TWO DEGREES ABOVE ZERO AND SINKING

It's 36º today in Valdez.  ABOVE freezing.

The temp in Valier today (if you include the night as part of the 24 hours) is teetering back and forth between cold 2º fahrenheit and extremely cold -15º.  This will persist for another three days.  The sky is low milk-glass, sifting snow now and then.  Last year this first tongue of polar air came licking down in the first week of December, so it’s early this year but not unfamiliar.   Yet I am never prepared.

In this weather safety and comfort depend upon a lot of small maintenances and observations.  My pickiup won’t start if it’s below ten degrees fahrenheit unless I plug it in for an hour or so.  The windshield will be very hard to scrape if the cold has followed warm weather and then rain which turns to ice and then snow.  Running the motor long enough to melt it off will use up expensive fuel.  

Such an expense doesn’t amount to much for the households with major incomes so in the morning there’s a two-step wave: pickups starting (esp. the big diesel ones) and then a half-hour or so later the actual revving and leaving for work.  Sometimes one sees wives dart out to start the engines for their husbands.  Younger wives wear sweats to bed anyway, so they just throw on a jacket.  Probably the husband is in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt in a house much warmer than mine and full of the swirl of little kids and dogs and pounding music.  

"Old Charlie" froze to death in 1898.  

They took one last photo.

Even the high school students -- the ones with no cars -- will beg for a ride when it’s so cold and the outlying ranch-serving school buses will be carefully maintained and driven, even though these days they are all in communication via radios and so are the kids with their cell phones.  (Kids monitor and critique everything these days.)  Where there’s wireless support, they can do homework (well, the nerds can) on tablets.  Electronics are like automobiles: you need the road. 

The two aging indoor cats demand to go outside, take one whiff of the cold, and back away.  They eat a little more than usual and a little more often.  Smudge, the feral cat, seemed to be missing -- no tracks in the snow except for the plowing of the rambunctious pup from next door and its equally vigorous mother -- but I put her catfood out in the back building anyway so I could close the door and it was mostly gone this morning when I took out breakfast.  I could hear her but not see her until finally her head popped up from the midst of the yard-high tangled pile of windfall branches I keep in case I have to rely on wood heat.  There's a cat hole so she can get in and out of "her" building.
  

Through the piped natural gas supply lines the town must be sucking fuel about as fast as it can travel.  Someone must regulate or at least monitor that -- there’s some kind of building a couple of miles out of town. (I assume because then if it blew up, it wouldn’t take the town with it, the same as the transformers -- which are basically electrical bombs -- are always located away from town if possible.)  In summer the doors of that little building stand open, I assume to let any leaks escape harmlessly.

Today there’s a tiny bit of a breeze to bend the smoke over.  Some people here rely on pellet stoves, which will feed wood automatically, and a few enjoy wood heat esp in the evening, but a fireplace in this country will suck heat out rather than warming the room.  I’m wondering whether I should have invested in a new “tower” infrared heater, now that the prices have come down, but they’ll come down more after Christmas and there will probably be long milder stretches after this. 

These early intrusions of cold air haven’t been around for a few decades -- forty years, say the weather people.  Forty years ago we were just discovering snowmobiles, but they weren’t perfected yet so you couldn’t go out of town unless traveling as a group.  Hopefully one of the drivers would be a decent mechanic.  Our little dog slept on top of the seat.  Otherwise, the sponge rubber was like a cement block.

Snow motorcycle

The most life-threatening situations of my life have been cold-weather related, starting with my family in the Fifties crossing the Dunsmuir Pass one Christmas trip, equally endangered by 18-wheelers jack-knifing and the fragility of the ancient chains on our wheels that broke and flailed the wheel-wells with nerve-fraying rhythm.  Circuit-riding was always risky because it had to happen regularly -- if I canceled, people would stop coming.  But once on the way to do a one-off pulpit supply in Washington State, I ran into weather so bad that I holed up in a low-rate motel for three days, dozing in front of Ted Turner’s TV reruns of Fifties Westerns.  

Here and now I live in an old house because it is cheap and in the center of town because it was built when the town was centered here -- the new, nice, expensive houses are three times as far away but the occupants can all afford dependable transportation.  I’m only a couple of blocks from the post office and the grocery store.  The Senior Citizen lunch program will deliver meals and the library will deliver books.   

People on this street have turned over at least once since I moved here fifteen years ago because they were old and either died or went to protected care.  Until that happens, people watch each other.  If I died, they would notice, probably because the cats would go to their houses to beg for food, or because the newspaper would stop being taken in.  A broken leg might be a little trickier if I couldn’t crawl to the phone.  Maybe the answer is a cell phone but it wouldn’t call emergency.

Why I live in a one-story house.

I skipped the town meeting last night because it was so cold, but also because last week I threw the rock of delinquent tax liens into the frogpond and they might have needed to talk about it without my opinion.  I am finding them defensive: they will need to demonize and stigmatize anyone who is delinquent.  (I’m paid up now.)

The game animals, the ones to eat, not just supplying trophy heads, have been up in the mountains too high to track conveniently.  This storm should push them down, but the bears haven’t had enough to eat yet.  Inevitably, there will be misadventures, partly from danger but more often from human stupidity of guys who over-reach their experience and skill.  Those aren’t usually the ones who eat what they kill, so they’re not as honorable as bears.

How we love the adventure stories about those with the skill, comrades and general vitality to survive dangerous stuff!  It’s Veteran’s Day but PBS is not playing mournful music, but rather telling the stories of survivors and heroes.  (“First SEALs: The Untold Story of the Forging of America’s Most Elite Unit" by Patrick K. O'Donnell)   The town of Butte is in a tizzy over the hometown SEAL who claims he shot Osama bin Laden.  Another SEAL claims the same thing.  These guys come with ego, as though it were a survival belt knife.  But then, we’re talking about Butte, where now the whole town claims they killed Bin Laden.  It makes them feel warmer.

Several times through the day I could hear airplanes at our little airport.  I suppose that in this weather it's safer than driving on the highways.

SATURDAY ON FRIDAY

This is sort of like "breakfast for supper" in that I write posts mostly on the day before you see them.  I put them on line at 10PM every day.  They are supposed to be composed essays a little more than a thousand words long and I mostly stick to that.  There are a lot of little rules in this house or I would slump into cartoon old-age ruled by cats and never get anything done.  Bad enough as it is.

But when a major atypical storm comes through, all my rules are off.  I just hunker down and wait.  It's a good time to question what I'm doing anyway.  This morning we're back to more familiar patterns.  The yards are full of snow rubble and fallen branches,  but the limber new growth has sprung back to upright.  They say a lot of the ripe wheat is flattened.

The mother cat returned for breakfast, which pleased Smudge very much.  The little gray rubs back and forth along the sides of her mother but all it gets her is a bop on the head.  At least they are fed.  I have no idea what the fates of the others might be.

A quick circumambulation of the town reveals cats basking in sunshine all over town, but I don't recognize any of them.  The mountains are white again.  All through the storm I could hear the big planes roar above the clouds, I assume making practice runs from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls.  Today contrails streak the sky.

Not so many limbs came down as might have been expected.  There was no wind -- just slow, heavy snow so what fell was young leafy weighted branches rather than the high bare snags the birds like.

All yesterday morning I spent at a town council meeting where the contract for the winter-proofing plan for the sewage lagoon was being finalized.  It was six pages long with many adjunct forms and agreements for various purposes.  Sub-contractors and a complex of funding, time lines, who does what, access roads, materials storage, and so on.  They exchanged cell phone numbers, vital for men working in outdoors, even though Verizon cells don't work here yet.  ATandT does. They did not exchange email addresses -- too bad there's no directory.  Since access to the lagoon is through the trash roll-off, some new keys will need to be cut .

The project manager is Craig Nowak, a handsome vigorous engineer with a mustache, and the main funding administrator is Rebecca Beard, a slim tall woman with a pale heavy braid, wearing a blue-striped shirt worthy of Glenn Close.  Both from Central Casting for  leaders.  The four other money-minders were small, alert, pretty women with good smiles.  The sub-contractors were big bear-like guys.  Two participants were Skyping through Nowak's laptop so there was no way to tell what they looked like.  

The mayor of Valier and two board members were in attendance, taking careful notes.  During WWI or WWII (I forget which) there was a design problem in one kind of aircraft.  If the plane were shot down, the escape hatch through which the crew were expected to drop with their parachute packs was too small for a man wearing a parachute to squeeze through.  Since the parachutes could not be put on in mid-air, men died.  

We have discovered that the two-foot by two-foot hatch that gives access to the ascending power and water lines for the new water tower is not big enough for a bear-shaped maintenance person to get through conveniently.  Access becomes necessary in winter because the insulation was not adequate so someone has to climb in with a heater.  If that someone were to be shocked or otherwise hurt, getting the person out would be very difficult.

The hatch is close to the ground, which is a mercy, but it is involved in the structural support of the tank so enlarging it is more complex than just making the hole bigger.  The price tag of a fix is $15,000.  The whole approval protocol had been completed -- no one caught it, everyone signed off.  This present expensive lagoon project is also due to the previous work not taking into account the very cold weather typical here.  A high proportion of the cost of these projects is fees for the engineers -- assumed to be experts.  Call the lawyers.

On the national level, all these additional costs count as Gross National Product, as do insurance claims.  According to the crop insurers, the weather changes in the past few years -- no matter whether they count as global warming -- have shifted the hail storms slightly north of Pondera County so that Glacier has been under siege but Pondera -- once it has figured the cost of this snow storm -- seems to have gotten off lightly. Thunderstorms in general haven't hit Valier so often, but neither has there been the stretch of hot weather I was waiting for in order to do some outdoor things.  The potted flowers seem to have survived all around town, maybe because they are up against buildings that hold heat.  Dave's tomatoes and zucchinis were covered, but they're done-for.  The temp was 23º this morning.

Obviously, these stories are all about cycles, including the people.  I've got enough material for my book about Valier.  Here's the tentative outline.  My idea of how to begin at the REAL beginning is to start with tectonic plates.  This means that the basic message of the whole manuscript will be the deep and ancient forces under more superficial recent history, revealed by what happens.

Table of Contents (first cut)

CH. 1:  The formation of North America

CH. 2:   Buffalo people

CH. 3:   Cattle on the prairie: the Conrads

CH. 4:   Belgian grain farmers: Swift Dam, Lake Francis, Pondera Canal Co., Railroad, Ocean ships, world markets

CH. 5:   Cargill

CH. 6:   Small town infrastructure

a.  Piped water

b.  Piped sewer

c.  Electricity, gas, telephone

d.  Electronics

e.  Service area versus city limits

CH. 7:  Social structure

a.  organizations

b.  demographics

CH.8:  Industrialism on the prairie: wind, oil, dams

In the end the message is not necessarily optimistic.  As I write, some grain farmers are spraying their wheat fields with Roundup herbicide in order to force early ripening.  Oil companies are still injecting poisonous water into the underground aquifers.  Chemical fallow fields -- using poison instead of harrowing to get rid of weeds -- are obvious this time of year because the dead fields are gray instead of the burnished gold of wheat stubble.  We may be in a space too small to get out of.