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An Alleged Field & An Old Field

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Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

I have no apologies. I was a crusader for the development of water. I was the messiah: Floyd Dominy, Former Commissioner the Bureau of Reclamation.

Before Michele got Covid, we planned to go down to Lake Tulare, which used to be part of a vast wetlands fifty miles – plus or minus – north of Bakersfield at the southern end of California’s Great Central Valley. It used to be is the operative phrase here: Lake Tulare started disappearing in the 1880s when the local White farmers started diverting the creeks and rivers feeding the lake. At the time, an estimated – very roughly estimated – 10,000 to 15,000 members of the Tachi Yokut tribe lived around the lake, and, depending on your point of view, they were either driven out or left because the lake was going dry and they couldn’t make a living (I’m going with a combination of both, BTW).

As the lake and wetlands were reduced and the Native Americans left, White farmers turned the former lake area into a farming area. Now, the lake has, at least temporarily, returned – without the accompanying tulle-filled wetlands – flooding the field. Michele suggested I go alone while she was quarantined at home. Ironically, the best place to stay near the lake is the Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino, which is owned by, you guessed it, the Tachi Yokuts. I’m ambivalent on the question of Native Americans being given the right to fleece people by way of reparations for them being cheated by other people. On one hand, we did take their land away and are not going to give it back, so we do owe the Native Americans something, but saying you can have legal gambling seems a little out of left field.

I say that with very little data; I’ve only been in two Native American Casinos, one in Bishop and this one out in the middle of nowhere. The Wanaaha casino in Bishop, owned by the Bishop Paiute Tribe, was almost empty the time I stopped by, and it occurred to me that Bishop is probably not a good place to build a casino. It is out of the way, and there are too many other attractions.

However, It turns out that the middle of nowhere is an excellent place to build a casino. The Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino is a stellar success story; the Tachi Yokuts paid off the original construction loan in seven months and now use the money generated to pay for youth recreation programs, college scholarships, and the construction of homes on newly acquired land. I arrived at twilight, checked into a lovely room, had the worst Manhatten I’ve ever had with a mediocre dinner, and…

I checked out the next morning to look for Lake Tulari.

For years, I have been quoting John McPhee, who quoted geologist Eldridge Moore in Assembling California when he said that California’s Great Central Valley is the largest flat place in North America. I believed Moore, but not as viscerally as I would have liked. After driving around looking for the lake, I now believe it. The farm roads in the area run north-south or east-west as if the lake were not even there, which, of course, it wasn’t when the roads were put in.

When I had checked in the night before, I asked how I could get to Lake Tulari, and one of the young women said to drive to the end of Nineteenth Street, which I did the next morning. That was the first and last time I actually saw the lake. The lake had partially evaporated – but only partially, even in the high temperatures -but was now partially refilling because of the late spring thaw in the Sierras.

I drove around for a while, trying to get a better view of the lake, but I kept running into roadblocks at intersections. This is not an area of family farms or what I think about when I think of family farms; this was an area of corporate farms. When I got up in the early morning, the temperature was in the low 80s; now it was about ten, with the temperature climbing past 90 and scheduled to rise to 115. I drove back to Tachi Reservation for a quick look around…

…and left to drive east to Big Pine through the Sierra foothills, where I surprisingly found an old oilfield being reopened.

It was getting very hot, and several of the roads were still blocked by last winter’s storms and the whole trip was starting to feel like a boondoggle.

A Not So Rando Rant

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Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, U.S. Officials Say Front page headline in the New York Times.

During the United States Civil War, most European countries had observers. Very few European observers thought they were looking at the future; almost all of them thought the Union Army, under General Ulysses Grant, was a primitive – third-world if you will – army that could not compare to proper European armies. They – both the Union and Confederate troops – were not disciplined and couldn’t even stay in formation.

The European observers felt so superior that they did not see the changes in war brought on by the changes in weaponry. When World War I started, they tried to fight it with their tried and true tactics. Tactics developed before the machine gun, and they suffered tremendous casualties. This superiority complex – in terms of everything, including raw intelligence – is a first-world affliction.

The subheading in the NYT article was that American strategists say Ukraine’s troops are too spread out and need to concentrate along the counteroffensive’s main front in the south. That pisses me off; American strategists have no idea what is happening. They have not even been to the theater. These experts have never won a war; hell, their side has had complete air control in every battle in which they have ever fought. Yet, here they are, thousands of miles from the front, telling the Ukrainians how to fight their war.

It’s embarrassing.

Michele Has Covid

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Michele caught Covid about two weeks ago and she is still testing positive, although she hasn’t had a fever for several days. She is tired but doesn’t have the nasty symptoms she had when she first got it. That is mostly, we think, because her doctor put her on Paxlovid almost immediately. Paxlovid doesn’t get rid of Covid but it does get rid of – or, at least, reduce – the Covid symptoms.

As an aside, I’ve been tested or self-tested about four or five times, and I end up staring at the blank test stick, wondering if the slight shadow is a positive result, it isn’t. When Michele tested, the line came up almost immediately, and it was anything but faint. End aside.

We live in a very small house, and, when Michele got sick, we were faced with the problem of her isolation. Michele’s first suggestion was that she stay in her office in the back corner of the house with all the windows open and out two air filters going full blast. About two hours later, she changed her mind and suggested she get a room in a local hotel.

That worked, but we were both not having a good time, so Michele suggested she move back in and I go on a vacation. That was four days ago and I am back home.

Oppenheimer: The Movie

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It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot. Manohla Dargis in the NYT.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer

When I was a child, everybody loved J. Robert Oppenheimer, I won’t say he was a household name, but in our household, it was close. Growing up, people talked about him in the same way they spoke of Einstein. My mother, back before I was old enough to have a say, even had the barber cut my hair “Oppenheimer Style,” so when I went to the movie with Michele, Richard Taylor, and Tracy Grubbs, I was a little surprised that most people don’t know Oppenheimer’s Promethean story. That’s too bad because he is a fascinating, brilliant, and complex man.

Maybe it is an age thing; perhaps it is because my generation grew up crawling under our desks, at least through grammar school, every time the air raid siren, high on a tall pole right in front of the school, went off; or maybe it is just my quirky/perverted personal interest, whatever the reason, I feel like I have known the Atomic Bomb/Oppenheimer story my whole adult life. I admired J. Robert Oppenheimer until I was in my late teens; then, at the end of the 50s, I saw Hiroshima, mon Amour, leading me to read John Hershey’s Hiroshima – voted the greatest piece of American journalism of the 20th century, BTW – and I became aware of the Horror we unleashed on Japan. Unleashed on the whole world, really, and Oppenheimer was the face of that Horror.

I thought that our dropping of The Bomb on Hiroshima was a mistake at best and, by almost any measure, a war crime, and I still feel that way. My parents, my parent’s friends, and any random adult, who lived through World War II, thought I was wrong. They thought the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to get Japan to surrender. So did Oppenheimer, sort of, and for a while.

Oppenheimer, the movie based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is a tour de force as a movie, a stand-alone piece of art. I expected the film to follow the book -which I thought was excellent but not as good as The Making of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes – and it does follow the book but in a Nolandesque sort of way. Oppenheimer is a different art form. Different from the book and almost anything else. Maybe the best description is that Oppenheimer is what used to be called an Art Movie. Except Oppenheimer feels like a summer Blockbuster. It is three hours long, and the experience feels much shorter.

At its core, this is a movie about the rise and fall of a scientific superstar at a time when there were such things, and almost all of it is brilliant people talking. No car chases, just brilliant people talking and a soundtrack – is that the fitting descriptor? – that is like another character (or completely silent).

The movie is filmed both in color and in very contrasty black and white, and counterintuitively the earlier scenes, like Oppenheimer studying physics in England and Germany, are in a deep, rich color, almost like Rembrandt, and the later scenes, Oppenheimer’s downfall, is filmed in black and white. But the movie jumps around in time – duh, it is a Nolan movie, after all – so, as it jumps around in time, the film jumps from color to black and white and back to color. It isn’t very clear at first, but it keeps you involved, and that is part of its power, and you get used to it.

It seems to me that Oppenheimer is not so much an entertainment – although it is very entertaining – as an invitation to think about what we’ve done. The Horror and devastation brought on by the scientists at Los Alamos are never shown, although the scientists’ reaction to it is. Especially Oppenheimer’s reaction and dismay. Toward the end of the movie, there is a scene between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman meeting in the Oval Office in which Oppenheimer says something along the lines of “I have blood on my hands.” Truman dismisses Oppenheimer’s lament, saying, “Nobody will remember that you made the bomb; they’ll remember that Harry Truman ordered it be dropped.”

As Oppenheimer leaves the Oval Office, we overhear Truman saying, ” I don’t want to see that crybaby again.” Both know what they have done, and both are, in a way, ashamed. Whether they should have been ashamed, whether we should have dropped the bomb or not are questions without answers, and Oppenheimer doesn’t try. But it does raise the question.

I walked out of Oppenheimer stunned. If art is supposed to make us think, to ask questions – and I think it does – then Christopher Noland’s Oppenheimer is art, even great art. It is powerful movie-making, the acting is terrific – especially Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. – and I want to see it again, but I didn’t walk out smiling like I did when we saw Barbie.

On Rebuilding A Deck & Other Things

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We are replacing our main deck after about thirty years This is a new milestone for me. Never before have I lived in one place long enough to replace work I’d done earlier. On the other hand, the original deck was installed about thirty years ago, and that is a long time for a wooden deck.

Rebuilding the deck is taking much longer than the original took, and I’m not sure why, but our house is in disarray, and poor Precious Mae is having a hard time adjusting. She has been very disturbed, hiding under the bed while the workers are here and then coming out to survey the change once they leave.

The downside is that the remodel costs a lot of money, and, when we are finished, we are basically back where we started.

For me, the biggest upside was that a lot of the plants that were on the deck have been moved to a small porch off our dining room where hey are much easier to see.

On the other things part of the post, while most of the US is suffering under a heat dome, it has been a coolish summer here. Today it was 81° and the forecast for tomorrow is 79° then 84° on Sunday1., then a cooling spell 77°, 69°, then 72°, 72°, and so on. It sort of feels like we are cheating. The reason, I read, is that the direction the wind is blowing brings up cooler, deeper, water which cools the land next the ocean in our area. This handy map – from NASA, I think – shows that our area of the Pacific is about the only part of the world’s oceans that isn’t hotter than normal.

Speaking of heat, Texas is roasting, and the Texas Legislature and Governor Abbot took the occasion to pass a bill that has overridden local ordinances that required people working outside in the heat to be given water breaks. The article in the paper was one of those articles that I had to read several times, thinking I must be getting it wrong. But I didn’t get it wrong. It seems that eight cities in Texas have laws that require employers who have employees working outside in the heat must have water breaks.

When I worked as a carpenter, I never worked for a company that didn’t let us drink water anytime we wanted. And – see above – it is not as hot here as Texas. I worked in over 100° heat once, and it was miserable, I was sweating so much that my hammer kept slipping out of my hand. I can’t imagine not taking water breaks (including pouring water over our heads). I can’t imagine a company not giving their outside workers water breaks, but, apparently, the Texas lawmakers can.

Still, why make a law like that? Who does it serve? Are there really companies that want to see their employees drop dead from the heat? Are they saying that the electorate likes macho assholes so we’ll raise assholeness to a new level? Or is it just that they like to see people suffer? I have no idea but Jeez, what fucking jerks.

Lastly, I keep reading about vultures hitting giant windmills, and I keep thinking that it can’t be a real problem, vultures have great eyesight, they can see a small bunny from 500 feet in the air. It turns out that they do hit windmills and it is because birds, in this case, vultures have very different eyesight than us. Vultures’ vision field – for lack of a better name – is very wide side to side – close to 180° – but very narrow up and down. So, when they are searching for dinner, they are looking down, and they can’t see anything in front of them just like we can see anything behind us without turning our heads.