Hurrican't Season

Nothing, in my opinion, is more regal, more poignantly glorious than the onset of Autumn. As late summer fades, shadows lengthen, cobwebs cover the boxwoods and drape the herbaceous borders of our property. The dogwood berries bronze in the westering sunlight and school buses and fussy knots of school children fill the leafy avenues of my quiet neighborhood. 

As I begin planning my Autumnal house decorations, the evenings get longer and cooler, mosquitoes die, the grass starts browning and it will soon be time to rake the leaves. Football begins in earnest, chili simmers on our stove. I find it delightful. As Keats so elegantly put it, Autumn is a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", at least until a hurricane, like a belligerent drunk at a garden party, ruins the mood.

The giant tropical storms crash through the state regularly at this time of year; rogue meteorological elephants stomping around the beaches and piedmont, sometimes even reaching the mountain ranges, delivering high winds and whole feet of rain. Hurricanes also tend to drag with them the steamy alligator swamp weather of their southern Atlantic origins. Mid-September ought to be dry, mildly summery, lovely for strolling in the long descent into twilight. It ought not to be 89° Fahrenheit with ten inches of rain flooding the storm drain systems and with the threat of falling trees killing electrical transformers and dropping power lines. And yet, that’s exactly what hurricanes do. I cannot think of anything more antithetical to the Fall mood.

Last year, my good friend's daughter was set to be married in mid-October. A few days before the weekend of the blessed event, forecast models began predicting a storm headed directly for our part of the state. When the hurricane landed it brought high winds, swirling tornadoes and arresting amounts of rain. Trees were down all over my friend's woodsy neighborhood. They had to dress and primp without electricity, drive around trying to find a way out of their community that wasn't blocked by trees or service trucks in order to survey the damage at the outdoor wedding site. Luckily it wasn’t that bad.

Everyone who showed up early enough to the scene rolled up their sleeves and lent a hand cleaning up. My friend was so stressed out that he couldn't calm down until the organ started playing. It was a long time after that, that he finally lost the look of someone who had been continuously goosed by a live wire for six months straight. After the happy couple departed for their honeymoon, if anyone even whispered the word ‘hurricane’ within earshot, my friend fell into a kind of hysterical catatonic state and gibbered something about clergy fees and power outages. At several points since, I’ve seen him gaze at the sky with haunted eyes and whisper, “Hurricaaaaannneee’s a’comin’!” in one, long, guttural growl.

Our Louisiana family regularly has to deal with hurricanes. As close to sea level as they are, flooding is a foregone conclusion, as are electrical failures, downed trees and destroyed bridges and roadways. One year as we drove north to help my father who was undergoing serious heart surgery, we spent much of our trip getting updates about how badly the Bayou State had been hit. Within a few days of our arrival in Pennsylvania, the same storm threaded its way across the eastern part of the state, forcing me to deal with my father's rapidly flooding cellar, where the excess rain caused his basement wall to actually spray water like a peeing statue in a wealthy widow's garden.

The year before that, we had two tropical storms pass over within two weeks of one another, downing a maple tree in our front yard and leaving much of central North Carolina with significant interruptions in electrical service. Departing early from work due to downed lines, it took myself and a deputy friend about 45 minutes to release an older patron who had been trapped in our elevator. While we worked, the storm dumped a staggering four inches of rain. It would go on to dump eight more inches before it passed on up the coast.

I dread hurricane season. And it's only going to get worse.

As ocean temperatures rise due to all the carbon we are expelling from our vehicles and production plants, the intensity and destructive potential of the storms—and weather generally—will increase. This year, for the first time in over 100 years, a tropical storm hit Los Angeles County, flooding and destroying parts of the city. 

Anomalous storms like Hurricane Katrina, which leveled whole states and forced families to move to other places for years until their towns and cities and homes could be renovated, used to be a once-a-century occurrence. The National Oceanographic and Aeronautic Association (NOAA) is predicting that within the next twenty or thirty years, Katrina-sized hurricanes will be the more commonplace kind. Super storms, exponentially bigger than Katrina, will take the place of hundred-year storms. Imagine category 3 storms like Katrina, but devastating the entire eastern seaboard, from Florida to Maine, or from the Gulf of Mexico to the prairie states and beyond, one after another for the duration of the hurricane season. And that's not even the Big One. The Century Storm will be the weather equivalent of a nuclear attack. A category 5 storm will produce stupifying 157 mile per hour winds and, to quote NOAA again, “catastrophic damage will occur: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and service poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.”

Hurricanes don't just bring huge storms, they also mess with regular air patterns, causing tornadoes, straight-wind shears called derechos, where usually convex wind patterns are driven in a flat line like a herd of buffalo charging across the plains. Huge downpours are also common. I have driven through a derecho (while crossing the Mississippi into Minnesota) and few things I have experienced in a car were more terrifying, including traffic in the Holland Tunnel and other drivers in downtown Reading. Perhaps most deadly, though, is storm surge. Of all hurricanes in the Atlantic, from 1963 to 2012 (again, via NOAA) 49% of deaths were caused by rising tides and surges of water and fully 88% of all hurricane deaths were water related. 

Clean up can cost billions in insurance fees and infrastructure repair. Towns and cities in the direct path of a category five hurricane will be rendered wastelands for years after and if Katrina is anything to go by, the government funded organizations like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers will fail communities both before and after the storm hits.

Human stupidity, as usual, also plays a part in hurricane damage and loss of life. A few years ago, on the last full night of a vacation weekend, Micki and I found out that we had to evacuate due to an incoming storm. As we were leaving super early the next morning, hightailing it to  higher ground, people moseyed on the beach and took pictures of the worsening rip currents as if everything was fine. I wish that this wasn’t the case, but perhaps because this is America, there are always some schmucks with tapioca where their brains should be who decide to wait things out, hoping plywood and sand bags will protect the family home from a storm that resembles a massive food processor made of wind and water and debris from destroyed homes and businesses.

As I write this, I've never been more ready for chilly weather; for the deliciously long slide into winter. Summer has been warm after a milder start and the last few weeks delivered highs of near 100° with soggy humidity for days and days. With school starting back and Labor Day looming, it will soon be that greatest of all seasons and I’m looking forward to it.

Fall in the North Carolina piedmont is epic and often, the bluest skies you've ever seen are on bright, glorious display every day throughout the season. And yet, here comes the first tropical nightmare of the year. In time for the first long weekend of the season, spaghetti models are showing that at least one proposed path of Hurricane Idalia is headed right over my house. Rather than cooler temps, and gently rainy days, I'm going to have a flooded basement and a stress headache, hoping my big oak doesn't choose this year to ruin the street and everything else. I could possibly be okay if we aren't washed away. Even if Idalia degrades before it makes landfall, the wind and water will be intense and possibly damaging. We will lose power for a few days. We always do.

If this is to be the first of several hurricanes (and we're due for a year of multiple storms) I'd just like to go on record and ask for us to be spared, just for this season.

This year, I just don't want any hurricanes. Not one. Keep them. El Niño was supposed to push them all out to sea, but it seems The Boy has dropped the ball. This year, I just can't deal. Please, if there are any weather gods listening, turn this and all further tropical weather back into the Atlantic. Spare Louisiana, Florida and Mexico and the Caribbean and the entire Eastern Seaboard. Spare the whole darn country. Especially, spare my hurricane addled friend who, even now, is beginning to chitter and shake with dreaded expectation.

We really need a break. This year, we really hurrican’t.

The things that (truly) matter

 

I used to like to talk politics—at least when it was a question of policies and principles—but not really anymore. This isn’t so much because there is a lack of policies and principles to talk about, but that most people have abandoned them for various other talking points and ideologies that really are not politics at all. It’s gotten so that, speaking about one thing and another, someone winds up getting really irate about stuff that just doesn’t matter. It signals their participation in distractionary tactics caused by propaganda and the media. It’s especially noticeable when people are still griping about things that aren’t even current anymore: it keeps them from moving with current affairs and thinking rationally. Add to this the many conspiracy theories, moving of goalposts for their own favored politicians, unreasoning support of morally imbecilic candidates (and legislation) and it may seem like Americans have lost our way. 

And these behaviors are pretty much rampant on both sides of the political spectrum, though one side has been made crazy by the craziness of the other side so that it can be hard to tell. The reaction to extremism is almost always more extremism in the opposite direction.

Turning away from politics for public discussion, I have noticed other symptoms of the cultural problems in our nation that show up when discussing other topics and subjects. The inability to change the subject is one of these symptoms. The other is throwing oneself wholeheartedly into just one subject so that it becomes one's entire personality. There’s also a tendency to be so touchy about this preferred topic that it's less of a discussion and more of a lecture, with someone sitting there listening to the tenets and benefits of whatever the other person so loves. It is frankly boring and quite off putting.

People are also really clear about what they don’t like and what they disagree with and they’ll fight about that, too. It’s not just their preferred topic, either. It’s about everything. We can dredge up an entire litany of the things that people are upset about and those things rarely match what actually needs fixing in our nation, but they are up-in-arms, even so. Emotional participation is key, by the way; being upset or angry about something requires less cerebral involvement. All that matters is that we feel angry and we can justify participating in even the most inane ideas.

Righteous anger, especially when aimed in the correct direction, can be a powerful tool. There are things to be angry about, but we mustn’t lose our critical faculties in the process. Politics, religion and other topics that get people ramped up do not require the critical faculties in order to feel like we are participating. We’ve been conditioned by TV news channels and social media to think that, as long as we feel passionately about something, we’re doing all we can. Emotions can also get us being cruel, hateful and even violent towards otherwise harmless people.

We ought to be kind, obey other people’s preferences about pronouns and prefixes and be generally inclusive to people no matter how they look or who they love or which side they vote for. The castigation, verbal and physical abuse, threats, trauma and assault that people have suffered have made them tentative to be open about who they really are. It’s not just for the rest of us to demand kindness and thoughtfulness, but we must also make sure that we are upholding a standard of behavior that reflects acceptance and inclusiveness, both at work and in the rest of our lives. We need to set expectations, too. People have suffered trauma that we don’t know about. It is important to act in such a way that we take that into consideration and, where possible, make an attempt to be accepting of other people. It’s far easier to accept people than to rage against them.

A person’s life is their own. It’s not for us to express what it is about that life that we don’t like. My hope is that if we are accepting and kind it will make people think again about their own approach. Any system of belief that makes us (or requires us) to make a stand against another person’s life is a faulty and failing system. It’s a holdover from our former, primitive, tribalistic ancestors and belongs on the rubbish heap of history. Moreover, deciding that we hate people because of how they vote, how they love, how they live, is a stupid and shameful mindset. We need to focus on the things that actually, truly matter to us.

The things that matter to us; the things that make us who we are, aren’t the things that we are obsessed with. It isn’t the fad diet, football team, political ideology or religious tenets that we profess. No one on their deathbed wants to have had a chance to vote more or watch more cable TV “news” or spend more time on the street corner holding up placards about The End Times. They don’t wish that they had a chance to watch more football with their favorite team. They don’t want the doctor to save them so they can just watch another hour of the televangelist or see the debate. They want to be with their families, with their children, with their parents and they don’t want the TV on or their Facebook open. That's because, when our lives are boiled down, the things that remain are the things that truly matter.

I’m a firm believer that Americans are, right now, burrowing into social media, politics, religion, fad diets, sports, not because those things fill us with actual joy, but because we’re scared. Our nation is going through a pretty heavy, dark time and our natural inclination is to hide from our problems (and our own culpability in those problems) rather than facing them square on, working on them and fixing them. We also—ridiculously—double down on things that challenge our beliefs. It is nearly impossible for us to admit that we were wrong, duped, hoodwinked, led astray. We'd rather lay everything that actually matters to us on the line just to feel justified in an unjustifiable belief.

To actually solve these problems, we’d have to have the maturity to accept accountability, develop skepticism, humility and try to foster acceptance within ourselves. Our obsessive behaviors about religion and politics are not fascinations so much as a reaction to how little control we feel we have.

Even so, our need to feel control, to feel as though our national destiny isn’t in tatters, must not be based on throwing ourselves into these bizarre fascinations. Ignoring the problem, becoming more and more misanthropic, hunching harder over Facebook and cable TV news won’t solve anything. That’s how we got into this mess. Instead, our solution comes from finding the things that actually matter. Regardless of how we worship, how we celebrate politics, how we eat, how we participate in sports or fad diets or social media, we need to focus on who we are as a people outside those things. The corrupting forces, though, have even tried to make those other topics bastions of black-andd-white, zealous thinking. 

Who matters to you? Truly, right now, more than anything? Is it someone you’re not talking to because of personal or political or religious differences? Do those things matter more than your feelings for that person? Isn’t your family member, spouse, child, parent, loved one more important than religion or politics? Do you profess to care about children as a segment of our population? Truly? What’s more important: children’s welfare and safety in our nation or your opinion about a problem that you cannot solve? You can help the kids, but only by putting those other ideas down.

It’s literally this easy. It requires being able to qualify those other beliefs. Many beliefs do not allow partial participation. You cannot love both politics and your neighbor who votes differently from you, but you can love your neighbor and accept that they see things differently and decide that no one really cares what your party affiliation says about it. Heck, it may even be a chance for you to see the world from their eyes. The old Atticus Finch trick. 

At some point—whether it is now, before our nation cracks in two under the strain that authoritarians, crackpots, con artists and thieves have put us under—or after, we will have to pick up the pieces, and try again, either way. I think it will be easier to do now. We just have to try to accept that we, as a species, are all we have and get to the real work of deciding what actually matters to us. We're easily fooled, but as the band The Who said, we have to say, "We won't get fooled again!"

No one is coming to save us from ourselves. It may be that we embark on a new chapter in the coming years, but we can choose to do so as our best selves—with love, humility, kindness, acceptance and a welcoming spirit, or we can decide that our prejudices, our religious beliefs and political opinions are more important than our families, neighbors, communities and our nation.

Sooner or later, perhaps even after it is too late, we’ll have to think about the things that truly matter. 

I hope we don’t wait too long.

Many Things and Few

Rather than a one-subject blog, this week's entry will be a few shorter thoughts on things, generally. Regular drivel to continue next week.

Witness Temper Tampering and TV Addicts

I'm continually perturbed by the fact that the wealthy get away with crimes that lesser folk (like me) would get tossed in a bottomless hole for. Trump is using his own social media platform to tamper with witnesses in his ongoing 2020 election charges and indictments as well as a place to lose his everloving temper about how unfairly he's being treated for trying to steal an election and actually stealing a warehouse full of state secrets (not to mention inciting a riot on federal grounds by a crowd of goons rabid to hang out then vice president by his neck for not helping). SAD!

 

Nothing, yet, has been done to stop this, and because it's his platform, no one will unplug the boss. However, even a mob don would be tossed away until trial for this, so why haven't they pitched Donny into a dark hole? Witness tampering is a federal felony and one that holds heavy consequences. The reason that Don has gotten this far is because he has long avoided consequences and accountability. The other shoe is dropping, now. How about we go the whole way and make an example?

Why? Because he's running for president. It's that simple. He could garner the Republican nomination and until he’s tried (and perhaps even after) it would behoove us to throw all the books at him. That way, if another wannabe comes along (I'm looking at you Florida Man Ron) they don't try this crap again.

The rest of the charges can come and go as the Law deals with them, and hopefully Donny will have his day in court and face the needed accountability as the various juries decide; lord knows there's plenty of evidence mounting against him in this "witch hunt". 

Threatening people is not okay. If he is more sternly dealt with it may make his beloved goons and the TV channels that love him a little more cautious to so overtly support him, but I doubt it. I long for the days when Donny is nothing more than a terrible memory.

Well, I can dream. 

Also, I think I've had enough of whataboutism. Most people who love Donny will not face these substantial charges head on with anything approaching intellectual honesty. Instead they say "what about Biden?" "Something something laptop". They still support a slimeball, even after he tried to wreck our democracy to stay in power and they're worried about a laptop? The ability of the average human to delude themselves is monumental.

As I tell my venerable father nearly every week, we all need to turn off those TV cable news channels and drop most social media platforms. Stop letting paid pundits and trolls tell us how to think. Switch off the TV and switch on the critical faculties. To paraphrase James Carville in 1992, "It's the democracy, stupid".

Beach Goer's Woes

Micki and I spent a restorative and relaxing (and romantic) weekend away at the beach recently. Just the two of us, just our own agreed-upon plans. We had a wonderful time (we always do) and sitting at the beach is about as relaxing as it can get while still maintaining consciousness. But we're used to off-season beachgoing and because Micki teaches school, going mid-Fall semester just wouldn't work this year.

So, we scheduled our getaway for late August—after her summer semester master's degree courses ended, but before she must begin returning to the schoolhouse—and though we got to the beach early each day and had snacks aplenty and beat the crowds, the number of people that eventually showed up and the high temps made it challenging to stay out there.

I don't love crowds at the best of times and working as closely as I do with the public professionally, my tolerance for other humans is usually at low ebb.

Yet, claiming our site early, and having our Shibumi unfurled before others arrived, and gazing at the ocean (and the other non-sea mammals, too) added an air of anonymity and primacy—we were there first! Even so, it was hot. Each day, as the temperature climbed with the sun, we felt caught between staying and getting as much beach time as possible and fending off heat stroke. Nevertheless the little place we stayed at is far enough away from the crowds and secluded enough to make returning there for the evenings quite rejuvenating and peaceful. Having a place to ourselves with no adult children is a wonderfully freeing experience (no offense to those adult children, of course!)

 

Still, in future, give me an October beach week any day (or month). Fewer humans around and way easier temps to deal with is much to be preferred.

Japanese Convulsions

While sitting in my little folding chair in the sand, I finished Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton. The book is an early nineties murder mystery set in the odd realm of Japanese business-is-war philosophy in an era when there was serious fear that the little island empire was taking over America yet again, this time financially. Crichton's book is a wonderful reminder that we only see history from the present and not from the perspective of history itself. Japan did not take over the American economy, as expected, but wound up running ashore on the rocks of their own sense of impervious business Bushido.

 

A worthy read, but I recommend reading it with an awareness that it is now quite dated.

The fascinating part is that, since Commodore Perry opened the island to the world economies in 1853, Japan has had three cultural convulsions; their adaptation to larger 19th century imperialism, their Pacific War in the 1940s and their financial repercussions in the late 1990s. It will be interesting to see how they proceed in the new millennium.

Outdoor Showers 

The one amazing thing about the place we stayed at the beach is the outdoor shower. Stepping out of the back door of the screened-in porch and down some steps, there is a boardwalk that leads to a small cubicle situated by the back corner of the house. Inside, a built-in bench and a few handy hooks and shower caddies belay the simplicity of a nozzle and minimal cold and hot water knobs. 

Being outside while bathing is only daunting based on how close you are to anyone in the immediate proximity. You don’t want the neighbors keeping tabs or being able to overhear your ablutions or joyous chortling. Luckily our little getaway spot has plenty of space all around the shower. Plenty of barriers beyond the confines of the cubicle to make bathers feel more secure.

Sudsing up, even on a hot day in the direct sunshine (though, I suggest twilight as the best time during late summer) is gloriously cooling and refreshing. Except for having to keep my shades on, (and hoping a passing single prop airplane couldn't see my soapy exterior as it flew right over me) having an outdoor wash is so wonderfully cooling. Going back inside afterwards, stepping into lounge clothes, sitting on the screened-in porch with a cool ginger ale renders even the most sultry days tolerable.

Except for a campground shower experience in Wales in '17, the outdoor shower at our recent beach stay is my favorite washing experience. We have begun discussions about this amenity before. There’s no way at our current residence that we could make this work, sadly.  Micki and I have decided that our next home (several years off and in the mountains, not at the beach) will have an outdoor shower. I will model it after the one at this recent beach stay but with a few added conveniences. Built-in shelves for soap and shampoos, a removable nozzle for greater rinsing capacity, a wider and sturdier bench and, of course, waterproof Bluetooth speakers and a cup holder. A towel bar or two would complete the picture (and a caddy for my shades). 

I think the outdoor shower is tied for me with my love of just sitting at the beach and is a nice pairing with the outdoorsy feel of beachgoing. Sadly, the people we rented from are going up on their prices (and no longer allowing dogs) and with a year coming of many travels to visit our expanding family elsewhere in the world, we will probably not be back there again, soon.

 

Coming back to a rain locker located firmly inside is a step down for us and though I love the idea of an outdoor shower, our closeness to neighbors who can be a little too observant, definitely prevents us from rigging up a handy dandy outdoor spot, and might be enough to keep me inside for scrubbing the carcass. 

For now.

Grass grousing

For most of July, we had no rain. My grass needed mowing though, and on a particularly and unseasonably cool weekend in July, I caught up the whole property. It had been so dry that the undergrass (the part under the wetter green stuff) was already brown. For another few weeks, I didn't need to dig out my yard implements (or refill my fuel can) and I enjoyed the midsummer hiatus. Now that storms have started back in a big way, our thirsty yards have once again begun their imitation of Amazonian or Southeast Asian jungles. But now, combined with the heat indexes way up in the upper nineties to low 100s, the likelihood of me getting out there to hack back the green and growing things around the place is as slim as a strand of angel hair pasta and as fat as a Chicago deep-dish pizza. If the heat breaks and it doesn't rain, I can maybe hope to shred down the grass to tolerable levels in the next few weeks. But in the meantime, our yard may become an eyesore, because I resist the notion that the landscape's beauty surmounts the grounds keeper's health.

Gas grousing

Speaking of filling the gas can, for a while now, it has been chic among the unwashed masses to blame the current president for our gas price woes. Little stickers of Biden pointing at the LCD screen at the pump with a bubble saying "I did that" popped up all over. As if in haste to prove the world right in its criticism of Americans as dumb hicks, some mammals thought this was really taking a whack at the president they didn't vote for. I bet that the Great White Father in D.C. is really smarting from that sticker. Good one, Cletus. How often, do you reckon, Joe goes to Sheetz? 

In the meantime, I find it astonishing (bottomless yokel ignorance aside) that we actually tolerate the fuel and gas costs. We queue for miles on July 4th to get gas at $1.76⁶ the gallon, complaining that it's been since the Obama administration (shocked gasping from the peasantry) since gas was that cheap. But Junior and Billy Ray continue to fail to see that the oil companies and rampant speculation are at the root of the cost of fuel, not this or any president. Not only are the fuel companies allowed to gouge us, but so are the companies that own the pumps. I truly wish that Geriatric Joe in D.C. could do something about it, as his predecessors (since Reagan) have not done (including Donny—dry your tears, Clem). I also wish my hayseed brethren would wise up and rise up, not by putting stickers on pumps or even by posting their fuel charges on Facebook (no one uses that platform anymore, Joe Bob) but by calling their Senators and Representatives and bitching to them about it. Put a sticker on their mailboxes and big black SUVs. 

They say all politics is local, well the cost of gas is a political problem at the local and the national level, but in my state and in yours too, I think, all politics is apparently yokel.

The cost of gas is high and if we all sing out, we might be heard. But people will continue to think putting stickers on the pump is the height of cleverness and political action. I bet the companies who printed the stickers really raked in the cash for a while, too. 

Oh Jedediah, the wit.

Insurance Guilt

In July, the county government I work for changed insurance companies. We've been dealing with the transition, but as Americans we expect to pay unpleasant co-pays, because why should necessary and life-saving medicines be reasonably priced? Here in the U.S. we pride ourselves on having to choose between eating and taking our meds and keeping the lights on, right?

For years, I paid a meager but essential four dollars for an inhaler that helps with my asthma. When I ran out, recently, I tried to get a refill and the Pharmacist said that my new insurance wouldn't pay for the original puff meds. So I messaged my doctor (apparently, this is my problem) and told them to go with whatever worked.

Today, my Pharmacist called me to say my Rx was ready and that, thankfully, it was less expensive than my previous copay. I drove up there. It was zero dollars. Zero. I have never not paid for an inhaler (or any med) before. I feel guilty; sheepish. Is this how people in countries that actually care about their citizens and have national healthcare feel? It's awful. I love it. 

Add Dad

Finally, after weeks of putting in the wrong email, I’d like to add Pops (or, as he is alternately known, The Governor, Father, Daddy-o, The Old Man and (by his grandkids) Pop Pop) to my growing list of readers. Approaching his 83rd year, the aged relative stays well up on current events and is always up for a good discussion. I usually call him once a week and our conversations range from family history, to electric vehicles, to car races, to what’s going on in his neck of the woods, to what’s going on in mine, to just about everything else. Anyone who has made it this far will note that I’ve mentioned Pops above, hoping he’d get a kick out of seeing himself referred to in the (for right now) blog with the lowest number of subscribers ever.

His elder sister, my good and deserving aunt (not the one who chews glass bottles with her teeth or turns into a werewolf at the full moon), has said that she wishes I’d compile these weekly articles and essays into a book. Pops concurs. I may. I don’t know how many people would want to read a series of unconnected ramblings, but perhaps it is worth the exercise—just to see if it is doable and for the experience, if nothing else.

Pops worked for years for Metropolitan Edison Company in Reading, served in the Army (mercifully between any significant conflicts) has been a volunteer fireman, a fire policeman (someone who directs traffic to let firetrucks and EMS vehicles into the area of a conflagration) a school bus driver, and sits on the fire company board. He originally wanted to be a history teacher and has kept an eye on that area of world events his whole life. I credit his love of history with my own fascination. Most days, Pops enjoys a much-deserved life of relative leisure (though he still does his own cleaning and chores except most of the grounds keeping) with his best pal, the dog Teddy. His review (Dad’s, not the dog’s) of my most recent essay on walking, was a doozy, including a long text about how he was thrilled that I was writing regularly and was looking forward to wading through the run-on sentences and five dollar words and obscure literary references (that’s my review, not his).

I’m glad to have one more set of eyes on these articles, too. Welcome, Pops.

And you?

Part of the point of this blog is to cultivate a group of readers, but also to engender those readers with the sense that they can and should comment on the blogging platform. Away down at the bottom, there’s a part that asks if you want to comment. Please do. You don’t have to. I don’t need you to, but I’m sure that there are some things that occur to you and I’m happy for you to share them. Heck, I’ll even fix my blog and credit you with the updates if I get something wrong. I’m always ready to think about things from your perspective and we might even have a worthy conversation.

Keep it nice, is all I ask. Leave the vitriol and snark to me (just kidding), but by all means, if you wish to, please check in! You’ll be very welcome.

Walking Blues

For years, I walked to work. Actually, I walked everywhere, but mainly I ambled, strolled, marched, moseyed, sauntered and tramped back and forth to work. I was known for it. People would stop and ask me if I needed a ride in the best weather and others would always comment about me being ‘that guy who walks all the time’ as if this made me akin to some supernatural phenomenon. But it was true. I really was that guy who walked everywhere. For a while, anyway.

When we first moved to our current home, I was thrilled by the idea that I could walk to and from work in just seven minutes. Every day I went up and down the hill. I met nice neighbors, watched the seasons change, experienced the vicissitudes of the weather, from unbearable heat to freezing cold and all the glorious chaos in between. I have been rained on, snowed on, made faint from the sun and burned by the wind. 

It suited me, too. I love being outside. I love to walk. Being close enough to work to use my legs as transit made me feel very outdoorsy and in tune with nature. I loved everything about it. Walking gave me a few extra minutes a day to meditate on the coming or just passed workday. I also listened to a lot of books, spoke with neighbors, met police and EMS and firefighters, city workers and many other walkers and generally became somewhat of a fixture on the leafy streets surrounding our neck of the woods. It’s odd to say, but I had a real sense of ownership with the process.

Part of why I was walking was necessity. Our boys needed the family cars for school and their first jobs and Micki needed our van to commute to her work and help her mom get to appointments and other engagements. Some days I needed our van, but mostly it was me walking and I was okay with that. In fact, I often changed after work and walked to meetings or other events, sometimes accumulating full miles daily during the workweek and even more on the weekends by taking long, leisurely walks with Micki or hiking together and sometimes with friends. I became a demon walker, going everywhere I could on my two legs. I felt great. It was wonderful.

Then the pandemic locked us all down. I was home and so was everyone else. In an effort to maintain distance with our many in-house residents, we started walking longer and longer distances every afternoon. By the time I had to go back to work, we were walking three miles daily. I was in the best shape of my life—fully in mid-season form, as Bertie Wooster would say. We both were. And although this was in the late Spring and the temps were warming up, we were also just happy to be out rambling. Just after that period, though, things started to change.

First, we sold our beloved, heavily used family van and got a compact SUV for Micki to use as her main conveyance. We no longer needed to fit more than four people simultaneously into a vehicle and the long family drives were becoming rare.

Then, when our middle lad moved to Raleigh from a local town, he shed his midsize pickup truck for a small, fuel-efficient two-door car. Not long after that, he and his soon-to-be fiancé started carpooling to work in her larger SUV which was also perfect for hauling around their two larger dogs. When job offers came to him from the western part of the state, he opted to sell his car to his younger brother and share their family car until they got settled in their house. The car the youngest of our three had been using was now free for me to use, since he had his own vehicle from his brother. 

Admittedly, the tale of vehicle use in our family really is a saga, complete with the nebulous details of a coveted piece of ground changing hands during a medieval battle. And yet, now I had a car that I could use regularly but this new freedom came with a curse, as all such freedoms do. Having unfettered access to wheels, I started driving more regularly. Then I started driving all the time. 

For more than a decade, I walked at least 1.5 miles per day. Assuming that I did at least that on weekends, too, I was walking just shy of 550 miles a year. In the roughly ten years that I had been walking to work, give or take a few sick days, vacations, hurricanes and so on, I likely walked over five thousand miles. That’s just a few miles shy of walking the Appalachian Trail twice! That’s a considerable step count.

Suddenly though, and uncharacteristically, I was driving. And I still am. 

Driving has its benefits. Now I could swing by the store on my lunch break or on the way home. I could leave in the middle of the day and run an errand or two, without worrying that I’d be late getting back. I can run to the next town and back in less than an hour. I can jaunt to a doctor’s appointment early, and still get to work on time. But there were downsides, too. Rather than stopping for a brief chat with friendly neighbors on the way to or from work, I toot the car horn as I sweep by. The street that I got to know so well while plodding daily, now zips by barely noticed. I see police and EMS and fire and city workers, but I can’t stop and chat with them. 

It’s true, I save time. I get to leave a few minutes later and still arrive more than early. I can stay right up to the hour accomplishing a few dedicated tasks at the end of the day and still be home only a few minutes past time. I can enjoy the cool of automotive air conditioning on days when the combination of humidity and temperature are enough to make cold-blooded creatures and insects take a moment to ask why they're outside. I stay dryer from rain and sweat, have fewer layers to put on or peel off, less transition between inside and outside temps. I can take a shorter midday lunch and that regularly contributes to a little extra time on Fridays to get home for pizza night.

Walking takes time. The average mile for me, when I was strolling around all the time, was about twenty minutes, which is excellent for someone who isn’t crazy enough to be a jogger. If you have to go more than a mile, you have to plan ahead, leave early, be prepared to get home late and expect a whole host of possible weather outcomes that merely bounce off the windscreen of the car.

On the other hand, I spend more on fuel than ever before. Yes, I don’t drive very far on any given day, but with costs for fuel as high as they have been, it always means a shaky and hoarseness whispered “you’ve got to be shitting me,” when I see the total at the pumps. I’m also contributing negatively to my carbon footprint and adding lots of CO2 to the atmosphere which also makes my skin crawl with guilt and shame. 

Mainly, though, despite the conveniences of a motor vehicle, which are many, I miss being outside. I miss the extra time to ready the brain for another bout in the proverbial salt mines. I miss the gloriously chilly days in Spring and Fall when my cheeks are rosied by the crisp, frosty air. I miss visiting, however briefly, with neighbor friends and other walkers. I miss the burnished, bronze tone my face takes on from exposure to wind, sun, cold nights and brisk mornings. I miss watching the sun progress through its own perambulations as the year fades and waxes anew. 

In the meantime, in order to salvage some of the healthful rewards all that walking gave me, I have taken up walking at the gym. The gym is too far to walk to, so I drive to walk. The irony is thick as cement. 

I put in nine miles a week at the gym. I listen to my audiobooks or watch streaming movies. I nod and smile at the gym folks, but there's no friendship there. Even the people I am friends with who I see regularly at the other treadmills or weight machines want to be left alone and walk or lift in their own private world and, honestly, so do I. Walking on a treadmill is fine. I can simulate walking outdoors with the screen on the machine that will even show an arid landscape, as if I was on the road to Athens with Socrates, if I wanted. It’s not a decent substitute. I get the miles in and I get to feel good and have excellent blood pressure, but I’m not outside, which is where I want to be.

I miss feeling trim, fit, light and flexible, springy, ready for a stroll. I miss bragging to folks that I walk everywhere. I miss walking. It’s that simple. No amount of treadmill miles, no matter how good for my blood pressure, seems to make up for the lack of outdoor time. 

I miss walking.

Perhaps ironically, as I write this, the weather outside is like dog breath. Trees hang limp, humidity and haze obscure the sky, any time spent outdoors leaves one soaked through and sticky. But the days are slowly getting shorter, the shadows lengthening, the heat and humidity are slowly on the wane. A few more weeks and things will be more tolerable, I hope. As we head to the equinox, the days will become more tolerably walkable. I’m holding out for cooler weather, yes, but I’m not going to mince words about it. When the cooler temps happen, I am going to leave the car in the driveway, even in driving rain or pelting hail (anyway, the Scandinavians are famous for saying there is no bad weather, only bad clothes). It will be worth it to get back to walking. And maybe, between the gym and the leg-impelled commute and the subsequent reimersion into the outdoors, I can shake these walking blues.

Trash Talk

A significant part of any consumerist society is waste. We generate a lot of garbage. Not just physical waste, the natural casting off of unusable matter from our digestive and respiratory functions, but actual rubbish. We throw away a lot of trash per day. 

When you stop to think about it—I mean really consider our propensity to generate refuse—the resulting reality can be absolutely staggering. It is a problem with immediate consequences and the human race is ill-prepared to make the requisite changes both in regard to how much trash we produce and how lucrative waste management has become.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the average American adult throws away about five pounds (two kilograms) of trash per day. This includes, but is not limited to wrappers, facial tissue, food packaging and scraps, newspaper, bottles (plastic and glass), paper towels, diapers, toilet tissue, plastic bags, cardboard, household products like toiletry containers, paper and foam food and drinkware, cartons, tea bags and coffee grounds among much, much else.

Keeping with the EPA's averages, then, a household of five, like ours, generates about twenty-five pounds of trash per day. Our garbage pickup is once per week, so every seven days, our family produces about 175 pounds of trash. This is roughly the poundage of a fully-grown adult male. 

That's just on average. Like with all human activities, the averages fluctuate. Throughout the year, our rubbish habits ebb and flow. At Christmas, one of the most wasteful times of the year, our individual average jumps from five pounds to 6.25 pounds per day. For my family, that's about 218 pounds per week. That is—considering I eat a lot during the holidays—a well-fed Dave-made-of-garbage per week going to the landfill just from our address. 

That's a lot of garbage.

Assuming that Asheboro's 2022 census population numbers are accurate, there are about 27,000 people in our small town. That means, all things being equal (and they're not) on average, Asheboroans throw out about 135,000 pounds of trash per day, 945,000 pounds per week and just shy of fifty million pounds per year. Talk about rubbish!

Of course other factors are in play. Asheboro isn't just residences. There are restaurants, businesses, production companies, mills, schools, churches, libraries, funeral homes, tattoo parlors, consignment and antique stores, animal rescue and veterinary resources, doctors offices, dentists, standalone surgery wards, a hospital and several dozen automotive repair shops. All of these businesses produce way more garbage than the average household does. All of it compiles and aside from specialized collection (like for tires, used motor oil, hypodermic needles, unused medicines, narcotics and biohazard waste) it goes to the landfill. Likewise, poverty levels within the community tend to play a role as well. The more money a town generates, the more unhoused people tend to reside there. Surprisingly, poor and homeless people generate far less trash than wealthier people. But it’s not just this simple. It never is.

The more money you make, again, on average, the more you can afford to throw out and be wasteful. Poor populations tend to use way more of what they purchase, resulting in much less waste and garbage overall. Though, garbage does pile up around homeless camps and tent cities, this is because the unhoused don't settle where trash pickup routes are run and the trash trucks won't stop outside of established lines.

Luckily, Asheboroans enjoy trash and recycling pickup that is entirely revenue based. The few dollars we pay per month on our water bill that goes for garbage collection actually allows the roughly 20 million dollars per year to be paid for by citizens. Even so, our landfill is spreading and getting larger and piling higher by quite a lot each day and each week.

There are some ideas about how to curtail waste generation locally, but they are expensive ideas and expensive ideas are usually unpopular. We don't want to think about just how much trash we make, because that constitutes a need for change. But something ought to be done. A high rate of garbage production implies a high rate of carbon emissions, since it takes fuel to destroy, burn and transport trash. Even just the process of decomposition at an average landfill produces enough greenhouse gasses to match a small town, meaning that a town like Asheboro generates twice the greenhouse gasses, because of our landfill.

One idea actually employed by some cities is to have a fine associated with excess garbage production. The more waste a town or city produces, the higher city-charged rates will be. So these towns are charging high waste producers (including residents) higher fees for larger than normal amounts of refuse. This is why it costs $20 to dump a couch or a fridge, but before, people used to get paid to dump metal or white goods. Now, the cities are charging more, forcing residents and companies to think hard about their waste production. In other cases, some towns are paying for trash pickup. If you are an unhoused resident, the litter you bring in will get you money that can be put toward housing vouchers and rent discounts or straight up cash.

All of this considers that the trash we generate all falls within a neatly regulated waste stream from our rubbish bins to the landfill. This is a common but fairly naive perspective. One of the biggest and most pressing environmental issues we deal with as a society is the problem of trash outside the system of collection and management. If you ever drive down the highway and see bags of garbage along the shoulders, you know what I’m referring to. Residents who don't have municipal garbage pickup services included in their city fees—usually those who live too far out in the interior—have to pay exorbitant amounts for trash pickup. Sometimes trash is discarded or just tossed into the wild places or the fringes of highways and other back roads, just to get rid of it.

Off the grid pickup fees can be conditional, and some companies prorate costs by averaging several homes within a given area together. You may be a single individual who only puts out your garbage bin once every two weeks, but your neighbors, who have three children, two dogs, two cats, grandma and Uncle Jimmy, all who stay on the property, may generate three or four times your output. That can drive up the cost of non-municipal waste management. For people on a fixed income, this is deeply expensive to manage.

Households that cannot afford the fees (or who just don't want to deal with garbage pick up at all) find not-so-clever ways to make their garbage someone else's problem. One of the biggest problems in our humble county is litter: people dump incredible amounts of refuse into our two major rivers. Each year, teams of volunteers roam the accessible edges of both the Uwharrie and Deep rivers, dredging up huge piles of garbage. Everything from tossed out furniture to toilets to washers, dryers, vehicles, cast offs from cars and homes located near these waterways makes it to the rivers, jamming them with junk, poisoning fish and wildlife, mucking up parks and ruining the view.

And that's not even close to all. Refuse and residue from regular home and car maintenance, lawn care, owning pets and small livestock, all create residue that washes downstream from our homes into the storm collection systems and into the rivers and streams near us. A strong downpour can propel oil drips on your driveway into the closest river in just a few hours. Pollutants in our water systems not only devastate local fish and wildlife populations, but chemicals from streets, lawns and driveways contaminate lakes that feed the city reservoir system. It clearly behooves us to think before we toss, pour, drip, spray or broadcast.

Cigarette butts are one of the most common and devastatingly deadly bits of garbage you can "flick" into nature. The environmental equivalent of lighting a stick of dynamite and throwing it into your friend's 1,000 gallon aquarium, cigarette filters clog the bottom of rivers and streams. They eke deadly chemicals into the water, while providing a brightly-colored distraction for fish and other aquatic fauna (like turtles) who ingest the recently-smoked butts mistaking them for food. Improperly doused gaspers flung carelessly by campers, hikers, vagrants or from the window of a passing automobile can ignite pine straw and kindle into huge wildfires. They are (the butts, not the wildfires) the most littered item in the world.

As if all this eye-popping, brain hinge-busting data wasn’t bad enough, on the global level, the human propensity to produce garbage is rapidly swallowing our planet whole. Wealthier countries export their garbage to poorer countries in Asia and Africa in a kind of dirty colonialism, spreading the problem around rather than cleaning it up. This is lucrative for waste management companies, who profit by the pound and ton. According to The World Counts.com, we currently need 1.8 Earths (complete, whole planet Earths, including all the space for water and mountains) to contain the waste we are producing annually at the global scale. The counter at this website is racing toward 1.9.

Arresting as this reality may be, our garbage problem doesn’t stop on the surface of the planet. Our immediate orbit is jammed with garbage left over from old satellites, space flight equipment, rocket segments, fuel tanks, nuts, bolts and all kinds of other debris and detritus, forming a kind of floating shield. Space junk, as it is lovingly referred to, is a byproduct of our scientific and technological advancement, certainly. But we’re rapidly creating a chainlink fence of trash in the sky, making launching rockets and other spacebound vehicles a dangerous option. Right now, the risk of hitting space junk during a maneuver (space flight or landing) is about 1:10,000. This is roughly the odds of being injured by a toilet, being born with spina bifida or finding a pearl while shucking a random oyster, but here’s the thing: those odds are rising steadily. Every year, more space junk winds up in orbit, requiring roughly 25 debris-avoidance maneuvers since 1999. Thos odds are way better than getting attacked by a Great White shark (1:3.75 million) or winning an Oscar (1:11,000).

What all this means is probably very clear. Short of packing up the trash and shipping it via rocket into the sun, which might actually be viable, we’re creating a planet of trash. Disease carrying vermin like mice and rats absolutely love garbage, and since our beautiful planet is being covered with junk, it’s only a matter of time before those vermin become more prevalent, dripping with diseases and bacteria, wiping out whole ecosystems as they grow. The garbage we do produce is creating far more greenhouse gasses than we would naturally produce; forget about cow belches, what about shoe boxes, paper plates, the plastic trash bags we use to contain it all? 

Waste, junk, trash, rubbish, garbage, refuse, detritus, litter, scrap, swill, muck, dross, dreck, grot, draff; whatever you call it, whatever you throw away is contributing to a problem that will overflow and collapse into our daily lives. Our means of dealing safely with trash is precariously balanced at the local level, but at the global level, things are not so pristine. We’re in a world of trouble and every time we throw away a bit of plastic wrap, a drinking straw or the cup the cold drink came in, we’re contributing to the devastation of our planet.

We really need to think about how much we throw away.