Across the Great Divide

Too Bad for America: Plymouth is No. 1 Small City.

When Money magazine published its annual list of Best Places to Live and the No.1 Small City in the whole US of A turned up just miles away, I had to take a photo ride!

I waffle between ridiculing, deconstructing and ignoring these rankings. Bob Collins has already covered the preponderance of bland suburban settlements in this list under the category Surveys That Don't Mean Anything. He lives in Woodbury, and he asked only half seriously: What's Plymouth got that Woodbury doesn't?

The answer is available on the site: Higher income, taxes, home values, math test scores and rates of kids in public schools; lower job growth and reading test scores; worse air quality, more libraries and movie theaters, fewer bars...

Wait. Why am I doing Collins' work for him? Let him demand the recount. This is about honoring the winner.

I regularly bike through No.1 Plymouth, Minnesota, and when I saw the magazine's ludicrously sanitized Ralph Lauren version of the good life in Plymouth, I also considered lampooning all of suburbia and the entire Money methodology.

But after 11 years or so in Golden Valley, I've mellowed on the 'burbs.

True, without real cities nearby, none of the top 10, except for Ft. Collins, Colorado, would amount to much. These places are seriously deficient in public spaces and lack any architectural distinction beyond the private home. If you are seeking a foodstuff, article of clothing, houseware or entertainment experience that is only available in your town, good luck.

Speaking of cultural life, Money cited the Hilde Performance Center and the Fire & Ice Festival as amenities, to which, as a next-door neighbor, I can only say, Wha-a-a-a?

I suspect Plymouth's biggest boost comes from simply being in Minnesota, because of our state's higher than average incomes and below the median cost of living. A relatively prosperous suburb like Plymouth scores a $25k+ family purchasing power premium over the average for the Best Places.

Plymouth has been adding affordable housing, yet when I searched for property foreclosures in this third  largest Twin Cities suburb — I found:

Does that even register? The whole rating system seems flukey. Eden Prairie, MN, was ranked in the top 10 in 2006, and though it looks even better on some scores now, it's No. 40 today. 

Plymouth residents seem to like the schools and not mind sitting next to a four-acre parking lot as they enjoy their Starbuck's. There's a mix of large and small employers representing a variety of industries. You can find plentiful open space, though it's challenging to find any sign of Plymouth's origins back to 1858.

For all its similarity to Anywheresville, Plymouth has plenty of good points. But if it's No. 1, that's too bad for America.

[As always, you can run the slide show manually by clicking for the control panel. Click the Picasa logo in the right corner or double-click the screen, and you can run the slide show larger from the Picasa site.]

Oil Shale and ANWR: Stretching the Truth.

For a brief, shining moment, I overheard John Hinderaker fulminating on The Patriot about the many ways Democrats were plotting to stymie oil exploration and development.

I know how hard it is to be an expert on one thing, so the radio talking heads who act as if they know everything don't get my time. But then Hinderaker claimed that Democrats were preventing oil companies from developing oil shale, as if it were just there for the taking, a point he's also implied in his blog.

In fact, Rocky Mountain shale is believed to contain the equivalent of 2 trillion barrels of oil. Is that a lot? The entire world has used around 1 trillion barrels since oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859. This chart by the Institute for Energy Research shows graphically how America's shale oil reserves compare to other countries' petroleum reserves.

Well, the truth is, no one in America did more for oil shale development and other alternative fuels development than Jimmy Carter and his Synfuels initiaitives. If you want some of the history, and why Carter's investment and tax incentive strategy failed, read here. Basically, Reagan gutted energy research Carter started, including into how to economically convert shale into oil. When the Iranian crisis ended and Saudis flooded the market with cheap oil, Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project in western Colorado, and the industry lost interest in oil shale.

I spent two summers (1967-68) working on drilling rigs mapping the oil shale reserves in Utah and Colorado, including the Piceance Creek basin, the same place where Carter put an experimental conversion facility during his term 10 years later. In 2006, Chevron announced an R&D project to do essentially the same thing more than 25 years after Carter.

Most alternative energy research — and oil shale is an alternative source — has been first stimulated by government subsidies and tax breaks, not industry acting on its own. If those public funds weren't available, the industry basically sat back.

It's not access to oil shale reserves that's the problem., it's access to the oil in the formations. Oil shale has to be dug out, or the oil heated out or otherwise forced out, and no company has yet come up with an economical and environmentally acceptable extraction method. 

What's really prevented the development of oil shale has been low world prices and an industry and federal administrations that favored easy money now versus addressing an inevitability. The reason for delays in tapping oil shale is not even close to the scenario Hinderaker and others are floating. 

And while we're on the subject of GOP misdirection over energy policy, Ollie Ox writes about how much area that itty-bitty 2,000 acres in ANWR actually involves. It's a topic I wrote about back in 2005.

It's sort of like this: If your butt takes a load of birdshot, do you add up the surface area of the pellets or measure the area of the wound?

Pregnancy: Another Meaning for "Country Jam."

Over the years, I got to know some of my brother-in-law's least favorite law enforcement activities during his time in the Mesa County Sheriff's Department. At the top (bottom?) of the list was pulling duty at Country Jam, an annual music festival and camp out held west of my hometown.

Now this information:

[Nurse-Family Partnership supervisor Wanda] Scott said on average the health clinic sees between 25 to 30 pregnancies a month. She says five weeks after the festival that number jumps to almost 80 a month.

The festival ran from June 26-29. Performers included Tim McGraw, Clay Walker and Sugarland.    

"That's our Grand Junction Woodstock," Scott said, referring to the 1969 counterculture rock festival in Bethel, N.Y., featuring such acts as Jimi Hendricks and Janis Joplin.

[...]

Commissioner Janet Rowland said education could help prevent unwanted teen pregnancies but didn't know what else could be done to stop them "short of putting birth control in the water at Country Jam."

Um, that's another reason why you don't want to take lifestyle advice from Rowland. To make any kind of dent at all, you'd have to put "birth control" in the Bud Lite.

 

Eyesore or Inspiration?

I never got around to posting this folly from Colorado that expresses something profound about the west, at least for me.

I love its vernacular meshing of a rail car, recycled bridge section, pioneer cart wheels, storage buildings behind, log cabin carpentry, passive solar heating, observatory and "fuck you if you don't like it" attitude. You could almost install it in the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, except it would lose something in that setting.

And since the residents built this place out in ranch country, they probably wouldn't take kindly to the Minneapolis traffic.

Such freedom of expression needs big spaces, of course. I'd probably have less affection for this or some other  farmyard junkyards I have shown here if they sat 15 feet off my lot line. But much of my acceptance would have to do with whether I knew the owner, and how. I don't believe most things that annoy me were created for that purpose, and so I approach annoyance as an opportunity to learn, preferably, two-way.

It's easy to advocate for freedom of thought and words you don't agree with, to wear flag lapel pins and support the troops from the next county who thought the Army was some kind of patriotic prep school for poor kids. For most of us, coexisting with China is an abstraction.

The best test of values and of tolerance usually occurs right in your own back yard.

A Name for the Times, if Not the Place.

My long shots of Knowles Canyon in the McInnis Wilderness Area don't capture the feeling of the place, so here are some textures from a day's hike instead. It's the last one in Colorado for awhile.

One of the great ironies of life in the west is that a national conservation area can be named for a former Congressman who is a lobbyist for an oil company that wants to drill in sensitive wild areas.

In Congress, Colorado Rep. Scott McInnis ran about a 15% approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters and was a lead sponsor of the Bush Administration's Healthy Forests Initiative. He now represents EnCana Oil & Gas, perhaps the biggest leaseholder in western Colorado and the likely largest driller when the BLM opens up the Roan Plateau, a remote area north of where McInnis and I grew up. (Our families went to the same church in Glenwood Springs.)

The Roan is under management by the Bureau of Land Management, which has plans to permit more than 1,500 wells in the  area. It has thus far rejected plans by the governor and appeals from representatives of both parties to consider the state's plan for phased oil and gas development to protect wildlife. 

The log at the trail head asked for comments and got one scrawled all over the margins about the travesty of naming a wilderness area after someone who was hardly a friend of the wild when he was in office and now gets paid to advocate its development.

But his namesake is also a fitting memorial to an era when black was white, pollution-friendly legislation was called Clear Skies, and Healthy Forests was another name for clear cuts.

Immigrant Climate Change Affects Farm Economy.

A local Colorado corn grower is moving his hybrid seed operation to Nebraska. Instead of employing 150 workers in the summer here, he will grow and harvest corn with a mechanized operation that needs only a dozen laborers. The reason: Colorado's stricter immigration laws.

Since 1958, the company has relied on the seasonal migration of workers. Harris, 55, said he’s being forced to turn his back on the men who have toiled to help build his company because of the “unfriendly climate toward immigrants in Colorado.”

In 2006, the state Legislature approved of penalties for employers hiring illegal immigrants, and since 2001, the federal government has increasingly tightened restrictions on border crossings in the name of homeland security.

Foreign workers deserve more, Harris said.

“They need to be able to participate in the genius of America to help keep this economic engine going,” he said.

No surprise that the Minutemen disagree. So does Colorado's worst legislator.

 

 

Of Fat Tires and Futility.

Yesterday we rode to Fruita for the Fat Tire Festival to watch the "Clunker Crit," a series of round-the-block races on aged and modified bicycles for all ages. Well, not races, exactly. More like self-propelled improvisational chaos on two or three wheels.

An uncharged battery — which I discovered only when trying to shoot the stars machined through the front sprocket of a Western Flyer — means no pics of the event, but photos wouldn't quite capture it anyway. The Crit takes the place of the parade that's part of any small town festival, except this parade changes direction at random intervals, participants may be required to exchange clothing, spectators may be spanked, and the races are handicapped on the fly so anyone trying too hard is guaranteed to lose.

In other words, the Fat Tire Festival is pretty much like any festival would be if it were run by stoners who love their community, drink copious amounts of beer and can ride trails that would cause arrhythmias in most Americans if they were walking.

When I grew up out here, Fruita was a tumbleweed farm and ranch town notable only for its wrestling team. It had so dominated the smaller high school class, it moved up to compete with the big boys, where it remained a force.

Today, the town is a work in progress, which is nevertheless a considerable advance over the old days. Suburban-style housing developments rise on alkali flats across from trailers and tin sheds. A new Walgreen's is going in downtown, but a refurbished brew pub shut down after a couple of tries. One storefront has been spruced up considerably from its days as an antique-cum-junk store, but the new occupant appears to be in the saving souls business, the second such establishment in that block.

Around the corner, the dry cleaners has closed for good, two outfits still bagged inside and all the fixtures left behind by a retiring owner who has no more illusions of a buyer coming along. The future for the sewing and alterations shop next door doesn't look much more hopeful; the proprietor was out having eye surgery.

Festival sponsor Over the Edge — about which I overheard one customer say, "This has got to be the coolest bike shop in the world" — is full of people today, but the cheapest bike with a price tag was on sale for $1899. Mountain biking has put Fruita on the map, but it is the map of Towns Where People Come to Look Without Spending Any Money.

Mingling in the friendly, tattooed and flat-bellied Fat Tire crowd, it was impossible not to harbor a little hope that we'll work our way out of this latest economic mess. How bad can it be if multi-generations can come together to eat ice cream, drink beer and watch renegade silliness on a Saturday afternoon? Perhaps the future does belong to smaller-scale life and counter-cultural, back-country boosterism.

But the ride back and the books awaiting reminded me of a larger landscape. It's the leading western edge of Obama's bitter midwest, a dry husk place where even the cheap suburban houses will never sprout, a place the kids with even half a mind will desert, not necessarily for anything better but for some place, any place, no so obviously on its last legs.

On the western slope, we're much better off than the High Plains towns on the other side of the state depicted in the recently published West of Last Chance, by Kent Haruf and Peter Brown. A week ago, the town of Ordway was nearly decimated by a wildfire that authorities said escalated because of high winds and dried-out farm fields fallowed because the owners could do better selling their water to flush city toilets than to irrigate their land.

Obama got in trouble for speaking a small truth about these places while trying to avoid the much larger one about the country. As Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, put it in a recent essay, "The Audacity of Depression":

And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

[...]

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign "plans for change." 

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

Okay, now I'm depressed. So today, it's read first, then bike.

 

Where is This Place?

Besides my sister's house, I've only been in two other places in our neighborhood just south of Grand Junction near the east entrance to the Colorado National Monument. Both have stuffed mountain lions.

So far, I know half of us are unusual. I just need a bigger sample to figure out which half.

I got the question about some photos, where is this place? Where is easy. It's what I still need to work out.

Earth to Blog.

Went for a hike with an long-lost friend, across several canyons overlooking the Grand Valley. Blogging takes a back seat at times like this.

Bob Schaffer: Running Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

I missed Vice President Dick Cheney's cannonball run into Grand Junction on Thursday. Since he was appearing at a private fund raiser in a home selected for its proximity to the airport — the hosts were not active political donors — I had no chance of seeing the V.P. except through the dark glass of a moving Suburban.

Which is how the kids of Holy Family Catholic School got to see him — twice. His motorcade went past the school, and Cheney apparently enjoyed the kids lining his route so much, he requested they also be out there for his return. After all, how often do young people get to experience history in the making?

The beneficiary of Cheney's visit is former Colorado Congressman Bob Schaffer, the sort of low-watt legislator who would make Minnesota's conservative contingent squirm with excitement. (He was succeeded by Marilyn Musgrave, Colorado's Michele Bachmann.) Schaffer is running against Democrat Mark Udall to replace retiring Senator Wayne Allard, about whom the best that can be said is he will depart without leaving a trace — including the trail of slime leading back to so many western districts of other retiring Republicans.

Schaffer term-limited himself out of the House, before realizing that seniority was actually helpful in getting things done for his district and that accepting a junket to the Marianas Islands organized by Jack Abramoff was a bad idea. The trip he and his wife took — and his subsequent involvement in island politics — had nothing to do with Abramoff's quashing labor reforms there, of course. He recently tried floating the idea that the island haven for garment sweatshops might inform U.S. guest worker policies.

Schaffer now says he went under the auspices of the Traditional Values Coalition, as if that made it better, to do fact finding in connection with his duties on the House Natural Resources and Education and the Workforce committees. As for Abramoff: "I've never met him."

Perhaps Schaffer will take the campaign opportunity to explain how his Colorado constituents benefited from his visit to a tiny protectorate with only a two-year trade school and no natural resources except the Pacific Ocean.