Category: Current Affairs

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California Drought News: Bishops Call on Faithful to Pray for Rain

With all sorts of bad news about California’s long, long dry spell — flows on the American River will be squeezed down to a relative trickle this week, suburban Sacramento is facing draconian water restrictions — here’s my favorite drought story. The Roman Catholic bishop of Sacramento, who leads the state’s conference of bishops, has issued a call for “people of faith” to ask God to make it rain. (Here’s the post I did on it for the KQED blog earlier today: “As Drought Deepens, Catholic Bishops Say ‘Pray for Rain’ “).

There are no atheists in foxholes, the saying goes, a simple way of communicating the notion that everyone gets religion when their mortal ass is on the line (or they think they’re about to meet their maker). But there are plenty of atheists in droughts, like the person who said to me this evening they can’t believe there’s a god who messes around with the weather. Myself, I don’t scoff at the notion of praying for rain and actually found something moving in some of the language in the bishops’ suggested entreaties to “the Almighty.”

Here’s my favorite, not least because it’s said to have originated in a 1950s volume called “The Rural Life Prayer Book” from the National Catholic Rural Life Conference:

Almighty God, we are in need of rain. We realize now, looking up into the clear, blue sky, what a marvel even the least drop of rain really is. To think that so much water can really fall out of the sky, which now is empty and clear! We place our trust in You. We are sure that You know our needs. But You want us to ask you anyway, to show You that we know we are dependent on you. Look to our dry hills and fields, dear God, and bless them with the living blessing of soft rain. Then the land will rejoice and rivers will sing Your praises, and the hearts of all will be made glad. Amen.

I admit I’m not crazy about the “you want us to ask anyway, to show You that we know we are dependent on you” part of that plea. Assuming we’re not dealing with Zeus and his ilk, what kind of a scheming, manipulative jerk of a god is going to hold back the rain just to maneuver us into begging? (Yeah, I know, scripture is probably chock full of examples of god in his/her various guises acting the jerk.) But what I do like about that prayer is the sense of wonder at nature: “To think that so much water can really fall out of the sky, which is now empty and clear.”

I’m of the mind that help is welcome from whatever quarter it arrives. We have fish runs struggling, pastures withering, farms going fallow, streams dwindling, and forests drying out. Native shamans, do your stuff. Bishops, priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, clerics and monks and religious practitioners of all sorts and stripes — likewise. Let’s clap in the presence of our local kami, Shinto style. Pray, if you’re moved to. Ponder this dry place of ours and all that’s beautiful in it. Then look west, or north, or east, or south — that’s where the rain will be coming from.

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Portrait of a Drought: Folsom Lake

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If you live in California, you’ve been hearing about how dry it is here. Our previous rainy season stopped abruptly just before New Year’s Day 2013. The rains didn’t return this fall, meaning many sites in the state had their lowest recorded precipitation ever. San Francisco, with records dating back to 1849, was one of those places; just 5.59 inches of rain fell during 2013. (The next-lowest total was 8.73 inches, recorded during the severe drought of 1976-77.) San Francisco’s average seasonal rainfall — dated from July 1 through June 30 to take account of the wet season — is about 21 inches. The highest rain total ever: the epic winter of 1861-62, which almost drowned Sacramento: 49.27 inches.

About the wet and dry seasons: Supposing we ever have a “typical” year, storms start arriving from the Pacific in October and keep rolling in through April. Normally, we’ll get breaks between waves of storms that bring lowland rains and huge amounts of snowfall to the Sierra Nevada. Since the state needs water year-round, since so much of it arrives in the form of snow that runs off from the mountains when the weather warms up, since there’s no way of knowing from one year to the next how much rain and snow we’ll get, we live on stored water. We have lots and lots of reservoirs.

And one reservoir that’s getting lots of attention during the current drought is Folsom Lake, on the American River northeast of Sacramento. As California reservoirs go, it’s not one of the biggest — in fact I think it ranks as the tenth largest in storage capacity, with 977,000 acre feet (if you buy the definition that an acre foot can supply about two U.S. households for a year, that’s enough water for roughly 5 million people for a year). The water in the lake is used to generate electricity, for drinking water, and for downstream farms. It’s also supposed to provide flood protection and “recreational opportunities” — swimming, boating, fishing, all those things you can do in a lake that’s in the middle of the hot, dry Sierra foothills.

Right now, Folsom lake is down to about 180,000 acre feet, about 18 percent of capacity. That’s just the sixth time since the reservoir was filled in 1955-56 that the level has fallen below 200,000 acre feet, and it appears to be the lowest the lake has ever been in January, right in the middle of what’s supposed to be the rainy season. And when I say low, I mean low. At capacity, the lake’s surface is 466 feet above sea level; yesterday, the lake level fell below 362 feet.

I drove up yesterday to take a look at the lake, the sand, the rocks, the mud, and the little bit of water that’s still spread out in the lake’s deeper channels. The weather was beautiful. People were out sight-seeing, riding bikes, meditating, even fishing, though one guy told me that when he cast his lures out into the water, they were hitting the bottom. It was pretty hard to imagine that all this was going on 104 feet below the surface of the full reservoir would be. We’ll see how low it goes. Right now, there aren’t any real storms on the horizon.

Here’s the slideshow from yesterday’s trip:

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Scorebook: Oakland 1, Detroit 0

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In just 10 hours or so, the A’s and Tigers will be back on the field, this time in Detroit, to continue their playoff series. It hardly seems possible, because Saturday night’s game in Oakland, the game the A’s won 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth, barely seems over. The epic tension of the game, the pitching, the crazy enthusiasm of the crowd (yeah, the Coliseum looks great with those third-deck tarps taken off and all those seats filled with fans), and the A’s finally breaking through to get a run home. Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say on the matter for now. Here’s Kate’s scorecard for Game 2–Tigers up above, A’s below (click the pages for bigger images).

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Journal of Airline-Seat Photography: Cross-Country Energy Tour

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I flew home from Chicago earlier this week and was glued to the window, taking pictures, as usual. I don’t feel like I’m trying to capture anything particular in the pictures. I’m just observing the flow of the landscape as it slides by seven miles below. Still, you hope something will jump out at you that you didn’t expect–a passing aircraft, maybe, or a glimpse of some remote locale you’ve visited before.

On this week’s flight, the unexpected happened as we flew across western Nevada, just north of Tonopah. My eye had been drawn to light falling on some mountains and dunes, and I took a couple of frames. Taking the camera away and looking down again, I saw a big circular construction on the desert floor with some sort of pillar structure in the middle. I’ve read about massive earth art installations out there, and for a second I wondered whether this was one of those. Then I realized I was looking at a rather exotic solar energy facility: a circular field of mirrors focused on a collecting tower. (Later research showed this to be a facility called Crescent Dunes, a name referring to the dunes just west of the installation.)

Then, looking through pictures of the flight, I realized I had a collection of pictures of latter-day (non-fossil-fuel) power facilities: the nuclear plant in Oregon, Illinois; a hydroelectric facility outside Ogallala, Nebraska; windmills along the Colorado-Nebraska border southwest of the town of Sidney, Nebraska; and Crescent Dunes, just north of Tonopah. Here’s the slideshow (and the map that goes with it).

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Equinox, 1771 Edition

Yesterday was our autumnal equinox (no, I will not surrender my boreal chauvinism to call it “September equinox”). I’ve seen this day from Berkeley’s latitude for decades now, and it never really feels like fall. While the days are getting shorter and the light is slanting in more acutely day by day, it’s the warmest month of the year there, non-fall. The real herald of the seasons in the northern half of California is the arrival of the first substantial rain, and that can happen any time from now through the end of October in what we like to call a “normal” year.

Still, on every equinox, I go through the same exercise in my head of trying to imagine our planet in space, its axis tilted roughly 23 and a half degrees to the plane of our orbit around the sun (I think I have that right). And while I can recite what’s supposed to be happening out there from equinox to solstice to equinox to solstice, I honestly have a hard time wrapping my brain around it (believe me, I have done the kitchen table demonstrations of the axial tilt and how first one pole and hemisphere, then the other are inclined toward the sun (and how the inclination accounts for our terrestrial seasons). And I’ve played those demonstrations out mentally hundreds of times; maybe I have trouble imagining all this happening in 3D or something.

Anyway, it struck me yesterday that it might be amusing to compare how the equinox was defined by, say, Samuel Johnson when he compiled his dictionary in the second half of the 18th century and maybe compare that to some contemporary definition. I looked–by way of Google Books–and I didn’t think it was that amusing. But I found something better: an article on astronomy from the 1771 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And in the course of the long, long recounting of late 18th century astronomical knowledge–hey, they knew a lot back then–I came upon this: “Chapter VIII. The different Lengths of Days and Nights, and Vicissitudes of Seasons, explained.”

The chapter starts:

“The following experiment will give a plain idea of the diurnal and annual motions of the earth together with the different lengths of days and nights and all the beautiful variety of seasons depending on those motions. Take about seven feet of strong wire and bend it into a circular form, as abcd, which being viewed obliquely appears elliptical, Plate XLI fig. 3. Place a lighted candle on a table and having fixed one end of a silk thread K, to the north pole of a small terrestrial globe H, about three inches diameter, cause another person to hold the wire circle so that it may be parallel to the table and as high as the flame of the candle which hould be in or near the centre. …”

Read the whole thing for yourself, or just as much as you can handle, and let me know how you make out causing another person to hold your stiff wire circle. Just for fun, up above is the plate referred to in the suggested experiment, the description of which goes on and on.

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Today, Twelve Years Ago

Borrowing from Michiko Kakutani in this morning’s New York Times:

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theater. … He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall–soon–it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.”

–Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow”

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Road Blog: ‘Bivouac of the Dead’

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We’ve spent the last several days making family visits in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: with Kate’s mom and sister in Monmouth County, N.J., with Kate’s cousin Rose north of Philadelphia. Yesterday, we made a long, looping drive back to New Jersey to the home of one of Kate’s closest high school friends, Lisa. On the way, we stopped in Scranton to visit the cemetery where Kate’s dad, Paul Edward Gallagher, is buried.

We’d visited the place, Cathedral Cemetery, just once before, in the summer of 1995. In the interim, I’ve discovered how difficult it is to find gravesites when you’re not intimately familiar with a cemetery’s layout (or even if you are). When we arrived, the cemetery office was already closed for the day, so we couldn’t get directions to the exact spot. I had a vague image of the part of the cemetery where the Gallaghers are interred, and we drove slowly around the place until I found a spot that looked right. We got out and went walking in different directions to see if we could find the site. I figured we’d never find it. But after looking for 15 or 20 minutes, Kate texted me that she’d found the place.

We went through an exercise I’ve gone through before, trying to note landmarks to remember for the next visit years hence. So: that group of five trees to the east of the site. The bee-hive shrine to the west. The prominent Mullaghy plot next to the Gallaghers. And I took pictures for a visual guide. I’ll look up the place on Google’s satellite maps and put an X on the spot. Assuming there is a next time, I’m sure I’ll feel lost again, at least for a little while.

During our search we also passed a section of the cemetery reserved for veterans’ graves. Civil War veterans and veterans of wars up through Vietnam. The largest group was from that first war, though, and a tablet had been put up with a stanza of a poem, “Bivouac of the Dead,” that reportedly appears at Arlington National Cemetery and many other burial places of Civil War soldiers. It’s by Theodore O’Hara, a Kentuckian who wrote it to honor the state’s dead in the Mexican War. He fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War (click the image below for a larger–readable–version).

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Road Blog: Late Starts, and Walking New York

Advantage to flying east from the western edge of the continent late in the morning: One can enjoy a leisurely morning. Coffee. Walking the dog. Getting the house a little ready for the neighbors (hi, Marie and Steve) who will be looking after things (and the dog) while we’re gone. Finishing packing.

Disadvantage to the late start: You reach your destination pretty late. And even later if your plane is delayed, the way ours was yesterday. We climbed off the jet around 11:45 or so and reached my brother’s place a little after 1 in the morning. The fatigue of the late hour was offset by the exhilaration of finding a parking space within a block of his apartment building near the Brooklyn Bridge.

The late arrival meant we were up until all hours talking with John, my sister-in-law Dawn, nephew Sean, and niece Leah. Then we had a late start this morning (or some of us did–John and Dawn were up pretty early). Eventually, Kate and I went out with Eamon and Sakura (our son and daughter-in-law) and Sean and Leah for lunch, a hike across the Brooklyn Bridge, a visit to the World Trade Center memorial, another hike up to Chinatown for dinner (with John and Dawn), then the eight of us finished with a stroll back to Brooklyn by way of the Manhattan Bridge.

Weather: beautiful. Warm and just enough humidity to remind us what that is without beating us over the head with it. Experiences: wow, were the streets crowded. I need more time to absorb the World Trade Center site. All I can say now is that the site is somber and restrained; that was a pleasant surprise.

Here’s a clutch of pictures from the day:

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‘Conquering Beautiful Stages’

Thirty-nine years ago this week, “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.”

I saw “Man on Wire” a few years ago, then again last night while we were packing for our big trip east. I love Philippe Pettit’s description of his obsession “to conquer beautiful stages.” But there’s something powerfully elegiac here, too, especially in the first three minutes or so of the clip below, a montage of the construction of the World Trade Center (the soundtrack is Michael Nyman, “Fish Beach“).

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Outside Editing Work

So, in a flattering moment a few weeks ago, a radio reporter acquaintance, Julia Scott, asked me to edit a story she was working on, a piece tentatively titled “The Last of the Iron Lungs.” It was about one of the handful of people in the United States, a woman stricken by polio as a child in the 1950s, who was still reliant on one of the old tank respirators. (I say “flattering” because Julia’s an accomplished reporter and I think she could have had any editor she wanted.)

Like most people who grew up during the second half of the Baby Boom—after Salk’s vaccine and later Sabin’s had halted the polio epidemic—I had heard about iron lungs but had only a vague idea of what they were, how they worked, and what role they played in treating the disease or helping patients survive.

My friend Christian Warren, a science historian, helped me with my research. He sent me a couple of articles and pointed me to David Oshinsky’s “Polio: An American Story.” Here’s one thing I picked up in that reading: the story of Fred Snite Jr., infected with the polio virus in his mid-20s while traveling with his very wealthy parents in China in the 1930s. He wound up spending the rest of his life in an iron lung and may have been the first medical technology celebrity–his every move, including his return to the United States, a trip to Lourdes, his marriage and family life (he and his wife had three daughters), visits to Arlington Park racetrack outside Chicago, and his regular attendance at Notre Dame football games was recorded in newsreels and the press.

Anyway, to cut to the chase: Julia’s piece relates the story of Martha Lillard, who lives outside Oklahoma City. We edited the piece on the phone, so I never really only got a sense of how immediate and compelling Martha’s voice and Julia’s storytelling was. Until today, when I heard the finished piece, mixed by KALW’s Chris Hoff, online. Give it a listen: