The greatest contribution you can make is: don’t gather together, don’t cause chaos, the Guangming Daily a Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda rag.

“The way we get ahead of it is, I want people to assume that we’re overreacting because if it looks like you’re overreacting you’re probably doing the right thing,”  Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. 

When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer upon the disbandment of the Pandemic Response Team by John Bolton in 2018.

Are there any nurses or doctors who are able to put in an IV in next half hour? Thank you. A message on the local neighborhood social networking service.

This post is sort of a coronavirus potpourri, starting with the good news. At last, a cold front is moving through California and it is cold and raining outside. I probably wouldn’t want to go out anyway, but, somehow, having to be inside is making this whole thing seem surreal and giving me cabin fever.

There is a voice in me that says: “What if this whole thing is really fake, well, not fake but blown up way out of proportion and I am sheltering in place for no real reason.” The problem is that, if staying away from people is not an overreaction, if there really is a pandemic, if staying at home really will help, then staying away from people will seem like it wasn’t really necessary because the pandemic will not be as powerful. This is called the paradox of preparation according to a Tweet by Chris Hayes.

This is obviously not something that the Trump administration expected, How could they, nobody expected it. They knew it was possible, just not likely, like “This has never happened before.” not likely. So the Trump Administration thought: Let’s save some money, which we can use elsewhere, by getting rid of the U.S. Pandemic Response Team. Which is exactly what they did, in 2018. One thing that I read, probably, twenty years ago is that successful people are gamblers and so are people who are now homeless, the difference in the result is often just a matter of luck. However, people who are responsible for the well being of others are usually not gamblers. Formula One is a large group of gamblers but the people on the F1 Emergency Medical Team are not and they will not let a race start in the fog because the medical helicopters can not fly in the fog. Trump may be gambling that a Global Pandemic won’t happen, just like they are gambling that Global Climate is not real, even Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defence, might not think either is real, but the people in the Pentagon who are responsible for long term planning, especially logistical planning, are basing their planning around Global Climate Change just like the engineers at Ensco or Transocean, who build and maintain oil drilling platforms, are building them high enough to accommodate sea rise.

For me, the biggest anxiety producer is the lack of facts, the uncertainty of the whole thing. We live in San Mateo County near the border to Santa Clara County, that’s close to being at the US epicenter of the pandemic. San Mateo has 64 cases and two deaths while Santa Clara has 138 cases with four deaths but I have no idea how many people have been tested. If one thousand people have been tested because they were out of the country or possibly exposed and only 202 have tested positive that is completely different than 205 people have been tested and 202 are positive. Because we’re still not testing – OK, we are testing on a very limited and selective basis – nobody has any idea of the percentage of positive readings compared to tests taken or percentage of the general population that have the virus.

I’m going to the drugstore today and I wonder how do I treat my prescriptions. I get a bottle of pills in a bag, the person that handed me the bag has handled it – and I get the bag should be disposed of once I get home – but they probably haven’t handled the bottles inside. Still, the pharmacist probably has. However, the pharmacist probably hasn’t touched the pills inside because a machine did the counting. Do I clean the pill jar? What are the chances it is contaminated? And what about a bag of frozen peas? Will the freezer kill the virus? And what about our mail? Will ripping the covers off of the magazines make them safe to read or should I just put them in the recycling?

In the meanwhile, try to stay safe. If you can, go outside alone and listen to the spring birds sing. The world is alive and it is inspiring.

What I find most upsetting about the coronavirus pandemic is the lack of real data put in context. Data that gives me some idea of the severity of the whole thing. Mike Moore, who I’ve written about mostly in the context of his oasis in the Smoke Creek Desert, sent out a link that, in a very passionate way, does exactly that. Dispassionately breaking down the statistics and their inferences and coming to the conclusion that this is a very serious situation. I can not recommend it enough, check it out. https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

During this winter of discontent, if you are looking for a distraction from Biden running the table or COVID-19, or Trump being Trump, may I suggest Drive To Survive on Netflix. Actually, I thought I had pitched Drive To Survive Season One but I can’t find it on my website so I must have decided against recommending it. That’s understandable, it is sort of a behind-the-scenes look at last year’s Formula One season and I am concerned that I like it only because I am so interested in Formula One.

On the other hand, people who don’t follow or even like Formula One seem to like Drive To Survive better than people who do. One reviewer, Jean Henegan, says: I have never watched a single Formula 1 race. In truth, I’ve never watched any auto racing at all. It’s just not how I would choose to spend my time. Which makes it all the more surprising that I absolutely loved the Netflix documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Henegan says that she loved it because: the subjects of the series are professional athletes and/or high ranking businessmen and women. That lends an additional degree of difficulty to the series – aside from a couple of individuals, most everyone here is at the top of their chosen field. There’s nowhere else to go but down…the drivers and teams are shockingly open about their failures in a way I don’t think we would see from a Major League Baseball team or an NFL team. That level of transparency is strangely refreshing to see.

This is not a recap of a season, it is more a series of video portraits; video portraits of some drivers, which is to be expected, but also of their families, and, in addition, several Team Managing Directors – what we would call CEOs – all of whom are fascinating to watch. These are people at the top of their dreams, they all speak English but are a variety of, mostly, Europeans. Listening to the Managing Directors of three top teams – one is Austrian, one is Italian, and one is English – and comparing their management styles to the Managing Directors of the two bottom teams was especially interesting to me. It’s on Netflix, check it out.

Even though we were considerably south of Badwater, we wanted to camp further north to give us a jump on going home the next day. On the way, we stopped at a low spot on the playa that still held some water leftover from the rain, then it on was to Zabriskie Point to play tourist. Zabriskie Point is probably the number one view spot in the Park because it is so close to downtown Death Valley: two hotels, a golf course, a restaurant, and the Park Headquarters. The Inn at Furnace Creek, where Michele and I got married in 1993, is only three miles from Zabriskie and, the sunrise after our wedding, we posed for photographs there so it was fun to see a German couple doing the same thing (although they seemed younger and hipper than I can ever remember being).

Then we drove a couple of miles up the road behind Zebinsky and followed a gravel road up a drainage to the Hole In The Wall where we camped. three miles up a fan behind the hole.

As I’m writing this, the only three people who seem to have a chance to be president are all old, white, and male, coronavirus infections have passed 100,000, and South by Southwest has been Canceled, so writing about Death Valley seems a little strange, frivolous.

The good news is that everybody seems to agree that Bernie Sanders is now classified as a white man; that would not have been the case fifty years ago. But, white man or not, he is still old and almost undoubtedly not going to win. The people in power, the people with money, do not want change that costs them anything and Bernie represents that change, the speed at which they circled the wagons around Biden, at his first sign of life, was truly stunning. David Brooks thinks that this is a good thing and he presents a pretty good case. His core point is that The politics of the last four years have taught us that tens of millions of Americans feel that their institutions have completely failed them. The legitimacy of the whole system is still hanging by a thread. The core truth of a Biden administration would be bring change or reap the whirlwind. I’m not a Biden fan, I didn’t like him when he first ran for president in 1988, but maybe he has been around long enough to fight the system. Maybe.

The consensus, at least among the so-called mainstream media, is that Trump aggravated the problem by taking the coronavirus as a personal affront and he stonewalled it when he first found out about it in January. All he did was pretend that the coronavirus was a hoax. Maybe pretend is the wrong word, he’s old and maybe he just can’t comprehend the reality of what he’s facing. I know that I’m having trouble fathoming it. I read that China has at least 3,015 deaths but I keep reading that the epidemic is slowing down in China and, out of 1,404,000,000 people, 3,015 doesn’t seem so bad. I keep reading that the flue has killed more people this year so how afraid should I be?

South by Southwest has been shut down and the Ferrari team may not be able to leave Italy to go to Australia for the first Formula One race of the year; is that overkill? I don’t know but I do know that Michele and I were going to go to a movie tonight and we decided not to. Last Tuesday, we went out to dinner at Fey, one of our excellent local Chinese restaurants and it was almost empty. Now we are thinking, Why take the risk? No matter how small. Tonight we’re going to stay home and watch Hustlers. Speaking of which, we saw Contagion the other night, and I would heartily recommend it.

val·ley/ˈvalē/noun; 1.a low area of land between hills or mountains, typically with a river or stream flowing through it. Google.

I was going to start this by saying Death Valley is not a valley, it is a graben, but it turns out that, while it is a graben, it also fits the definition for a Valley. Specifically a Rift Valley. The surface of the earth is pulling apart here and the broken pieces – called blocks – of the surface are tilting as they pull apart. The high side of the block gets more weather and erodes faster with the eroded material running down to the low side of the block making it heavier which, like a sea-saw, pushes the high side even higher. The valley part of Death Valley is not from a river eroding a valley like the Nile Valley, it is the low side of the sea-saw being pushed down into the underlying magma.

At Badwater, we are standing at 279 feet below sea level but we are also standing on the surface of about 9,000 feet of fill that has washed down from the mountains, both the Black Mountains behind us and the Panamint Mountains in front with their huge fan-shaped piles of rocks washed down from above. For scale, the mountain directly in front of us, in the top picture, with a sprinkling of snow, is Telescope Peak at 11,049-feet.

JR wanted to see Badwater, which is the lowest place in North America, so we decided to drive down the Badwater Road, check out Badwater and then hike a couple of canyons south of Badwater. This is not an area I know very well; I’ve spent most of my time in the north and western parts of the park but, probably in the early 80s, several of us hiked a number of canyons in the area sort of at random because there was not much information available on wilderness hiking. Now, there are sorts of blogs with dozens of hikes reviewed in detail. We choose Sidewinder Canyon, in the Black Mountains, from a blog by Steve Hall.

This is a different experience for me, I am, by far, the slowest and weakest hiker. Forty years ago, we easily did hikes that are impossible now. Forty years ago, I would have walked to the end of Sidewinder and probably climbed out to catch the view, now I only get halfway up – and, since I didn’t get to the end, I’m not even really sure if I got that far – and the thrill of getting above the canyon and looking down on the immensity of Death Valley is only vicarious.

I did get a sense of the immensity of the Valley when we camped a mile up Queen of Sheba Road which ran up a shallow fan to an old mine (that we didn’t visit).

The next day, we try another Steve Hall hike, this one called Room Canyon but I’m pretty sure that we actually walked up the wrong fan into the wrong drainage. What I like about hiking in this area is the feeling of exploration, the sort of pseudo-adventure of not know what is ahead and being, in that regard, in the wrong canyon is the same as being in the right canyon as far as I am concerned. The journey is the destination in this case. Walking up a fan into a canyon is a pleasure that is hard to explain. We are in this immense space with a zen-like austerity and it is composed of an almost infinite amount of detail.

To be finished….