Across the Great Divide

Crying Infant. Frantic Mother. A Wall. And Well-Meaning People Watch.

Susan heard the duckling first, its insistent peep answered by the mother's squawk. It came from a containment pond next to a row of townhouses bordering a park where we walk.

The pond drains a nearby wetland. When the aerator is working, the water is reasonably clear, and even in its stagnant condition (the aerator is clogged with muck) the pond supports a sizable population of goldfish over the winter. A salad-plate-sized turtle lazed in the murk. And an abandoned Mongoose bicycle lay just under the surface near the inlet.

But it's no place for ducklings. 

There's no vegetation or shoreline around the edges. The water's surface is about four feet below the top of a sheer block wall topped with hostas. Once in, there is no way out for a creature that can't fly or swim a long distance under water.

The duckling swims along the edge, peeping like an Easter chick. The wary mother watches from the edge of the park. Sometimes it flutters into the pond to swim with its baby. Or it stands on the other side of the chainlink fence, designed to keep people from tumbling into the water, and calls to its offspring, which darts toward the sound of her voice but can't reach her.

Susan came home and said, do you want to save a baby duckling?

Maybe in another mood, a time immersed in book writing, I might have grumbled enough to warn her off without actually saying no. But lately, I seem to have a taste for saving something less than the entire world, so I immediately say yes.

We assemble an armamentum of duck-saving equipment. A fishing net, a long grabber designed to lift books off high shelves, a long-armed roof rake, line and a hanging basket that might serve as a seine. Once we get there and can better assess the situation, we make additional trips back to the house for more stuff.

My barrier fence climbing skills are not what they used to be. I'm less flexible, lack upper-body strength, and my water shoes' wide, hard toes don't allow me a purchase. The prospect also of tumbling into the gross soup if I go over the fence discourages too-vigorous efforts. 

Susan helps unsnag my shorts as I attend to protecting their contents.

Ducklings do not come when you call them, unless you are the mother. But this one is very busy circling the pond, as if some new opening in the cliff face might have materialized.

Lying atop the wall gives me little chance at reaching the duckling unless it is right next to the blocks, so I lower myself to the concrete drain that sticks about six inches above the surface. As long as it's dry, I can perch on its curved surface, still and heron-like, awaiting my prey to come near.

With the landing net lashed to the book-picker, I have a larger sweep of the water. Snatching the duckling off the surface seems unlikely. The angle of the net is wrong and a swing and a miss might traumatize the bird so it avoid my station. The best approach seems to be to submerge the net and wait for the duckling to swim within its circumference.

Meanwhile, the two guys who own the townhouse next to the pond come out to see who is thrashing around outside their window. They bring out some bread to lure the ducks our way. Mother and child are not enthusiastic, though they will nibble at bits they encounter. We consider and reject a lattice they have in their garage as a potential way to climb out.

We get a history of the pond and how the homeowners association contracts with a private company to maintain it. Its sorry condition is due to the contractor's slow response this spring. 

I have three tantalizingly close calls when the duckling comes almost within range. The sunken bicycle complicates my underwater movements. If the duckling starts right and then comes closer left, I have to guide the net past unseen handlebars and cables before I can reposition it.

The duckling (now called Little Buddy) is wary but not afraid.  Twice I make an attempt when it swims over the top of the net. But the water resistance is surprising, and, coupled with bits of algae and the length of the pole, it creates too much of a disturbance so the duckling darts off before I can capture it.

Susan makes a few more trips, returning with duct tape and a step stool to make the various trips across the fence slightly less perilous. She goes in search of some waders or perhaps a kayak, but the best she can find are some rubber boots that would immediately fill with water. More than once, I weigh the possibility of going in after the speedy duckling. The water doesn't seem more than three feet deep, but the bottom and its composition are invisible. I can't have tetanus shots, so the risk of finding a wound and an infection in that nasty, littered water seems too great.

The mother duck has returned to the pond and ushers her baby around and away from me. At one point, they crawl up on the dead aerator and snuggle. I net the turtle just for some sense of accomplishment and Susan takes it to the wetland without walls.

She decides to call the city of Crystal, just to see if they have an animal welfare department. After a few calls, she learns the Parks people have already left for the day, but she's put through to the city dispatcher and explains what's going on.

Meanwhile, I go home and clear off a shelf in the garage and bring back a long 1x8 board that I figure might be lowered from the block wall to the submerged bike, forming a ramp to freedom. When I return, there are four police squad cars at the pond. The supervisor pulls away, but three others stay to try versions of what we'd already attempted.

The board looks like it will work. I can rest it on the deflated tire sticking a few inches out of the water. Adjusting it so the end touches the surface leaves just enough to rest atop the wall. We decide to give the ducks some peace and trust that the mother will figure it out. Before taking Little Buddy back to the aerator, she swims past the board and seems to examine it.

The sergeant on duty says he'll monitor things, and if the ducks get out, he'll bring our board back to the house. Susan gets curious later in the day and bikes past the pond. Little Buddy is settled on the aerator between its mother's feet.

We give it the night.

The next day, we purposely take our dog walk in the opposite direction. Later, we have errands to run, so we decide to drive past the pond.

We can see the exit board still solidly in place. We have to get out to look for the ducks. The mother is sitting on the aerator, but without Little Buddy. 

The goldfish roil the middle in their tangerine school. Little Buddy's yellow and black is hard to spot close the beige blocks of its prison. So we scan the perimeter twice. Nothing.

Until we see the downy feathers skimming the surface near a floating water bottle. 

We had worried about starvation in those stagnant waters but not this, not some owl or hawk spotting unprotected prey.

There's always a little sadness at the death of a blameless creature, but this was a kick in the gut. We'd spent hours trying to save Little Buddy, to help its mother save her lone duckling. We cared about this one vulnerable life that had nothing to do with ours. 

Maybe if we'd called someone else or worked harder at finding a kayak or braved potential staph. It was not enough.

The lone mother and lost child and ineffectual response seems like a metaphor for these days and their grinding futility.

Now, if I was a man who didn't want to put himself out, I could rationalize that predators have to eat, too. That's true, and maybe that will make me feel better tomorrow. But not today.

 

A Lenten Walk with Rabbits.

The dog, who has scorned fetching the newspaper until the sun breaks over the mammillated hill, breaks fast this morning and we continue toward the trail.

A snakeskin tread runs plain through the sand. A sign my neighbor is riding before work.

We hit the wash. A fresh splash thrown up on the rocks, too high for the steam to have done on its own.

The tread resumes and I think we might meet on his return.

But one small paw print crosses over and suddenly there is nothing to track. The sand a muddle. In a sweep of foot and rolling fur, coyotes have covered his escape.

The dog knows where to go. Up-canyon were the coyotes den.

The rubber tire snake is back. 

As we ascend, the track turns old. Now I see another hiker's mark in the cold mud. A sliding Sisyphus in LL Beans has clodhopped craters, days old now and concrete. 

A shard of cloudy church glass ice fills a shaded hole. Today may be its last unbroken.

Why did you keep climbing? To reach the top of the mountain? There's nothing there but another mountain. All will still be there when it's dry.

We turn at the accustomed place, a rock ledge good for pissing.

I have been watching the scat all the way up and mean to examine it on our descent.

Winter's mince pies of fallen quince and crab apple and rotten prickly pear alternate with grey poop, some like dryer lint but also plugs of high-caliber wadding.

Soon, no more vegan coyotes. The rabbits mill in the greasewood, tourists pretending to make up their minds.

On the way up I had my eye on a red conglomeration studded with what might have been juniper berries still blue, but the dog was too eager on the downhill and I did not want to hold her back.

We cross the stream again. The dog drinks coyote water but has a pointer's indifference toward chasing the rabbits. 

Given the choice, perhaps the coyotes would prefer Taste of the Wild.

 

 

"Natural Climate Change" is Cold Comfort.

Memory is unreliable and historical records provide an incomplete picture, so it's possible the valley I grew up in was not all that warmer than the one I walked through today. I know I didn't own a proper winter coat then, but I was also tougher, perhaps, and went more places in a car.

Still, there's no question the air quality in this high desert town is worse and the inversion phenomenon that traps bitter cold for weeks at a time seems to have worsened, too.

And we know why.

The particular shape of the valley combines with snow cover and weather systems to trap frigid air. Pollutants don't rise, forming a cloud that blocks sun from melting the snow and warming the earth.

Since Jan. 18, air quality in low-lying areas of Grand Junction has been worse than Denver’s, a metropolitan center of 2.6 million people. For that matter, the amount of fine particulates — a mix of acids like nitrates and sulfates, organic chemicals, metals, soil and dust particles — trapped above the valley are more concentrated here than in any other city in Colorado.

...

[T]he pollution measuring less than 2.5 micrometers — which creates the health risks — is caused by any number of combustion sources. Smoke from wood-burning stoves and vehicle exhaust make up most of it. Other factors include the use of hot water heaters, industrial pollution, the effects of drilling and dust from dirt roads.

To climate change deniers, the cold provides an occasion to make gleeful comments about global warming. Others, whose denial has begun to be penetrated by science, have shifted to "yeah, but climate always changes. It's not my fault!"

And since climate changes, we have the earth's permission to go on doing what we've been doing. We press on with "reducing our dependence on foreign oil" without really addressing the dependence part. Another way to say it is, we're committed to using up our domestic energy supplies sooner rather than later.

No one can live in this valley and deny the massive changes that have taken place on earth or fail to see the relatively little say any puny creatures have had in the matter. But neither can they bundle up in an extra layer, watch their heating bill climb, and breathe lousy air, while believing mankind's fate is out of their hands.

Righteous Hiker Meets Trespassing Four-Wheeler.

Less than a mile from our house sit a few hundred acres of empty private land. It's unfenced and unposted and apparently—except for its future value as desert home sites—unloved by the people who own it.

But others do. It attracts dog walkers by day, underage partiers by night, and according to the season,  occasional cross-country skiers, mountain bikers and four-wheelers who find this a convenient playground, though far inferior to public lands farther from town.

In fact, we have better trails out our back door, but lately our dog has wanted to walk in this direction and, permissive father that I am, I let her pick the route.

Today, Roxy spotted a man in blaze orange walking his Shiba Inu across the road from the paved trail where we were walking, so I let her cross and we made our way along the maze of double track the four-wheelers have made through the snow. I know from biking here the ground shifts from a soft red sand to a sticky gumbo—each nearly impassible in their own way and therefore irresistible to a guy with a 4X4.

It's not my property and thus none of my business who else is using the land, but it does grate me when I come upon a hidden bowl where four-wheelers have been spinning circles and unsuccessfully trying to climb one of the hills. Elsewhere their driving has simply packed the snow, but here they've churned up the ground enough that the crust had melted and my boot slipped into a generous patch of the gumbo. (Think rubberized wet concrete that will adhere the rest of the walk, even as I scuff through snowbanks and stomp on rocks.)

When someone's sport tears up the earth this way, it doesn't seem like a game to me. I entertained a scenario in which I'd come upon some of them, pretend to be the property owner and run them off.

As Roxy and I circled back toward home, I spied one of those trucks coming up the road toward us. And then I saw the two big Labradors running along behind.

I confess uncharitable thoughts in that moment. A trespassing four-wheeler too lazy-ass to walk his dogs. We stepped off road which cut through a hillock and waited for him to pass. Meanwhile, the yellow Lab of the pair passed the truck and ran toward us.

"Tahoe... Tahoe, get back here," the driver yelled.

Though Tahoe was twice Roxy's size he didn't look like trouble, and Roxy is usually fine with other dogs, but she was leashed and you always have to watch how dogs react in that situation. They sniffed each other and then Tahoe headed back to the truck, which had stopped partway up the incline. The driver was out and loading the other dog into the covered back.

Roxy and I moved closer and to the other side of the road so he could see us better when he resumed.

That's when I saw the wheelchair symbol on his license plate.

He worked his way slowly back to the cab, leaning on the side of the truck for support and shuffling his feet a few inches at a time. When he reached the door, he had to use it to lift himself up to the seat, but because of the truck's angle, the door kept trying to swing closed on his fingers.

I said, "Your dog was fine," and he just nodded. He had a long greying ponytail (Western Colorado must be the men's ponytail capital of the world) and looked to me like a motorcyclist who'd come back from a bad accident, but not all the way. He had one leg up on the floor and rocked a bit as he lifted his left leg with his hands against the closing door and the skew of gravity.

Not the sort of man you ask if he wants help.

I waved as he drove past. He kept both hands on the wheel and drove out of there, and I realized I felt like the guilty one for cutting his outing short.

Riding Lessons.

At the end of April, I had a serious bike accident. Upon hearing about it, everyone asked the same question: Were you wearing a helmet?

I was, but the helmet had absolutely no role in protecting me from injury.

However, one simple thing could have saved me from the hospital: fixing a depression in the road that was unnoticeable to a car but caused me to lose control of the bike.

Staying last week in the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, I got a chance to reflect anew on how we ask the wrong questions about bicycle safety interventions—whether helmets, special bike lanes or dedicated trails.

For days I walked the narrow streets in a place whose street grid was set in the 1700s and has scarcely changed since. (Photo: Zack Clark)

Sidewalks average about a meter wide and narrow further wherever barred windows project into the walkway. Each block is built right to the corner. The only traffic controls are alto signs painted on the sides of buildings.

There are no lanes painted on the streets, which are cobblestone canted toward the center for drainage. On the outskirts, there are speed bumps, but the irregular pavement in the central city functions as one continuous deterrent to speeding.

The streets fill with pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, trucks and tuc-tucs, while the town's distinctive buses prowl the main drags.

Not exactly what you'd call a welcoming urban cycling environment, right?

Nevertheless, bikes were part of the traffic and after three days of walking, I was ready to jump on one of the bikes at the place we were staying. A Murray Baja with no working rear brake, it looked about average for the beat-up mountain bikes I saw on the street—underinflated tires, discount store frames and missing or maladjusted parts.

Perfect, in fact, for the rough streets, slow pace and lack of poles for securing the bikes. This rack at a cathedral was the only one I saw. 

However, I did enjoy several rides through the city, sans helmet, and never felt endangered in this foreign environment.

Here's why:

Speed. The narrow, bumpy streets, short sightlines and mixed traffic meant everyone was going at approximately bicycle speed—6 to 10 miles an hour. The mass of larger vehicles is a lot less dangerous at these low speeds.

Driver attention. Although I saw lots of Guatemalans looking at cell phones on the street, the drivers didn't. There was simply too much going on, with tuc-tucs and motorbikes and proximity to pedestrians,  for a driver to be inattentive or to have the illusion that he was in control. Likewise, there was no advantage to racing to beat a light or to pass another vehicle.

Cyclist attention. A lot of cyclist bad behavior is related to maintaining momentum or taking advantage of gaps in traffic. The same factors that slowed down the drivers and made them pay attention affected the cyclists, too. I saw only two riders in full kits with road bikes and helmets during my stay. One was walking and the other was rolling along at about 4 mph. Neither of them looked as happy as this guy, who was the only other rider I saw wearing a helmet, with good reason.

My Guatemalan experience reinforces that we are asking the wrong questions and arguing over the wrong solutions if all we talk about are adjustments like helmet use and advisory bike lanes.

As one expert says:

It’s safe to say that there isn’t any conclusive evidence that helmets help. The scientific community has been split down the middle for two decades. There are basically two camps: those who look at head injuries and look for ways to prevent them, and those who work towards getting more people to choose the bicycle as transport.

Another, unnamed camp has the biggest voice in the matter, though.

Our cities are built and engineered for cars, so car traffic rules. Whatever changes are made to help equalize that difference will be more effective than putting every cyclist in a helmet.

Home on a Half-Ruined Planet.

From a long, but worthwhile post, Putting the Future Back in the Room:

The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I'm more and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we're on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.

That void in our future vision, I believe, is not accidental. In the 40 years since the first Earth Day, a whole set of industries has grown large attacking scientists and conservationists; falsely complexifying issues; spinning the news of environmental crimes; launching astroturf front groups; endowing think tanks; bribing politicians; obfuscating the need for systemic change by pushing funding towards NGOs that advocate the most limited of personal actions; and by promoting (in the most direct financial sense) cultural work that promotes cynicism and a disdain (if not a hatred) for idealists, from talk radio to teabagging. In a twist on the old axiom that tyrants don't care if they are hated so long as their subjects don't love each other, these industries don't care if the future they're offering us looks dark, so long as no other futures we can imagine look brighter. Despairing consumers still buy, and they cause less trouble for the investing class. "We have an economy," as Paul Hawken says, "where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P." Keeping the future dark hides the crime.

Everglades Deal Shows Limits of Government Rescue.

A state-funded effort to save the Everglades exhibits just about every peril and pitfall in the spongy ground of politics and Florida real estate.

The public deal to buy scattered parcels of overpriced land from United States Sugar is looking more likely to rescue the company. And it may be a sink hole under Gov. Charlie Crist's political future, too, if the purchase turns out to be as flawed as portrayed in the New York Times article.

[T]he governor said that critics of the deal would come up with “all kinds of reasons not to do something.”

“But what are they doing to try and preserve the Everglades, other than complain about it?” he said. “What are they doing in a productive way to move forward and preserve this national treasure that exists nowhere else on the face of the earth? Nothing but complain. I rest my case.”

However, the story spells out many problems that can happen once the forward motion starts.

• The real estate market changes but the appraisal doesn't.
• Cronies are involved in the deal and some interested parties are cut out.
• The big project doesn't take fully into account the other financial obligations of the water districts that have to contribute to the solution.
• Internal reviews and safeguards are ignored or worked around.
• Proponents who fear doing nothing is worse than a half-assed response keep their mouths shut.

Crist is right that big problems require big efforts, but this wasn't it. But the industry that helped create the problem in the Everglades was more interested in rent seeking than in being part of a market-based solution.

As one company official said, a government buyout was preferred because, “It wasn’t another company coming in and bottom-fishing you. They knew it would be for fair-market appraisals.”

Said another former executive: “I won’t lie to you — it’s a damn good price for that land. But it’s not as good a deal for the Everglades. If the district doesn’t have any money after this purchase, then they won’t be able to do any restoration projects. It could be a disaster in the making.”

Oil Prices Aren't Only Hurdle for Oil Shale.

Shell Oil, one of the major players in developing western Colorado's oil shale into actual oil, announced this week that it is dropping a contested application for conditional water rights on the Yampa River near the Piceance Creek Basin, where much of the fable trillion barrels of American oil remains locked up in rock.

The company said in its statement, “The exact scale and timing for development will depend on a number of factors, including progress on our technology development, the outcome of regulatory processes, market conditions, project economics and consultations with key stakeholders.

That's what companies have been saying about oil shale since before my mother was born. (A local newspaper editorialist makes that point, punctuating a talking-head video with a 1920 oil shale news story.)

I remember as child my father pointing out street signs falling down in a patch of desert, where developers promised oil shale was going to bring a monorail and a burgeoning new community. Ten years later, I was working on drilling rigs that were sampling the Piceance Creek shale deposits, and fiften years later, a big oil shale project collapsed with oil prices, nearly taking the entire western slope economy with it.

It's not much of an overstatement to say that experience made many locals here feel about oil shale after Black Sunday the way 9/11 made Americans feel about terrorists.

Regardless of what happens to prices in world oil markets, one irreducible fact remains. Most oil shale reserves are in the arid west, where water is a very precious commodity — with competing demand from agriculture, growing cities and power generation. Extraction technologies that work in pilot programs still must be able to scale. With water shortages all over the west now, that's a big hurdle to overcome.

Bonanza Revisited.

Ordinary people, making it by guess and by God, or not quite making it, are just as susceptible to dreams as the ambitious and greedy, and respond as excitedly to the adventure, the freedom, the apparently inexhaustible richness of the West. And the boosters have been there from the beginning to oversell the West as the Garden of the World, the flowing well of opportunity, the stamping ground of the self-reliant.

[...]

If you believe that the world owes you not merely a living but a bonanza, then restrictive laws are only an irritation and a challenge.

— Wallace Stegner, writing about his father, the boom-and-bust West, and its drill, baby, drill spirit

Welcome to the Boomtown.

A couple years ago, Grand Junction's economy was still booming, housing was in short supply and local retailers had trouble filling jobs because the oil and gas companies paid better for low-skilled workers.

Some people thought that the energy economy was going to sustain western Colorado and Grand Junction would continue to outperform the state and national economies. After all, gas was around $4 a gallon and it wasn't going back.

Locals who lived through the last boom and bust in the earlier 1980s, or the ones before that, weren't quite so optimistic.

And now the recession and the tail end of the recession is snapping around like a dead alligator's tail. It still has plenty of power to hurt. Some of the impacts are familiar to other parts of the country, but others have a local flavor.

Some recent notes:

Grand Junction lost a greater percentage of employees than any other metropolitan area in the United States between November 2008 and November 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And once hot real estate sales plunged to their worst levels in 20 years.

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Waste mercury is going to Texas instead of my backyard. Damn, more jobs lost because of those damn environmental regs in Colorado!

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Tax revenues are down because gas prices are down, along with consumer spending.

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State budget cuts closed a skilled nursing unit in town that served severely disabled adults. Without the special unit, residents had to find new homes with non-profit agencies that run group homes in the community.

Surprise — some current residents think the group homes don't fit their neighborhood.

And another subdivision is changing it protections for homeowners who built there before the developer ran into trouble.

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Climate change and a stagnant economy are tough on animals, too, horses present special difficulties.

“Abandoned horses and livestock issues are somewhat new,” Dr. Anderson said. “It is a new thing causing some drains on the budgets. Large-scale impounds are going to be drains on the community.”