THE TERMINATOR AKA THE GRAY LINE

The Mick watches Finnegan

Since I had taken an antihistamine pill at bedtime, I slept hard.  But I dreamt that I was living in a university town in an apartment on a high floor, very pleasant, but then acquired another small house “on the flats”, from a woman who was an artist and moving somewhere else.  The rest of the dream was about moving my collection of art work from one house to the next as she made wall space by moving out her own paintings.  Both of us had large bright works.

You can analyze and so can I.  Maybe it’s a novel.  As I was drifting off last night I was thinking about animals and insects that move into the structures built by others, like hermit crabs.  (I identify as a hermit.)

I was woken by Finnegan and the Mick, crusted with ice, diving down my neck to get under the covers where it was warm.  The whole outdoors is a white sheet of paper: snow.  Probably gone by the time night comes again.  I had turned on the floor furnace so when I accidentally stepped on the Mick’s paw while trying to get all our breakfasts, she staggered onto the hot grill over the furnace, and after a scream of indignation, she regards me as a great traitor and has reverted to feral.

So the first mark on the paper is a burning indignation and resentment.  Finnegan, however, has no sympathy for his little devoted buddy and leaps into my arms, climbing my shoulder as usual.  By the time I went out to the garage to feed the ferals, I was conditionally forgiven, but was surprised to see that the cat hole in the garage door had been drifted over so that they had had to dig their way out.  They’ve also dug multiple hole entrances under the back shop, acting more like foxes than cats.  Since they are under a floor made of 2X12’s, I can’t get at their nests of kittens.

The Terminator Line

The limber bushes are crushed under the weight of the snow, but the trees were so far barely generating catkins so they are "bearing up".  I hadn’t gotten around to checking the tarp on the garage yesterday as I intended, so it may leak.  Everything is under plastic sheets.  Yesterday had been very pleasant.  Squibbie, who sleeps all day next to the computer like the grannie she is, got a little overheated so I cracked the window.  She rearranged herself to plant her nose in the crack.  

My mother slept like that: warm body, nose out to the weather coming in through her north window.  She didn’t trust electric blankets and, truthfully, in Portland one wasn’t usually necessary.  As a child I would wake to her adjusting our kid-bedroom windows.  They rattled unless they were wedged with half a pinching clothespin.  I'm free-associating.  That's what writers do.

For a few days I’ve been thinking about the line between day and night as it travels around and around the planet.  It is so grown into our cells that we follow the rhythm even when we can’t see it, but I’d forgotten its two exceptionally suggestive names: the terminator and also the gray line.  On this planet the atmosphere fuzzes it up enough to make an ambiguous transitional twilight zone, but on the moon it is sharp.

“A terminator is defined as the locus of points on a Moon or planet where the line through a Sun is tangent.”  I barely remember that a tangent is sort of like a perpendicular except coming out of a circle from the center.  I had not realized that in the polar regions there are times when they are entirely night or entirely day, no line between.

The Terminator not quite touching the South Pole

“The terminator path varies by time of day due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis. The terminator path also varies by time of year due to the revolution of the Earth around the sun: the plane of the terminator is nearly parallel to planes created by lines of longitude during the equinoxes, and at its maximum angle of approximately 23.5 degrees to the equator during the solstices.”

“The terminator moves at approximately 1668 kilometers per hour (1036 miles per hour).”  The fastest airplanes and the satellites can overtake and cross it repeatedly, but at the poles when the planet tips to its extreme, there is no terminator.  “It is possible to walk faster than the terminator at the poles, near to the equinoxes.”  How poetic all this is!  

“Amateur radio operators take advantage of conditions at the terminator (so-called "gray-line" propagation, or "grey-line" to the British) to perform long distance communications. Under good conditions, radio waves can travel along the terminator to antipodal points. This is primarily because the D layer, which absorbs high frequency signals, disappears rapidly on the dark side of the terminator line. This process is known as skywave propagation."

Mimas (left) and the Death Star (destroyed)

“Mimas” is a satellite, a moon, that has two  “terminators”— one for the light from the sun and the other for the reflected light of Saturn, its planet.  The facts get entangled in Greek mythology used as a naming resource.  In this case, Mimas was a giant son of Gaia, one of the seven Titans ruled by Saturn, whose other time was Chronus (Time).  The Wikipedia entry is worth reading.  (Wiki accounts seem to stay sane so long as they aren’t addressing people.)  Some call Mimas the Death Star because it’s about the same size and shape as the totally invented figure in “Star Wars IV: a New Hope.”  Los Angeles writers love their scifi as much as their Joe Campbell.  The satellite showed up in Star Trek as well.

Connectome before and after psilocybin, similar to LSD

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/lsd-research-brain-neuroscience-human-nature-psychedelic?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+CB+header&utm_term=167343&subid=10790770&CMP=ema_565

<sup>Today’s news cycle includes brain scans of people on LSD, which the scientists say show that the drug is able to change the process flow of the neurons.  Ordinarily they are in feedback loops with specific purposes that don’t interact loop-to-loop.  LSD temporarily erases the boundaries to let the loops communicate among themselves, allowing a reconfiguring of the separations.  The obsessions and conflicts disappear, at least for a time, setting the person free.

Now for the poem my subconscious has been working on.</sup>

Time and place are the great terminators.

I walk along the gray line

Looking for you

Hoping to walk faster than regret

So as to overtake the dawn.

Why were we antipodal 

When we seemed to have the radio

Frequency set to survive

International air flights,

But then the D layer

Disappeared in darkness.

Maybe it was the high frequency 

Of cognitive dissonance,

A snowstorm that erased the words.

PROM NIGHT AND THE WATER IS RISING

Front yard  4/26

Back yard  4/26

This morning the cats and I rose to discover that the white stretch limousine parked across the street as part of preparations for prom night in Valier was covered with snow and the trees and bushes everywhere were bowed over with their snow load.  I knew the forecast, had seen the building cloud snow-shelf behind the Rockies, and have lived through many of these Spring monsoon snows, but I was still startled.  It’s not cold and the snow is already melting enough to chute off the trees and roofs.  Soon it will be only ermine trim, like that on the theatrical homemade crowns for the prom King and Queen.  

People who haven’t lived here long will joke about global warming (bring it on!) and the farmers will smile about the moisture.  When I drove to Cut Bank a few days ago in a howling, pounding high wind, there was one section where a newly plowed field was so dry that it was blowing so much dirt across the road that the road was hard to see.  The topsoil of that field is now in Minneapolis.

On the environmental listserv for the organization called the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, a professor has posted a question both ethical and strategic.  She wants to know how to handle the teaching of research and empirically-based thought in general writing courses when the topic is climate change.  Because her community adamantly and sometimes angrily opposes the idea.  

The list, for all its sophistication, calls it “global warming” but it is far more than that when one gets into research about what many people now call "global climate change".  It’s even more than that.  Heat=energy and it is the retention and driving convection of that energy that interacts with geology to create the mammoth planetary currents of air and water through the oceans and across the continents.  You've heard of the Japanese current?

Bangladesh

Coping with the rise in sea level caused by melting of ice at the poles will be major, because humans have always built along waterways and some countries (Bangladesh) will disappear underwater.  Already villages in Alaska have had to move.  Loss of permafrost, the depletion of the glaciers that feed major rivers, general shifting of tornado "alleys" and increased intensity of droughts and hurricanes, deaths of forests, expanding territories for disease and their vectors, extinction of species like polar bears and penguin, loss of fish due to the failure of water column turnover -- it’s enough, as one of the respondents said, “to make semi-grown men cry.”  And that happens.  I’ve seen it.  Of course, grown men and women often fly into a rage when they realize the real nature and dimension of the problem.

ASLE conference panel

The inquiring professor wanted to know how she could keep from being shifted from classification as a dependable teacher to being considered a trouble-making activist and therefore losing her job, as well as short-changing the education of the students.  Those latter may not give up the pursuit of money and refocus on saving the world, but they will be a different kind of voter.  That will make some politicians very angry.

Therefore, I will shield the identity of the professor who said, “If institutional priorities . . . can [make] top-down changes in curriculum occur which would make GW education more than optional, and I don't know what to do about this, particularly in regions where a) the majority culture is skeptical of or indifferent to GW and b) where the institution wants/needs as many enrollees as possible to generate funds, and therefore seeks to exclude all Negativity.

“Your questions bring up lots of other thorny issues, e.g., what channels of future activism can the teacher actually offer the motivated student?  What psychological effect will a continual focus, however realistic, on a problem generating hopelessness have on the person "just starting out" in adulthood (I assume here the "traditional" student)?  As we sing 'roun here, "Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants to die."  For this innerness of global warming awareness I strongly recommend the new book by Steven Pavlos Holmes, exploring personal responses to gw.”   

Steven Pavlos Holmes, Independent Scholar

“Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming” by Steven Pavlos Holmes.  On Amazon for about ten bucks or Kindle.  I ordered a used paperback, my usual standard.  I had thought that this climate change was moving slowly enough that at 75 years old, I would be gone.  I don’t have children.  Now it appears that the beginning has already begun.  Just not this snowstorm, not even this dust storm, and the snowpack on the Rockies is “normal”-and-above for the time period in which we’ve been keeping records.  But there are other things to consider.

An Australian fire whirl

If something drowns Bangladesh, if something forces an Alaskan fishing village to move, if something caves off the sides of mountains and changes the intensity of cyclones in Kansas and turns Australia into a holocaust -- it changes me, too, because everything is connected.  This is grain country and we know that the profit of our grain depends on the world climate -- not just in terms of rain and sun, but also in terms of politics.  What happens to the Ukraine happens to our wheat elevators.   The markets are the same. 

One of the first responses is to compensate by evading expensive regulations, particularly when owners are faraway (not in physical danger) and workers are local (in danger), which is the case with many of the services in our area.

“A Minnesota-based agriculture company was fined $211,000 by federal safety regulators who said Wednesday it had repeatedly failed to ensure workers weren't exposed to grain-dust hazards in Montana.

“CHS Inc. was cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 19 workplace safety violations at grain elevators in Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier. A company spokeswoman said CHS will challenge the violations.

“Three were repeat violations, including failing to test the air quality in work spaces for potentially explosive grain dust, hazardous gases or lack of oxygen, regulators said.

“Dust from grain in elevators is considered highly combustible and can be more explosive than coal dust, Funke said.

“Fourteen of the violations alleged against CHS were classified as serious, meaning there was a substantial probability of a worker death or injury.”

Another consequence is a deepening wedge between two demographics in a state where liberal populations are concentrated in the scenic and university towns and conservative people are spread across the rural landscape.  So there are climate rallies to support clean-energy in 13 communities today: Bigfork, Billings, Bozeman, Columbia Falls, Great Falls, Hamilton, Helena, Kalispell, Lame Deer, Missoula, Pablo, Red Lodge and Whitefish.  NOT Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier.  (The rumor that a coal company arranged for this snowfall is only a bitter joke.)  

From my point of view it's a very interesting development that the Native American people, who have been scorned in small town settings but championed by universities and environmentalists, are now arriving at a position where they can provide payback politically.  Consider the impact on negotiations over irrigation water rights to Birch Creek, which divides Valier from the Blackfeet Reservation.  Consider frakking.  Consider wind farms.

Prom tonight -- then what?

As is often remarked, the only real constant is constant change and as grain farmers know, life is always a trade-off between givens and surprises.  Culture can foster collaborative changes in attitude or it can ignite wars.  Both are happening.  This is not a simple squabble over where to set the planetary thermostat.  

SMALL VILLAGE, BIG SNOW

Today the temp is supposed to rise to 28 degrees (fahrenheit) and the Montana roads map shows clear and "green" all the way to Great Falls, but many of the rez roads are still closed and a formal state of emergency has been declared.  There are a lot of daunting statistics and I haven’t begun to look at the road cams.  One could do as well by looking at a sheet of white paper.  Great Falls gets less snow than we do but they have five times more than usual this winter.  When I was with Bob Scriver in Browning, we used to say that if we could make it to Valier, we could get “out,” meaning to Great Falls to a major airport.  That was in the Sixties when snowmobiles had just been invented and people were giddy with the ability to move around locally -- esp. during calving, which is pretty well along now.

In the cities snow causes traffic snarls, school closing, and mountainous heaps of snow but there’s even more to it out here on the prairie.  We’ve gotten into the habit of driving long distances; delivery systems come in over a hundred miles of highway daily.  The newspaper gets here okay but the delivery person sighs.  I hope my peanut butter (large jars of Adams because of low sugar content, crunchy for, um, texture) made it.  Nevertheless, all the Homeland Security planning and systems are getting a workout which is a good thing.  Heavy machinery is coming from other places, crews are checking homes.  Sometimes the weather is the worst terrorist of all.

There are subtle long term consequences and some violent short term consequences.  After the deep snow of the early Seventies, very like this winter, it was worthwhile to take big earth moving equipment to cut down the Y (2 & 89) where a ten-foot-tall V-plow got trapped and snowed under, marked only by the small round blackened hole in the snow the running motor left when the resourceful driver climbed out the window because his door was wedged shut.  People will die of carbon monoxide if they stay in a buried vehicle with the exhaust plugged.  The Fitzgeralds and their roomer died in a lesser storm than this one when a drift covered the chimney of their house in the Sixties.

On the other side of the ledger, the fortunes of the east side hinge on water and since the previous decade’s drought has been pretty well caught up by now, the recharged ground water will mean wells will be full (the water is much softer now, much less dissolved mineral), the creeks will be full (good for trout), there will be persistent snowbanks (not quite glaciers) in the mountains, and there will be a little more time before the re-allocation of the irrigation source water puts alfalfa growers out of business.  (The Blackfeet Nation is claiming rights to water that they have not exercised since the beginning of the reservation.)  It may change the formal plans of the Pondera Canal Company, which is the linch-pin of the Valier economy though we take it for granted a lot of the time.  In fact, I don’t think we talked about it at our long-range planning meeting.  Nor the wind farm you can see from town.  The red lights on the snow at night must be visible from satellites.

The emotional and social consequences of a winter like this can verge on trauma.  This is not a community of youngsters who see snow translated immediately into skiing.  Rather we are one of those towns where the kids think they need good educations because they intend to leave.  The population in July 2009 was 452, which is a nearly ten-percent drop since I came back in 1999.  The median age is 42.7 years, which is five years older than Montana as a whole, though this is an “old” state. Household income is about $33,000 which is ten thousand dollars lower than the rest of the state.  Estimated per capita income in 2009 was $20,436, but I’m thinking that’s in town.  What is not acknowledged by demographers used to city density back east is that much of the population is in the webs and wagon-spokes of people outside the formal town limits.  Their incomes might not be high, but their assets are formidable.  The town, like the Pondera Canal Company, exists because of them.  Another factor is that as soon as native people see a way to come back, they return in a rush.

Those who are still hearty are generous about digging out the frail.  The EMT’s are heroic in getting to people who need help.  Our streets get cleared with some dependability and the mail gets through.  But in a year that we are snowed in a lot, older people sit by their television, drinking coffee.  Here’s where my snob aspect kicks in:  when I visit such households, they are most often tuned to the right-wing scare monger stations because they identify with older, more conservative values and because they self-identify as Christian.  But those stations provide a steady stream of kidnapping, atrocities, allegations of terrorism, accusations against the president, and predictions of world collapse even as they deny global warming.  Between caffeine and adrenaline -- with no way beyond shoveling the front porch to work it out of their systems -- a little liquid self-medication seems like a good idea.   

I’m a snob because I listen to NPR: classical music, quiet jazz, much analysis of politics but usually in calm voices.  Just the same, maybe because of the left wing, I’m far more aware of what Nassim Taleb calls “fragility in systems.”  Because much of my work is on the internet, I’m far more dependent on systems that are in collapse due to technological shifts:  publishing is rubble, schools are a shambles, churches are winking out, food has been industrialized to the point of poisoning the population.  When I look out at my bermed-in driveway, trudge to the post office with my face burning from the cold, get up in the dark with torrents of wind pounding the house or sheets of snow flapping against the windows, thoughts go wild.  Then it’s better to write than to read or listen to media.

I remember 1972, how Bob Scriver could only get into his house through a tunnel with a garbage can lid for a door to keep dogs out.  On the inside one fell into the shed around the back door.  Dogs played on the roof.  Browning dogs are pretty adapted to this kind of weather: part sled-dog, part-wolf, maybe part bear.  Things are so different with this much snow that the world has a sci-fi feel, like those end-of-the-world movies that are always showing Manhattan, not a little village out on the prairie.  (Though there is one of the latter named Manhattan.)  

That was the winter I could see I’d better leave because as a single woman the only way I could stay was by depending on the kindness of those who knew me.  They didn’t all feel that kindly.  March is the snowiest month of the year.  We can hope that March came in February this year.  Or we can get braced.  No reason we can’t do both.