, into euphoria so addictive it makes heroin look like chump change. And reproducing our bodies perhaps leads to the wildest perversions of our healthy instincts.

Considering we all tend to be tempted off course in this manner, one way or another, the smartest response is to, “confess sin and receive an assurance of pardon,” and the stupidest thing is to be “given to sin.”

I like that word “given.” If you are given away, some hand is letting go of you. What is that hand? I think it is the hand of Truth.

Truth is the most agreeable of agreeable things, and this is especially true when you are frank, and confess you lost your train of thought because a beautiful blond walked by just then. Truth pardons that because it is truthful. It may not be high minded, and in fact may be lustful, but it is the truth. Maybe you blush to the roots of your hair, but Truth embraces you. You have stood by Truth, so Truth stands by you. Truth also helps you get back on track, and remember where the rails led, before you lost your train of thought.

If you are scornful of honesty the derailing becomes serious. You are “given to your sin”, which is a way of saying you have lost hold of what separates men from beasts. If your sin is sloth, you can’t overcome your laziness. And so on. Until you can’t even tell if you are a man or a woman.

Becoming lost in this manner tends to be a gradual process of degradation, full of self-delusion. We imagine we are making progress when we are actually pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage. This seems to occur because there is something in the human spirit which craves freedom, and which knows when it is enslaved by some sort of addiction, and therefore we tend to alternate by being repelled by our addiction and being seduced by it. We make New Year’s resolutions and then fail to keep them. Back and forth; back and forth; restlessly going nowhere like pacing tigers.

The savior is Truth, which has been there all along, but we have failed to grasp it. Ambiguously, control comes through giving up control, but the ego craves power. Once the ego thinks Truth can be disregarded the ego becomes lost and the craziness of the power-mad appears.

A simplistic escape from the debauchery of the craziness is to enlist in some discipline. It does not matter much if it is a religion or a branch of the military, it is helpful to have some sort of drill sergeant bellowing at you, making you do what you don’t want to do. However, this tends to be the tiger walking one way in the cage, and the repression is accompanied by a longing for freedom. As soon as the soldier goes on leave or the sailor’s on “liberty”, the debauchery reappears with a vengeance. The fifty weeks of work leads to the wild two-week vacation, after which you’re wasted. This is the tiger walking the other way in the cage.

This is all avoided if one clings to Truth like a small child clinging to a father’s leg in a crowd, but people can’t believe it can be so simple. Also it offends their pride to be so small, so much like a little child. They’d much rather swagger. So off they go, either to boot-stepping discipline or to a wild party.

In the desert southwest the biggest party is the “Burning Man” gathering, held on a playa in Nevada. Originally this was a celebration of artists who simply wanted to be artists, rather than being burdened by the discipline of dishwashing, (or whatever other job they did to get by). It was an escape from the discipline that responsibly pays the bills. Originally it was held on a beach by San Francisco, but fires were made illegal on that beach, so they moved to a playa in Nevada, which has a certain irony, as “playa” is a Spanish word for “beach”.

In the American Southwest the word “playa” has evolved to mean the bed of a dry lake, an area which is usually very flat, and paved by a crust of dried minerals like a pavement, perfect for campers and RV’s to drive over. All sorts of artists would arrive and become “artistic”, which involved some genuinely inspired genius, (and discipline), but also a fair amount of promiscuous decadence. To be free of the chains of breadwinner discipline involves what people call “cutting loose”, and this tends to mix heaven with hell.

Then there came an infusion of amazing amounts of money. The people of Silicon Valley also wanted a break from the dreary discipline of “writing code” and from figuring out how to cram ever larger amounts of memory onto ever smaller chips. Some of these people were so rich they could blow a million dollars on a party. Some money went for drugs. (“Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you make too much money.”) But some went for sheer fun; for huge and silly artworks, for preposterous costumes and excellent music; and for dancing like mad. The parties became events one needed to attend; a sort of proof one was a fashionable person who went where the “in crowd” goes.

However a playa, as a dry lake bed, may, when the climate reverts to a wet phase, revert to being a lake. If it so much as starts this process, the pavement-like surface reverts to mud, which slows the party down. This was a known hazard of the “Burning Man” celebration. Here is a picture of the situation in 2014:

If such a damper could happen before, it cannot be called “unprecedented” if it happens again. In fact, as former-Hurricane Hilary had brought so much moisture north, and dumped it in the deserts, it followed that the so-called “monsoon” would have more moisture to work with, when it came to building thunderstorms. One might have even forecast a greater than average “probability” that the Burning Man would be afflicted by a damper, and even a swamp.

Which is what happened.

My granddaughter could likely find better pictures, but the above is from a decent post about the debacle, found here:

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/burning-man-2023-descends-into-chaos-after-rains-leave-73000-campers-stranded-2276495/

The media went wild over the prospect of doom and gloom. Just think! 73,000 people stuck in the mud, miles from safety! Surely this was a Global Warming disaster! To their apparent disappointment, the media only could report a single person died, (when they stepped in front of a bus). There was nothing to report in the way of starving and thirsty people, miles from food and water, resorting to desperate deeds. In fact there was little negativity at all. But there was also very little reporting of the positive way people actually responded to the challenge.

I did a bit of digging, and to me it seemed the situation was an example of the American selfishness going “Yippee”, but being smacked in the nose by a rolled-up newspaper, whereupon an unexpected resourcefulness and self-reliance appeared, and things worked out better than any could have expected. In fact many delighted in the challenges, and some even felt the party was improved by mud.

Undoubtedly the situation involved a degree of danger. Initially even Fraudulent Biden was alerted to the potential of a national disaster. But there was no disaster. I find this a little bit wonderful. I like to hear the tales of individuals who disentangle and extract themselves from disasters, but this was not a few individuals. This was 73,000. It was as if the Titantic sunk and everyone survived.

Surely there is a tale here that would be good to be told, but the media does not want to tell it. They cannot free themselves from pacing like the tiger in its cage. They can see only one response, when those who “party hearty” get in trouble, and that is to bring back the drill sergeant. The government must step in and clout its discipline left and right. That is the only way the 73,000 can be saved. So, you can imagine how offended such a government is, when the 73,000 can’t be bothered filling out the applications for government assistance, and simply save themselves.

History seldom shows such escapes from the tiresome to-and-fro pacing of the tiger. For one sad example, when German faith was shattered by their defeat in World War One, their society fell into despair, deep debt, depression, hyperinflation that wiped out lifetime’s savings, and an abandonment of hope that led to the faithless immorality enacted on the stages of Berlin, (where part of one stripper’s grossly pornographic act was to publicly inject herself with heroin). Yet this decadent backlash only prompted the opposite backlash of Hitler’s extreme discipline, an insanity worse than the worst seen on the sick stages of Berlin. The tiger paced from insanity to insanity, from boot-camp to shore-leave to boot-camp, without escape. There were the ninety-seven bad ideas without ever the three good ones. What made the “Burning Man” different? How did they avoid repeating history?

Witnessing this, I again felt something was missing in my vocabulary. My mind went back to my misspent youth, when I would have been in a hurry to be “in with the in-crowd”, and to say, “I go where the in-crowd goes.” I wanted “to be a nonconformist like everyone else.” It is in many ways embarrassing to look back at old diaries and see what a copy-cat I was. However, after too long working the dullness of a Real Job, I wanted to cut loose and be free. (To be honest, sometimes “too long” was one day.)

Now that I’m a tiresome old coot, I tend to skim through the artworks on display at an event like the Burning Man, and silently check off the copy-cats. For example, there are only so many ways to portray sad polar bears regarding burning oil rigs, before the politically-correct sameness overwhelms the best surrealist efforts, and the revolution seems less than revolutionary. In fact to be truly revolutionary might gain a disapproving glance at “Burning Man”, for it might portray Polar Bears savagely killing and devouring cute baby seals, or oil rigs saving millions from freezing and starving.

However the spirit of “Burning Man” is largely accepting of any and all, and even so-called right wing conformists are welcome, as long as they don’t mind it if they never get central stage.

One thing I noticed about conformists was that they want to look like they are not conforming. They like the idea of being first, at the forefront, and revolutionary, but under examination much of what they do is not new; it is merely opposite. If short hair is in fashion they move towards longer hair, and if long hair is in fashion they move towards shorter hair.

When young I was forced into seeing the absurdity of fashion for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was a year younger than my classmates, and still a boy as they all became deranged teenyboppers. In my eyes they went mad, as they abruptly didn’t want to go fishing. They developed an aversion to mud when I still wallowed.

The second reason was due a family downfall, and the fact that we became poor and my mother had to revert to Great Depression strategies to get by, and this included hand-me-down clothes. Patches were not in fashion back then, nor were pants so worn that once a month I suffered the indignity of having the seat split right down the fanny-crack. It has been over forty years since I have suffered such embarrassment, but back then it’s regularity made it hard to be fashionable.

One tends to lose interest in a game one has no hope of ever winning, and for me this seemed true of the fashion game. I suppose I gravitated in the direction of being a slob. However back then there was something called “the dress code” which kept one from slipping too far from conformity.

Some “dress code” rules made no sense to me; blue jeans were not allowed while “school pants” were allowed, even when the “school pants” had patches and the blue jeans had none. However, for the most part the parameters of fashion were a given I didn’t question, even when I ridiculed them. One could poke fun at the parameters without actually stepping over the line. (“Mad” magazine was good at this.)

To a certain degree fashion was ludicrous, and appeared to have little connection with Truth. I saw this one winter when my family was at its poorest, and I was hunching about in a fashionable but threadbare coat shivering, and then my mother did some wheeling and dealing at a place called “The Children’s Exchange” and traded in three old coats for a single old coat I absolutely adored. It was a couple sizes too large, and utterly out of style, but well designed. Called a “Mighty Max”, it related to a simple truth. The truth was: It was winter and I was cold. But as soon as I put my Mighty Max on I wasn’t cold anymore. It was like being inside a warm pillow, or being hugged, and felt so good I could easily say to hell with fashion.

The fact that fashion was ludicrous was to a degree common knowledge, even to the degree that “status symbol” was a commonly used phrase, employed to poke fun at certain things, yet at the same time it could not be denied that some fashions simply attracted people. For example, one fashion of that time made cars heavier, more expensive, and supplied little aerodynamic lift, and yet there was something undeniable “cool” about cars with fins, so the fins got larger and larger for a while.

It is a bit of a sidetrack, but the fashion of big, bulky cars seems a typical example of the American “yippee” experience heading off through mingled greed and a spirit of fun towards the inevitable whack across the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. The whack took the form of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the resultant Arab Oil Embargo. Some of the lumbering American cars got as little as five miles per gallon, (and included a new trickery called “planned obsolescence”), while Japanese cars got over twenty miles a gallon and were wonderfully durable. As the price of gasoline doubled the American automobile industry crashed into deep trouble, and greedy people abruptly found themselves with empty pockets, and there was a fair amount of rending garments and gnashing of teeth, and 97 bad ideas for every 3 good ones. But…

…But in the end the American auto-industry came bouncing back. Somewhere in the background, behind all the frenzy and hysteria, the common sense of mechanics, engineers and scientists quietly faced the Truth, and Truth provided answers.

What I lack-vocabulary-for is words that describe the capacity Truth has to provide an escape for people who have landed themselves in trouble. Humanity usually has no one but itself to blame for the messes it gets itself into, and the blame-game only furthers the mess. The rich justify their greed as the poor justify their envy, and the situation tends to spiral downwards, unless the escape appears like mercy from the blue.

This mercy always comes as something as a surprise to those who have turned away from Truth, and accept the pessimistic cynicism that surrounds being “given to sin.” Yet over and over history demonstrates Dark Ages giving way to a Renaissance. What is the difference in thought that separates darkness from such dawning of light?

In my mind the difference is perhaps illustrated by a quick comparison of Paul Ehrlich and Norman Borlaug in the year 1970.

Paul grew up in a sterile suburb while Norman grew up on a working farm. Paul’s father was a shirt salesman, skilled at making people buy what they often didn’t need, while Norman’s father, as a farmer, produced a necessity. Paul went to college and studied obscure butterflies, while Norman studied how to continue a process that mankind had followed for a thousand generations: Choosing the best seeds to plant for the next year’s crops. (Neither corn nor wheat, as they now grow, exist in nature, and both involve seed-selections other than natural selection.) Paul’s study of butterflies attracted few investors, and he needed to grovel for funding and grants, while Norman’s study bore immediate results, and not only attracted investors by increasing crops, but attracted conservationists by making it less necessary to chop down wilderness to increase farmland, because old farmland became more productive.

At this point it might seem Paul was destined to be poor and Norman to be rich, but Paul was interested in fame and fortune more than butterflies, while Norman was interested in improving the productivity of crops, and only cared for fame and fortune when it involved getting funding to further his study.

At this point Paul, perhaps using salesman-charm learned from his father, pulled off a remarkable career-switch. He switched from butterflies to being a prophet of doom and gloom. For some reason he had the charisma to make pessimism exciting, and abruptly made very good money basically stating most of mankind was going to starve while choking in its own pollution, within twenty years. He appeared on the most popular late night TV show of those times (Johnie Carson) roughly twenty times, and likely wasn’t asked once about butterflies.

Meanwhile Norman was making sure most of mankind stayed fed. As Paul appeared on Johnie Carson and enchanted the public with what was tantamount to a scientific-sounding sensationalism, (sort of like a good teller-of-ghost-stories by a campfire), Norman was at the center of the “Green Revolution”. The very nations Paul stated were hopeless became self-sustaining and even exported food.

At this point one discerns a difference, and draws a distinction. Even if one gives Paul the benefit of the doubt and states he was warning people of a worst-case-scenario, what he proposed seems brutal for a man once enamored by butterflies. He proposed foreign aid be cut off to “hopeless” countries, and that their people be “allowed” to starve. He proposed the males of India and Pakistan be castrated, to prevent population growth. He proposed that, even in the wealthy west, people who chose to have large families be penalized, even if their children were well-fed, happy, and well-educated. He himself chose to have a single child, but then did not chose to be castrated. (He chose a vasectomy, I suppose so he could continue enjoy sex, without the inherent responsibility.) And he made this behavior pay, even to a point where a University sought him out, as a “famous person”, and offered him a cushy position which had nothing to do with butterflies, (which he knew a thing nor two about), but rather about “sustainability”, (even though time proved he was an ignoramus on the subject).

Meanwhile Norman was so consumed by his work that, when his wife informed him that he had won a Noble Peace prize in 1970, he thought she was joking and went on with his work.

And how about me, in 1970? Who did I hear about? Sadly, Paul got all the press, and Norman little. I was so convinced we would run out of oil by 1980 that I changed my life in accordance, and even convinced my mother to invest in solar panels. (In my own defense, it was to heat hot water, which makes far more sense than using solar panels to generate electricity. I think something like 90% of Israel now uses solar power to heat their water.)

Then, of course, we did not run out of oil in 1980, and I felt like I had been a fool. The changes I had made to my life were changes that I needed to reverse, and, because admitting I am wrong is not easy for me, reversing course was not an easy process. But Truth demanded I do it, so I did it.

Did Paul do it? Did he set a good example and make my life easier by admitting his gifts as a prophet were nil? Paul was so wrong that he qualified as a false prophet, and in ancient Israel he would have been led to the edge of town and stoned to death, but fortunately he was in America, and all you get here is a rolled up newspaper whacked across your nose.

What truly amazed me most was that Paul refused to admit he was wrong. How was that even possible? He predicted a billion would have starved by 1990, and worse. None of it happened. How can a person be so wrong and not admit it?

He had various excuses, which basically boiled down to “My ideas are right, but it is taking longer than I thought for them to manifest.” Meanwhile he kept his position as a famous person at his university, and continued to make decent money giving talks as a famous person.

To me it looked like he was stuck on stupid. I was reminded of a line in a hit song of those times, “Every form of refuge has its price.” If he had stayed with his study of butterflies he would have been like a honorable starving artist, but he blundered into a cozy situation and became addicted to it. Dishonorable. (But I notice that, in his old age, he has returned to studying butterflies.) (But not for profit.) But back at that time Paul seemed to me like a sort of sell-out. His dumb ideas had made a mess of my life, and I had suffered through following his bad advice, but he was too weak to suffer, and instead stayed cozy. He was living the good life as I endured The School Of Hard Knocks. I suppose some envy was involved, but he lost any respect I had for him.

But how about Norman? Did I switch sides, and become a follower of Norman? No, because I never heard of Norman, despite the fact he’d won the Noble Peace Prize. The media didn’t salivate over him the way it did over Paul. There was little sensationalism involved in cross-breeding strains of wheat, and yet Norman may have quite literally saved a billion people from starving to death. That should generate a sensationalist headline or two, but the media prefers a Paul, saying a billion would die. And that is the difference.

I brought up Paul and Normon because they exemplify the difference between dishonor and honor, between being “given to sin” and being “given to Truth,” and between being basically harmful and being basically helpful. It boils down to difference between lies and the Truth.

Thinking about this difference is no small matter. It currently involves the whole world. World War Three (so far) is occurring on an intellectual level, and involves the differences which I’ve brought up, sort of as a sub-topic while discussing droughts and floods in the American Southwest. But this “difference” can’t be dismissed as a mere sub-topic when it infuses, invades and in some ways poisons even topics as innocent as talking about the weather in the American Southwest.

When I began this post I thought it would consist of a pithy comment about how some sensationalism had been refuted by the “mega-drought” becoming a “mega-flood”, but the post, (and my life), have not gone as I intended. Events have occurred which give one pause. Such pauses tend to elongate my posts. My posts become repositories of my thought, as I am forced to stop and think. Hopefully readers will have forgiven me as this post became long winded, but there is much to think about.

I also am arrogant enough to think some ideas in this post are worth sharing, and, though I am far from finished thinking-about-things, now seems a good time to cut this post short and tie up lose ends.

At one point I describe my granddaughter as a nine-year-old and another as a ten-year-old. This is not an inaccuracy, but rather is evidence of how long it has taken me to write this post. This post was started as snows started to melt, and now they are starting to fall again in the mountains of the American Southwest. The “monsoon” (or “monseen”) has past, and we now watch the winter systems.

If you are rooting for a mega-drought, you will be disappointed to learn a weak low did manage to kick some significant moisture into southern California.

This rain approached 3 inches in some locals. In most areas it was less. However the sensationalist media reported it as “once every thousand year rains.” People seemingly said, “Ho hum”, and went about their business, as the media showed flooding in low places,and rains moved from California to Arizona.

Why does the media insist on making such a big deal of what is a very wet day, but not really that great a problem? Are they stuck on stupid?

This immediately embarks my mind on two long-winded sidetracks, right when I stated I was going to cut this long post short. In a nutshell they would describe:

1.) How people get trapped by a situation they find cozy, and learn that “every form of refuge has its price.” It is up to the individual to decide if the price is worth paying.

2.) How such a trap can become an addiction which compromises ideals, and creates a hypocrisy which mingles lies with Truth, until the worsening dependence results in morality so muddied people don’t know what Truth is any more. Describing this would lead to further sidetracking, and involve many pages describing how a perverted form of Islam came to form an unholy alliance with communism, based upon the legitimacy of lying.

(Hint: The Byzantine’s were so corrupt and so cruel that, in specific situations involving imprisonment and torture, Islam allowed lying, however this narrow window, basically an exception-to-the-rule, has been expanded grotesquely into what seems to be a general strategy, making the word of some Mohammedans worthless; if their lying is allowed their treaties are worthless. However accepting deceit as a political strategy has allowed their worst to ally with communists, even when communists are mistreating Mohammedans.) (I think both sides are well aware their alliance is an expediency, and that as soon as they are done exterminating everyone else they will turn on each other.)

I was struck by an awful irony, for, it was while contemplating the fact 73,000 escaped calamity at the “Burning Man” festival, other young people, singing and dancing and rejoicing at another festival, were utterly unaware of another calamity approaching them in para-gliders. Though many escaped the atrocities enacted by Hamas, many did not. The vileness was so pronounced that the “difference” gouges the page and obliterates the paper; to even mention “hitting a dog on its snout with a rolled up newspaper” seems wrong.

However the same principles apply, albeit in a warlike setting. Humanity creates a problem that demands a response, and one prays for leaders like Churchill, able to weed through the 97 bad responses for the 3 good ones.

Finding the three good responses is not possible if one uses cancel culture to disallow second opinions. Instead one stays stuck on stupid, and something about such stagnation gnaws away at the human spirit. When solutions based on Truth are prevented, bad festers in the manner hatred festered in Gaza, until, like a boil, the pus bursts forth, at which point the headache and discouragement of psychological warfare becomes the horror of actual, physical wars and genocides.

The founders of the United States were not unaware of the evil mankind is capable of, and it was to avoid that evil that the American Constitution was devised to prevent any one person gaining the power to silence others. Freedom of Speech was vital, and resulted in amazing progress. To cancel Freedom of Speech is to cancel progress, which makes it absurd that those who are most interested in censorship call themselves “progressive.”

The problems of the progressive movement are that progressiveness was one of 97 bad ideas that sprang out of a crisis the world faced 175 years ago. At that time the agrarian system was facing challenges, and people were going hungry due to the potato famine and other woes, but Truth provided answers, one of which involved the start of the industrial revolution, which involved home industry being replaced by factories, people moving to cities, and eventually new crises. This became a general upheaval all over Europe, called the generic term “The revolution of 1848”, though in fact it involved many different situations in many different places, motivating all sorts of deep thinking and attempts to find Truth. This is a continual process, in essence a revolution which has continued to this day, except for one particular stagnation that refused to change. That is communism, which calls itself a revolution, though I don’t see how, considering they’ve gone 175 years without changing.

How can they prevent change? This is how: They call changing a “counterrevolution”, and do everything possible to prevent it from occurring, including lying. They call any idea that differs from their own a weed they must remove from their garden, but their gardens are barren, and are proof that the worst weed of all is communism itself. They are the antithesis of progress, for, I repeat, by calling any who differ a “counterrevolution” they have gone 175 years stuck on stupid, and are the epitome of sameness, and are about as opposed to revolution as you can get. Revolutionary? One does not change things for the better simply by wearing a Che Guevara hat; that is merely a fashion and an example of a tiger pacing in a cage. Nor does one change things for the better by being a so-called militant, and, (though praised by propaganda in the mainstream media that calls you “a peaceful protester”), revealing your true colors by burning the storefronts of hard working entrepreneurs, attacking the police that protect you, or even paragliding into “raves” to commit atrocities. Such behavior only proves one is an useful idiot foolish enough to serve as cannon fodder for equally idiotic people who are older and a few brain-cells wiser; wise enough to work behind the scenes where they won’t get shot, or won’t get shot until things really get out of hand and they face what Nicolae Ceaușescu faced on Christmas 1989.

In conclusion, one does not change things for the better, in any way, shape or form, by warping or denying the Truth.

The founders of the United States wrote its constitution based on the premise people respected Truth and would not lie. However communism extols lying. Therefore a communist can place their hand on the Bible and pledge to uphold the constitution of the United States, and their word means nothing. Their intent, if true communists, may be to destroy the United States, and yet they can say with dewy eyes how they respect the Founding Fathers, and also the Father of all, which is Truth. Afterwards they can laugh up their sleeves, “Heh, heh, heh! What suckers and chumps these losers all are!”

History seems to show us that, whatever short term gains such scoundrels may gain by denying Truth, in the long term the result is downfall. Sometimes it is merely the downfall of that particular individual, a Macbeth at his tragic end, but other times it involves the downfall of entire empires. No matter what glories of God they may have shone with in their past, the rot of corruption can crumble their knees, and they fall. The United States is not above such an end. Past glories do not guarantee a future that is spared being ignoble.

History also shows such downfalls do not create a worldwide Dark Age, for if Truth is suppressed in one place another place benefits from the first place’s insistence upon staying stuck on stupid, for the second place allows Truth to lead them, and they spring up as a surprising new power in the world. In fact our very word “renaissance” is historically closely associated with the final downfall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. In like manner, the fall of the United States can’t make Truth be untrue. Truth will simply burst forth someplace the power-mongering politicians never suspected it would. As they suspiciously regard Hungary, Poland, and India as hotbeds of counterrevolutionary dogma (IE: Truth) the next center of a new nation which astonishes the world might be Window Rock, Arizona.

Personally I hope I don’t live to see the downfall of the United States, although the behavior of many politicians in Washington D.C. does reek with a disgraceful, ignoble stench. To call them “The Swamp” is apt. They are shameful, but my hope is that this merely represents the entire nation getting whacked in the nose by a rolled up newspaper, after going “Yippie” too long (in many ways, but don’t ask me to go there, for I am concluding this post.) My further hope is that my nation retains its capacity to utilize Liberty and seek out the three good solutions from the ninety-seven less-good suggestions.

I’m still waiting.

The agony I feel is shared by fellow Americans, and was expressed so well by an unknown who called himself “Oliver Anthony” that his YouTube post became an overnight sensation. After two days it was well past a million “views” on YouTube, and past six million a few days later. People made a big deal of these numbers, and the people who like to think they control Truth because they attempt to control the media (and Free Speech) were wonderfully disconcerted, for they had not given this young man permission to speak.

The people perturbed by six million views can only be more perturbed by the fact that after four months this low-budget production now has over a hundred million views. (To be precise, 105,602,279 at 11:30 PM EST on December 23, 2023.)

Admittedly such a song is largely heart, and, while pointing out the head-oriented reality of certain problems, offers little in the way of solutions. However it does express a lack of faith in the solutions offered by “rich men north of Richmond”. (IE: Politicians in “The Swamp” of Washington D.C.). In essence it states the ordinary person is aware the liars are lying, and it is causing them anguish.

Although I do love music and think the power of the heart is superior to the power of the head, I am dissatisfied with merely moaning and groaning about the idiocy of the “progressives”. I want to meet them on the low level of intellect, and clash horns like the goats they resemble. (Meaning no offense to my goat Lydia).

However the liars increasingly seem to avoid any actual intellectual discussions. Why not? Because that might allow Free Speech, which might allow a “counterrevolution”, which they dread. This proves they are afraid of Truth. Why? Because they are addicts. They would sell their grandmother’s false teeth for their next fix, but they are not addicted to heroin, but rather power and all its perks. They so enjoy the cushy privilege which power has seduced them with that they fawn and bleat and bow to a king other than the King who is called Truth.

Over and over this has led to the fall of great empires originally uplifted by Truth. The fall can be prolonged agony; the fall of the Byzantine empire saw the rise of the Ottomans, and Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, but after a time the Ottomans too suffered the increasing rot of corruption until they were called “The sick old man of Europe” and were nearly wiped from the map, at the end of World War One. Only “The Young Turks” saved them from becoming a people with no nation, (like the Kurds). And in the American southwest the charcoal in the ruins of the Hohokan city of “Snaketown” in the year 1100 suggest how the mighty can fall even here.

And so it goes, and an individual feels small and ineffectual in the face of such prolonged downfalls. What can a lone man do?

Stand by the Truth. We may be small, mere motes of dust in the sunlight of millenniums, but it is not our job to be the Truth in its entirety. Truth can take care of itself. We need to take care to be truthful in the small spaces allotted to us, and that is enough. Maybe we will see our small efforts in some backwater had the power of a pebble to start an avalanche, and simply by cross-breeding strains of wheat on farms, far from the mainstream, we will start a “Green Revolution” and save a billion lives, or maybe not. In any case, it is not the individual who actually saves the billion lives. It is the compassionate side of Truth.

In the darkest winter night
Look for unexpected Light.

Merry Christmas!

ADIOS ELSIE

When troubles come in clusters I try to take an upbeat attitude, and say something along the lines of, “It’s better to get them all done with at once,” and, “Once I get through this, there will be a long spell with no trouble at all.”

However this time it wasn’t working. Some things, such as a mother-in-law struggling with dementia, are not a thing you can fix. Other things, which you should be able to fix, (such as the well at the Childcare), defy diagnosis and remain troubles even when you attempt to deal with them head on.

Then, just when I needed to be especially strong, I wound up in a hospital with pneumonia, and my upbeat attitude got a bit frayed. (Usually I find hospitals fascinating places, but there are troubles they face these days I couldn’t fail to notice and be nosy about, and my frayed attitude soured further.) Then, when I got home, I faced a very sick dog that likely would have to be put down.

The vet agreed, and my friend of fifteen years went to the Big Sleep with me petting her.

Then the vet asked me a question he likely asks by rote, somewhat hardened by having to experience the death of pets so often. “Would you like us to dispose of the dog for you?”

“Dispose”. What a word. I shook my head.

“If you wish we can cremate, and give you a box of ashes.”

I shook my head again. Then I found the words. “I think I’ll have a quiet funeral in the back yard, and bury her next to others.” The vet’s staff placed Elsie’s body in the back of my Jeep, and I headed home.

In actual fact I wasn’t at all sure I was being wise. Five years ago I could still dig a hole four feet deep, four feet long, and two feet wide in twenty minutes, in stone-free soil. But pneumonia had made a weakling out of me. Even walking seemed to require a caution I never took before, (unless I was very drunk.) I told someone that rather than spring in my step I had fall in my step. And I expected myself to go out in the back yard and dig a decent grave?

But all I had to do was think of that word, “dispose.” A dog deserved more dignity than that. Elsie wasn’t some tissue you use and then throw away. She held life, and life deserves respect.

I wasn’t being sentimental. To be honest, I surprised myself by noticing a flint-like hardness in my attitude. I reckon it has a lot to do with the political climate we are enduring, where it seems Truth is opposed by a great deal of falsehood, and, in a manner of speaking, life is opposed by a great deal of death.

For example, if you are in a hospital the people who care about life are fairly obvious, for they care about you. However others are detached, and shuffle papers, and, if you express interest in what they are doing, it turns out they are in it for the money. Basically they fall into three categories; they are working for the lawyers, or the insurance companies, or the politicians. (A fourth category might be the people who make pharmaceuticals and equipment, however among such people are some who actually care for patients.)

I admit it is a bit of a leap to connect people working purely for money with people working for death, but that is only because you haven’t thought long and hard about it, like I have. If you don’t care about life, what do you care for?

In any case, I only bring this up to give you a glimpse into what made my attitude so flint-like. The veterinarian likely had no idea of the sore point he was touching upon when he politely asked if I would like to “dispose” of my dog.

The fact we mere mortals bother to make a big deal of how we “dispose” of those we care for makes little sense, if you are measuring all in terms of material gain. But it does make sense if you value life. The fuss of a funeral recognizes that we value life even when it has departed, and this in turn broaches the mystical subject of where life has gone, when it departs.

Pneumonia is a sort of brush with death, but no one at the hospital seemed particularly concerned with the subject of where life goes, when it departs. Some good people seemed interested in keeping your life here, and some less good people seemed interested in profiting over your interest in delaying your exit. But there were no nuns or holy yogis. Not that I particularly desired being preached to, but I think I would have preferred that, to being sold a heap of oxygen equipment.

All the equipment arrived at my house even as I did, when I left the hospital. I’m not sure who is paying for it. Medicare part J4, or something like that, which basically means the taxpayers are paying, or the government is printing money it does not have. In any case all sorts of ugly green bottles and ugly plastic tubing and a grunting, hooting air pump cluttered my wife’s lovely layout. And I was instructed I should be a layabout. I was suppose to sit around and breathe like Darth Vader, (without his very cool helmet).

Fat chance of that happening. In some ways overwork put me in bed, but also got me out of bed. If you are running a Childcare, you can’t have a dog die on the doorstep, so right off the bat I had to take care of poor Elsie. Then I had to drive around with a dead dog in the back of my Jeep, because this blasted world would not have the decency to give me time to dig a grave. I had tried to dig a grave right away, but right away my cellphone called me to work, and the shovel was left thrust into the hillside.

I’ll try to keep this griping brief.

The first annoyance involves office-bound bureaucrats, who sometimes can’t tell a bounding child from Barbie Doll, informing Child Care Professionals how to spend their time.

In reality a Child Care Professional often can handle twelve preschool children at once, however they must swiftly shift to one-on-one attention when a child throws a blue-faced fit and melts down into a tantrum. The workers shift with a grace, dignity and deftness that always amazes me, for they usually occupy the other eleven children with some “craft” or “activity” as they deal with the one. On occasion, two children throw tantrums simultaneously, and I’ve seen Child Care Professionals handle even this stress, (though I’ll confess their lips do compress a bit tightly.) But the bureaucrats and politicians decided a law should be written, and no teacher should have more than six children, when children are so young. This makes little difference, for, when a child throws a tantrum demanding one-on-one care, the second teacher must deal with eleven, and if a second child throws a tantrum we are back in the original situation.

In any case my wife and I are attempting to cut our Childcare down to only six children, so I can retire, but my wife has a hard time saying “No” to mothers in need, so often, though only six are scheduled, a seventh arrives. This in turn requires, by law, a second teacher, who happens to be me.

I usually arrive grumpy because my plans are disturbed (for example, I might have planned to bury my dog.) But what is uncanny is that the moment I walk in the door the grumpiness in me completely vanishes, as does any weariness. Something about small children draws something out of me. Floodgates open, and I am enchanted, and apparently enchanting, as the closest I have ever been to being a rock star is among little children.

However the humorous thing is that my wife doesn’t want me to be a rock star. She would prefer I enter by a back door and remain hidden, so I don’t disrupt her routine or “circle time” or whatever. I am available for melt-downs, but mostly am there in a sort of limbo, because bureaucrats say there must be a second person. On this particular occasion the “seventh child” headed home at lunchtime, which allowed me to leave my wife with the six remaining kids, and head home with my dead dog to dig the dog’s grave. But no sooner had I arrived home when my cellphone began beeping.

This brings me to the second annoyance, which is the fact the water pressure has been feeble at the Childcare. It has been that way ever since a thunderstorm knocked the water out last summer. I replaced a pressure switch, which did nothing, but by fooling about with the wiring of the pressure switch I got a feeble flow going. At times the flow was so feeble there was barely a trickle, so I had to figure out how to remedy that problem, but at least we kept the Childcare open.

After several months of trying this and trying that, (and spending much time on the web researching what people, [both the wise and the foolish], advised me to do on YouTube, to handle problems with pressure switches,) I had to admit I was baffled. I had tried just about everything possible, and was starting to fear the problem was not in the pressure switch, but in the pump itself, a hundred feet down at the bottom of our well. When younger I would have searched for answers on the web, and would have hauled the hundred feet of plastic pipe and electric wire up onto the Childcare lawn, and installed a new pump myself, because I couldn’t afford a plumber and such a job can cost a couple grand. However at age seventy even thinking of such effort got me huffing and puffing, and I decided I should just shell out the damn money for an actual plumber. (I’m not so poor as I used to be, with my five kids all raised).

The fellow I wanted was old Pete, who has spent fifty years around town (and surrounding towns) digging wells and repairing wells and installing water pumps and fixing the pumps when they break. I wanted Pete because he is as old as I am, and also he is familiar with old farmhouses and the weird ways things were plumbed and wired before anything was “done to code.” Whereas younger whippersnappers tend to adopt indignant expressions, upon coming across blatant violations of modern codes, Pete understands how things were done, back in the day, when people often had to do things themselves because they simply could not afford a plumber, or electrician, or new pipes, or new wires. or even new nails.

In a sense Pete was the opposite of a bureaucrat, for he did not sit in an office making rules concerning things he knew little about, but actually dwelt in a world he knew a great deal about, among people who followed few rules beyond, “make it work.” He had come across all sorts of jury-rigged set-ups in his time, and wasn’t the slightest bit judgemental about how risky or inefficient they were; he knew they worked, and what he offered was how to make them work better, with fewer sparks and clouds of smoke.

(Actually the phrase “jury-rigged” apparently originated among sailors. When a beautiful sloop or schooner was de-masted by a savage storm, survival demanded a new mast be raised from splintered remnants of the old one, with awkward and clumsy rigging devised by desperation and ingenuity. The ship might now look ugly as sin, but no one complained about the “jury-rigging”, if they limped back to port all alive.)

Of course men as skilled as Pete are hard to come by, so I felt very glad to get him to schedule a trip to my Childcare, but then I caught the ‘flu and had to postpone. Then I landed in the hospital, and left a message on his answering machine to just head to the old farmhouse and scope things out for himself. He hadn’t had time, and with winter coming I was worried about the Childcare’s well completely quitting. However now my wife called to tell me Pete had just arrived, and that she felt I should be there. So me and my dead dog turned around and headed back to the Childcare.

He was already in the basement of the dilapidated farmhouse with a huge, young intern he was training, when I got there. I went huffing and puffing across the yard and through the ruined building and down the rickety stairs to find them scratching their heads over my peculiar wiring of the pressure switch. I explained it was the only way I could get the pump to work, and they explained I had power going through a grounding wire. It was lucky, they said, that the pipes leading away from the pressure switch were plastic, for if they had been copper I would have electrified the entire system. I just shrugged and said, “I knew things were not right, which is why I called you, Pete. By now, after fifty years, you must have seen every dumb thing a fix-it-yourselfer can do.”

Pete shook his head. “Nope. This is a new one to me.”

I laughed, “Well, we had water and didn’t have to shut the Childcare, but I knew something was not right.”

I then explained one thing that had completely baffled me. The breaker in the panel was a double breaker, which means there should have been two hot wires and the ground, but at the switch only one wire was hot. I finally concluded the circuit must be broken at the pump, which was why I hired Pete, for I expected a big job, costing a couple thousand, involving hauling the pump up from the bottom of the well and replacing it. But Pete and his huge young intern tested wires and concluded the break must be between the pressure switch and the breaker box. This seemed unlikely to me because the box was (relatively) brand new and brand new wire left that box and brand new wire arrived at the pressure switch. Pete insisted in following the wire back to the box, and, as his amazingly bright flashlight probed the cobwebby route the wire took through remote depths of the ancient cellar he abruptly said, “What’s that?”

Midst an enormous clot of cobwebs a rusted square of sheet metal hung crookedly from a rotting slab of wood. The band new wire appeared to pass over it, but closer examination revealed the wire neatly looped down into the sheet metal. Pete worked through the webs for a closer look. Creaking a rusty door open he revealed an archaic fuse box, with two old cylinder fuses half buried in spiderwebs and the carcasses of unfortunate bugs, and one of those fuses was burned out. “There’s your problem.” stated Pete. “You were running on one leg.”

Pete had the right fuse in his amazing toolbox, which apparently held everything known to plumbers, and we replaced the burnt-out one. Then we did a careful check of the pressure switch to see if my fudged wiring had all been set right, and Pete said, “Now we shall see if you destroyed your pump or not. Go click on the power.” I clicked it on, and immediately heard the pipes humming in a far more healthy manner than I’d heard in months. “Sounds like it works!”

When I returned from the breaker box I found Pete scrutinizing the pressure gauge, and I mentioned, “That’s the first time I’ve seen it above twenty pounds in months.” Then I added, “I kept turning up the pressure at the pressure switch, but it didn’t raise the pressure at all.”

When I mentioned that Pete’s eyes grew a bit rounder, and with amazing spryness in a man so old he jumped to the pressure switch and, with a ingenious socket wrench which appeared from his box, he deftly, and very rapidly, turned the nut atop the pressure spring that controls the pressure. “Glad you told me that.” He calmly mentioned, “You’ve got the pressure set at around 120 pounds. We’d likely blow a pipe somewhere. I’m getting it back to 40 where it belongs.” He got it down to 40 pounds just as the pressure rose to 40, and the pressure switch clicked the pump off, in the manner it is suppose to do.

I shook my head. “That is a click I’ve wanted to hear for months. I can’t believe the problem was just a blown fuse, but I didn’t know that fuse box was there.”

“Yup. It always pays to follow the wiring in these old houses. I’ve come ‘cross junction boxes in the strangest places, lookin’ like spiders ’cause they have eight wires comin’ from a single box. But it looks like we solved your mystery. But keep your fingers crossed. It is hard on a pump to be run on 110 volts when its s’pose to run at 220, and we’ll have to see if yours quits after a day or two. However so far I’d have to say you’ve been shit lucky.”

I laughed, thinking to myself I’d never heard the phrase “shit lucky” before, and reminisced, “When they built this house they’d never heard of a junction box; all the wiring was knob and tube. I think the fuse box had just four fuses. They put that new breaker box in because you had to turn the radio off to use the toaster.”

Pete nodded gravely. “Seen a lot of knob and tube in the older houses. It was three times cheaper. So of course they used it in the Great Depression.” He gestured to his trainee to pick up his heavy toolbox, and we headed from the gloomy cellar up the rickety steps.

As we stepped out squinting into the brilliant sunshine I told him, “Write me up the bill and I’ll hustle off and get my checkbook. It’s best you get paid right away. You know how forgetful old codgers like me can be.” Then I walked over to my Jeep, nodded at the dead dog in the back, and rummaged around for my checkbook.

Peter charged me $200.00 for the hour’s worth of work, which seemed on the low side to me, considering some plumbers charge over $300.00 just for driving into your driveway. But some older fellows like Pete charge on a sliding scale, and it pays to wear frayed trousers when paying your bill.

Pete told me to call him if the pump quit (it hasn’t) and then the young fellow surprised me by shaking my hand earnestly and saying how glad he was to meet me. I puzzled over what that was all about. Maybe he liked watching old-timers.

Then suddenly I was alone, again driving home with my dead dog, feeling a smidgen of satisfaction for having dealt with the low water pressure without it costing a couple thousand dollars, but also feeling drained. The doctor said I should rest, and inhale oxygen, but life wouldn’t let me.

When I got home I opened the fridge and looked through all the Tupperware containers of chicken soup kindly church ladies had brought me, and chose an especially good one with dumplings that resembled a chicken pot pie. The doctor said I should cut back on salt but I didn’t. I fed the fires, which left me huffing and puffing, so I attached a little gadget to my fingertip to check out my O2 levels, and it said I should be blue in the face and keeling over. I figured the figure was faulty; my circulation was just not getting to my fingertips, with excellent chicken soup demanding attention in my stomach, but 52% is pretty low, so I turned on the O2 machine and as it chugged and hissed I put on the plastic tubes that interfere with boogers in your nose, and decided to lay down a while and breathe like Darth Vader, before burying my dog. The little clip on my finger rose fairly rapidly to 91%, and I felt very peaceful, and decided a brief nap would be nice, looking at the low, golden sunlight.

The next thing I knew it was pitch dark, and I could hear a whispering hiss. The O2 tube was blowing into my left ear. It didn’t seem to improve my hearing any, so I shut the machine down and got up in a grouchy mood. Where was my wife? Then I abruptly realized it was only 5:15 and the Childcare wouldn’t even have closed yet. It gets dark too early in December. At my latitude the sun sinks from sight at 4:15 in the afternoon and you don’t see it again until 7:15 the next morning.

That is too much darkness for me. I go to bed early and then tend to get up for a while in the middle of the night. I heard the old-timers developed a bunch of chores that they could do by candlelight, (because they had to get up in the middle of the night anyway, to tend the wood fires). There is little for me to do, other than tend the wood fires, because if I make too much of a clatter I risk the ire of my wife, who does not approve of any sort of hammering when she’s trying to sleep, so I write. It is a good time to write, for it’s wonderfully quiet at two AM. When my creativity is drained I go back to bed, sometimes passing my wife who is getting up early for her prayer-time, and some of my best rests are between five o’clock and winter sunrises at seven.

This sunrise was surprisingly frost free, especially as it was cloudless. Clear skies usually breed frost, but the wind was stirring around to the warm southwest, and the forecast was for those winds to pick up as a cold front approached late in the day. I had only three things on my schedule. Eat, rest, and a funeral for Elsie. I was glad it was mild, for I didn’t want to deal with shoveling frozen earth.

I felt ridiculously stiff and sore, like I once felt after serious work, though all I’d done the day before was hurry a little. Pneumonia left me amazingly out of shape, and had melted ten pounds from my scrawny frame, and I decided even hurrying a little must count as serious work, and be capable of making me stiff and sore. The net result was I didn’t even want to get out of bed, and when I made it to my armchair for a coffee, I didn’t want to get out of the armchair.

There are certain times in life when it is a heroic act of will to stand up, for example in the fifteenth round of a boxing match. There is a quitter in us which just wants to rest, and that quitter can be very persuasive, and one really needs to gird one’s loins to get up. However defying that quitter is what makes a champion get up in the fifteenth round and win the title match.

Also, incidentally, it sometimes is what gets an old man out of his armchair. This thought made me smile wryly. I might not be winning the title, but it was the only way I’d get any breakfast, as my wife had to rush off to run the Childcare all alone.

Though the fridge was full of Tupperware containers of excellent chicken soup, man does not live on chicken soup alone. Especially for breakfast. So I opened a can of corn beef hash, noting the 16 oz. can is now 15 oz. (“Shrinkflation”). I fried it up and then dropped four eggs on top. It was a big breakfast, but I have ten pounds to put back onto my scrawny frame.

It was delicious, and added more than a pound to my frame, but initially this consisted of a greasy blob in my stomach. My stomach informed me no energy would be available until it did some digesting.

When younger I could override this message from my stomach. Often I had to, for most bosses wouldn’t put up with me sitting around after I ate. So I’d trudge around working much more slowly than usual until the energy kicked in. But now I’m my own boss, and also seventy, so sometimes I see no reason to override the message from my stomach, and instead I just lay down.

In the morning Elsie would put up with about fifteen minutes of such nonsense, and then start to disturb my peace. She wanted to go out for a walk. Not that she would be so forthright as to bark at me. Instead she’d begin pacing about, clicking her toenails on the floor, and would increasingly talk to herself, sighing deeply and muttering odd noises. I knew I’d better get up, for if I allowed her agitation to pass a certain point her stomach would produce a sort of slimy bile which she’d vomit as a disgusting yellow pool on my wife’s floor. Nor would the dog clean it up herself. The prospect of such a mess nearly always got me up and out.

But now there was no Elsie. I could digest my meals longer than fifteen minutes, if I so chose. And the doctor had told me to rest. So I decided I’d lay down for a half hour, and closed my eyes, and…

…And abruptly it was more than two hours later. I couldn’t believe it. The clock must be wrong, but my cell phone stated the same time. I’d wasted an entire morning, accomplishing nothing but making corn-beef hash with dropped eggs on top, and eating it. Meanwhile my wife was running the Childcare all alone.

I supposed I could say the doctor had told me to eat and to sleep, so I had accomplished two things. Eating and sleeping. But a man usually does not like the sum total of his morning to be those two things. I paced restlessly about the house, and then headed out the back door and up the hill to dig a grave.

It wasn’t much of a climb, only around fifty steps, but by the time I reached the site I was winded. It seemed ridiculous, but was the after effects of the pneumonia. I was rendered a weakling, and leaned against the handle of the shovel to catch my breath.

I fumbled about in the pocket of my jacket to find the little gadget to clip to my finger. My O2 level was at 69% as I huffed and puffed, catching my my breath, but as I watched it rose back up to 85%, and I risked digging a few more shovelfuls. Immediately I was out of breath, and the gizmo showed my O2 level sink down to 64%. As I caught my breath I wondered how low I could get it.

As I leaned against the long-handled shovel it seemed obvious to me that it was going to take a long time to dig the grave, but that there were worse ways to spend a day than standing on a New Hampshire hill, admiring the view. It also occurred to me that Elsie was once again, for the last time, getting me out to enjoy a view I’d otherwise miss.

As I alternated between scooping a few shovelfuls and resting, I reminisced about all the walks I’d been on over fifteen years.

Originally we’d been more of a traditional town, where dogs ran free, especially on farms, but as houses popped up like mushrooms more and more people moved in who were downright offended by the sight of a dog running free, and Elsie often became the subject of Facebook posts by indignant Karen’s. They were convinced a dog off its leash was terribly neglected.

I didn’t want to tie her up, because the children at the Childcare delighted in her, and also we suffered an invasion of rats when a nearby stable shut down, and Elsie loved to hunt rats. She could snatch one from the weeds and kill it promptly with a good shake. Then she would cast it aside. Elsie ate nearly anything, but not rats.

However she also grew increasingly independent as she got older, and developed a habit of edging towards the bounds of the Childcare, and then abruptly bolting. She’d return in roughly ninety minutes, after making her rounds and investigating every compost pile in the vicinity. This made me more watchful, but that only made the dog more crafty.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and maybe it wasn’t a new trick she was enacting. Maybe she had been free before, and was just stuck in her old ways, but she became increasingly devious about gaining her freedom, and famous on Facebook. Most people liked or at least tolerated her, but some grew quite angry. One person, (I fortunately never discovered who,) even tied her up and then began spraying her with a can of blue spray paint. She escaped by slipping her collar and bolting, arriving back at the farm looking abashed and like a blue zebra, but, (though she likely avoided that particular yard from then on,) she did not learn to avoid people grabbing her collar, for a few months later she arrived back from one of her ninety-minute escapades with a note attached to her collar. (The note made it clear that authorities would be notified if Elsie ate their cat’s food on their back porch again.) Besides getting me outside on mornings I was sluggish, Elsie also introduced me to neighbors I otherwise would not have met.

Increasingly I had to tie the dog up, but I did not like doing so, especially when I was working outside. I promised my wife I’d keep a better eye on her, because I just liked having a dog with me as I pottered about. This only increased Elsie’s skill at sneaking off. At times her ability to vanish as soon as I got absorbed in a task infuriated me, and I’d drop what I was doing, hop in whatever clunker I was driving, and drive to a place where I knew I could intercept her as she crossed a road. Long time residents would assist me, and I recall one woman, upon looking up from her beautiful flower garden and seeing me lurking on the street, cheerfully informed me Elsie was likely in her compost pile behind her garage. We walked together to peer behind the garage and sure enough, there was Elsie. What amazed me was that the compost pile was surrounded on four sides by chicken-wire four feet tall, but Elsie had managed to get in. The lady stated, “Oh Elsie! Are you ever grounded!”

And Elsie was indeed grounded. It was embarrassing to be seen lurking about, peering into people’s yards, attempting to intercept my straying dog. New residents to town were made nervous when they saw me.

I was determined to teach the dog to stay by my side. But in this case I could not teach the old dog a new trick. She would test doors to see if they were latched, and became an escape artist, learning new tricks other than the new tricks I wanted her to learn.

One unexpected trick she learned was how to get people to pamper her. Besides being yelled-at and spray-painted blue, she also met a fair number of kindly people in her wanderings, and was at times fed by complete strangers. I wasn’t there and don’t know the details, but I do know she developed a pathetic expression she used on susceptible people. A posting would appear on Facebook, wherein someone would ask, “Does anyone know who’s dog this is? The poor thing was lost, and came wandering into my yard half starved to death.” Then there would be a picture of Elsie, wrapped in a blanket of lamb’s wool and eating what appeared to be sirloin steak. A flurry of replies would then follow, informing the kind person, “That is Elsie.” Then I would hear about it from my wife, (because I myself am never on Facebook). And I’d go pick her up.

One morning I had to fly out the door because a cellar was flooding over at the Childcare in a terrific rain, but Elsie whined she hadn’t been for her morning walk. I couldn’t find the leash, but in heavy rain I could usually let her into the backyard and she’d return swiftly. However on this morning a cottontail hopped across the back yard, and a rabbit could make Elsie forget her age in an instant, and she went bellowing and crashing off into the woods. Swearing softly to myself I headed off to the emergency at the Childcare. Even before I got the sump pump going my wife informed me from above that a Facebook post stated Elsie was in safe hands. As I emerged from the basement I inquired, “Where is she this time?” My wife informed me, “The bank.”

I happened to need to make a deposit that morning, so it was actually handy Elsie was at the bank. As I walked in all three tellers looked at me with sympathetic eyebrows. They informed me Elsie had come dragging out of the woods completely drenched, and covered in burrs, and had staggered to the drive-through window and looked up with her pathetic expression. Now she was behind the counter, where I am never allowed to go, getting treated better than that bank ever treats me. She was swaddled in towels and had a large bowl of kibble in front of her that they’d rushed off to buy from the market across the street. I shook my head. I briefly explained the dog had spent less than forty-five minutes in the rain, after running off after a rabbit, after a good breakfast. My voice got a bit lame towards the end, because all three tellers were regarding me as if I were a person making poor excuses after maltreating his dog.

As Elsie grew older she developed her pathetic look to a high art, and could stop cars. I think she may have even exaggerated her arthritic limp a little, to make it more effective. (I know there was no sign of a limp when she saw a rabbit.) I had several opportunities to see her in action, for, despite the fact we increasingly had to obey the leash law, and she was increasingly banned from the Childcare and reduced to four short walks a day, (after breakfast, noon, before supper, and before bed,) I still liked to have with me as I huffed and puffed splitting and stacking wood by my house. On those occasions I’d keep an eye on her, and sometimes watched her walk to the end of the drive, sit down, and look pathetic. I saw cars slow as they passed. Some stopped down the road, and returned in reverse, and they’d open their passenger-side door, but, before Elsie could jump in, I’d shout, “That dog is mine!” Then I’d wave, the kindly person would wave back, and Elsie’s plot would be spoiled, but she never lost hope nor stopped trying.

Sometimes she succeeded. Usually it was when my grandchildren were visiting, and she was playing with them. They’d stop for a snack, and Elsie would be offended she received no snack, walk to the foot of the drive, look pathetic, and hop into the first car that stopped. The first thing I’d know about it was when I heard there was a Facebook post showing her enjoying a sirloin steak in front of a fire in some lavish living-room in some million dollar mansion. (Perhaps I exaggerate, but only slightly.)

Then came a frightening day when she vanished and there was no Facebook post. I had a sick feeling the foolish dog had jumped into the wrong car, as I went to the police station to find out if they had heard anything. The secretary was sympathetic, because she knew Elsie, and shook her head, as she shuffled through the overnight notes. Then she paused and smiled at me. A newly hired officer, who did not know Elsie, had advised a kindly person who had picked Elsie up to take the dog to the regional office of the humane society. I called them up, and they informed me they had her. They were located across the state in Swanzey, more than a half hour drive away. Off I eent.

The people in Swanzey were very nice, and we laughed over Elsie’s ability to get rescued from her own driveway, but once in the car Elsie got a frown. I had better ways to spend my time.

Perhaps the most ridiculous rescue was when the newly hired officer picked Elsie up from my drive even as the grandchildren played in the back yard. He told me a leash law was a leash law, as I paid the $25.00 fine up at the station. The secretary carefully avoided meeting my eye.

In any case, the town changed and dogs definitely didn’t run free any more. I became a grouchy anachronism, voicing garrulous opinions about the direction society was headed, and Elsie became a dying breed, the last of the free dogs.

She still was allowed freedom when I took the goats out to the flood control reservoir behind our Childcare. Originally there were many goats, as well as many small children. Elsie, a mutt with some retriever blood, also displayed some herding ability at times, and developed a relationship with the goats which fascinated me. My fascination grew, even as the herd dwindled down to a single goat.

Above is a picture of Lydia, looking backwards for Elsie, my last goat looking for her nemesis the dog, after the dog had its last swim.

After that last swim the dog began yelping, because she was so tired she couldn’t push her way through the especially thick grass (due to the summer’s extravagant rainfall) to the top of the dam. I had to walk back and huff and puff down the embankment to break a path for the weary, old dog. Elsie gave me her pathetic look, but I wasn’t going to fall for that, and refused to carry her. But it was obvious we were both much older, as we reached the top of the dam. Elsie was dragging and I was huffing and puffing.

Lydia gave us both a somewhat condescending look. She didn’t hold with having anything to do with bodies of water larger than a puddle. Arid-land creatures, goats rival camels with their ability to endure parching circumstances, and, after I stopped milking her, Lydia amazed me by going days without touching her water bucket, seemingly getting by merely on the dew on the grass she ate at dawn. However she would have nothing to do with the flood control reservoir, never drinking from it, nor wading even ankle deep. The fact Elsie loved to swim in it always caused her to wear a look of disbelief, turning to mild panic when, as a younger dog, Elsie would rush up to us and then shake herself vigorously, filling the air with spray.

The two beasts had been juveniles together, and then endured each others company for fifteen years, as the herd grew to seventeen, and I felt rich, and then as it shrank to one, and I felt poor again. As their ancestors had been predators and prey, they had many reasons to dislike each other; one liked meat and one was vegan, (which seems to be a reason many humans dislike each other as well). However their ancestors had been herders and herded as well, so they also had an ancient linkage, though I doubt either would begrudge confessing any such attraction could ever exist.

One thing I never saw them do in fifteen years was to touch noses. It was a common greeting among dogs, and among goats, and there were occasions when I sat looking at clouds and composing poetry when a goat, or my dog, might come up and touch noses with me, but they simply would not do it with each other. It simply was unthinkable. Yet they were strangely attached in other ways. Should a distant branch snap, off in the woods, the goats came rushing to me and my dog, as the dog took a few steps in the direction of the snap, lifted a paw, and freed an inquiring “woof”.

One bond I felt we might have was we were all social animals. Goats have their herds, dogs have their packs, and humans have their small towns or city neighborhoods. There is enough similarity to make partial blending possible.

Not that they didn’t constantly test each other. If a goat became too complacent the complacency may have seemed disrespectful to Elsie, and she’d make a totally unnecessary move, more like a feint than a lunge, towards the tendons of the goat’s rear legs or the goats udder, and that would wake up the goat in a hurry. Usually the goats pranced away from Elsie, even as she wandered by completely disinterested, as if she was a wolf in their midst, which, when you think of it, she truly was. But at times Elsie became a sort of air-headed wolf, so lost in her sniffings she neglected her duties, and I think this must have seemed like negligence even to the goats, for why else would one reach out their herbivore mouth and pull the dog’s tail? Elsie would then wheel and deliver a bombastic lecture of barks and snarls and bared teeth containing every swear-word a dog knows, and the goats would all back away, looking at each other with marveling expressions, apparently very impressed. (But in a strangely pleased, admiring way.)

Watching this strange relationship over fifteen years, and also understanding I was a part of the mix, gave me ample time to reflect upon the strength that comes from differing talents working as a unity. (I could go off on a very long tangent at this point, but just the basics will suffice).

Dogs have amazing noses. They can literally “see” who passed over a patch of earth, and gauge how recently. Only when there has been a thin fall of powder snow can we see the footprints, and get a small idea of the newspaper they are reading when they snuffle over a patch of earth. But furthermore, they read moods. An angry man can falsify a smile all he wants, but if he approaches a child a dog has custody of, the dog bares its teeth.

Goats have amazing eyes. I’m not sure how their square pupils work, but when my herd stopped and all looked in one direction, I too stopped to see if my dim sight could see what they saw. Often I couldn’t, but when I could it amazed me because the only reason I could see was because brown or rust-red fur clashed with green leaves, and goats are supposedly color blind and shouldn’t be able to see such a clash. On one occasion it was baby foxes playing under a low-hanging branch of a bush, mere tiny red specks in the distance. I never would have seen them, had not the goats alerted me.

Often I was humbled, because I lack an amazing nose or an amazing pair of eyes. What’s amazing about me? Nothing, really, except for the fact I’m in charge. I’m the boss, though the beasts do like to see what they can get away with. And I feed and protect them. When the goats escaped and ate the neighbor’s roses, I was the one who made amends. When the dog was at the police station, I bailed her out, paying the $25.00 fine. I’m not sure how amazing that is, but for fifteen years I was the overseer of something not seen very often in modern suburbs. Just a ripple in the waters of time.

I leaned against the long handle of my shovel to catch my breath. It was just my luck to hit a large stone in the usually stone-free hillside, but I’d finally budged it. I put the little clip on my finger and saw I’d set a personal record. 49%! At the hospital alarms would probably be going off, and nurses would be scurrying, but for a tough old Yankee like me, it just meant I’d huff and puff a little longer.

If I did die, it would be with my boots on, and I preferred that to being in a hospital with a ventilator jammed down my throat. Or to be dying with my pants down. Going to the toilet is stressful, and the night before I’d had the little clip on my finger as I evacuated my bowels, and was surprised to see the stress lowered my 02 levels to 56%. Who wants to die with their pants down when they can die with their boots on? But I was being too morbid, even as I attempted humor. Elsie deserved better.

I trimmed the edges of the hole, and the grave was done. I was exhausted. I decided I needed a strong coffee before the burial, and headed down the hill to the coffee pot and my armchair by the fire. I couldn’t resist checking the news, and as usual it was abysmal. Terrorists beheading children, and so on. It occurred to me that, while some wonder if dogs have souls, the question should now be whether humans have them.

In this fouled world, not worth the cheap tintype
It's minted from, the death of a dear old dog
Deserves some blink. Maybe not tears to wipe
And hide from reluctant lashes, nor fog
On the teeth of dawn, but at least a pause
In the never-ending yammer. We're made cold as ice
By the symptoms of survival; the cause
Of cold is its continuation. A nice
Sunbeam might warm, but warming makes no sense
In this gyre with no heart. A black hole cores
Our galaxy. Who in their right mind repents
The death of a dog? It's low spirit soars
While where can we claim our high spirits go?
A dog's death reminds the highest they're low.

The strong coffee must have included too much cream, for I nodded off in my armchair, drifting off into a strange reverie wherein I thought I should have been born a Buddhist. They believe the one life we live is far longer than the three score and ten years allotted by orthodox Christians, and in fact that single “life” included numerous, (perhaps millions), of incarnations, including animal incarnations before we achieved “God’s own image” status as humans.

Therefore dogs do have souls, striving to become human. Humans, however, fail to grasp what Creation is for, and all too often strive to be dogs. Rather than seeking their birthright, and becoming children of God, they backslide, so addicted to Creation they prefer it to their Creator.

Therefore dogs are, in a sense, superior to humans, for they are striving towards God, whereas humans are lollygagging about, treading water at best and devolving at worst. And if you doubt this, ask yourself this question, which I ask myself: Given the choice, would you rather study scripture or watch men run about in shorts bouncing a ball and shooting it through a hoop? For most of my life, given the choice of watching a basketball game or attending a Bible study, I confess basketball would have won every time.

An odd thought occurred to me as I drifted into dreaminess. It was that, whereas physical, Darwinian evolution forces each step to closely resemble the gradation that preceded it, spiritual evolution might escape such limitations, and beasts might reincarnate as whatever seemed most interesting, and therefore Elsie might reincarnate as a rabbit, or even a goat.

Abruptly I woke with a jolt. I glanced anxiously at the window, afraid it would again be dark, but was glad to see it was still golden. I then lurched my aching body to my feet and headed out to bury the dog.

It was a strange afternoon for late November, especially after so much wet weather. The approaching cold front wasn’t just ramming into our local, sodden air, but had peeled a ribbon of very dry air from some place out west, either the deserts of Arizona or the Chinooks of Alberta, and this air was so very dry the wet leaves swiftly dried and began to stir and then to rush about my feet. I thought at one point they might fill the grave, but they didn’t. I again thanked Elsie for getting me out to see weather I otherwise would have missed.

How often she did that. Too often I grumbled. But the dog dragged me out, and how many sunrises did I see and how many bird songs did I hear? How much weather did I sniff even as she sniffed? I recall at least two rainbows I would have been oblivious to, plus night owls that hooted and packs of coyotes that yipped, and much more. (Not to mention that I often needed the exercise).

As I lifted Elsie from the back of the Jeep I was afraid she’d be heavy. Towards her end she couldn’t leap into the passenger seat of the Jeep any more, and I’d had to hoist her bulk. But she hadn’t eaten much towards her end, and was surprisingly light. Rigor mortis made her stiff as a board, but fortunately she was in a position of rest, and fit in the hole I had dug. I stood a while trying to think of some profound eulogy, but couldn’t think of much beyond, “Good dog.” Then I covered her with an old sheet my wife donated, and filled in the hole.

And that was that. I knew it was inadequate, but I suppose we always must be inadequate, when trying to thank something as huge and beautiful as life. But at least I hadn’t “disposed” of her.

Next I had to attend to a hoard of grandchildren arriving for Thanksgiving, and how we were going to maneuver a mother-in-law with dementia through the event. I figured the dog was done with, but she wasn’t. As many old country songs croon, to fill the hole of a grave does not fill the hole in your heart.

In a fall already full of losses
My old dog died. The children felt the space
On Thanksgiving, yet bore their small crosses
But a moment before filling the place
With fresh glee. The sweet stampeding patter
of small feet; the abrupt outrage over
The ownership of a toy: a matter
just as abruptly forgotten; a blur
Of feeding, dishes, diapers, wiped quite clean
The slate of my mind from all morbid thought
Until with shrill goodbyes they left. I had seen
Such chaos that to step in a hushed house ought
Be welcoming, and yet I bit my lip.
No dog's tail greeted me with "tip-tip-tip."