THE ADMINISTRATION'S PROBLEM
We live in strange times, neighbors.
I am referring to the Chambers Incident, in which the Administration, while attempting to shoot a messenger bringing bad news, managed to shoot itself in the foot.
The messenger in question, Teresa Chambers, Chief of the U.S. Park Police, was trying to educate the Administration in simple physics, that is an object cannot be in two places at the same time.
The object in question being a park police person.
It seems that the Administration wanted the icons of American Democracy, the Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and other memorials and buildings heavily (and obviously) patrolled and protected
Fair Enough. The Al Qaeda threat is not imaginary. Simply authorize more park police and increase the budget. Apparently, the Administration did not care to go this route.
Very well. There are many private security firms in the DC area. Some of the more upscale ones have rather snazzy uniforms, complete with smokey bear hat and Sam Browne belt and imposing height requirements. Hiring private police would be in line with the Administration's interest in privatizing certain federal functions such as building security.
Indeed, most sworn and highly trained police officers do not want the static assignment of guarding various marble sheds; they want the adventure and adrenaline surge of actually chasing the bad guys on roving patrol by foot, horse and vehicle.
So, monument guarding might be one thing that could be turned over to the private sector with very little controversy. Good thinking, George!
Alas, this was not to be!
The Administration wanted the monuments guarded at no increase in costs or in staff. This means that officers would have to be taken off the never ending task of keeping the more obvious dope dealers out of the federal parks, making sure visitors are safe and keeping the parkway speeding below that of the Le Mans Rally.
This is where Chief Chambers felt she had to impart to George & the boys some basic information on physics, about being in two places at once. She had desperately tried to notify the Administration about her continuing shortfall in budget and manpower.
In retrospect, her only mistake seems to have been one of naivete and trust in the essential goodness of the Administration. Like most police professionals, she is intensely loyal and supportive of the chain of command. She really believed that if the President knew of the problems, he would act to remedy them. She had passed her concerns up the chain of command, with the usual results.
Recently, a reporter asked her if there were any manpower problems.
Now, neighbors, when politicians ask bureaucrats a question, they want straight to the point factual answers delivered in a timely fashion. However, when a reporter asks a bureaucrat a question, that same politician wants the bureaucrat to respond like he/she had just gotten a discount frontal lobotomy. "Me no sabe! Me just work here!"
Chief Chambers, who had been informed that in addition to her other chiefly duties, that she was the lead Public Information Officer, told the reporter, that yes, there were some budgetary and staffing problems, and yes, they would have to be remedied if the parks and public were to be protected AND additional monument guards supplied.
Although this was a fairly straight forward statement on economics and physics, the park service politburo considered it bureaucratic treason.
Chief Chambers was accused of "lobbying", that is, influencing budgetary and fiscal matters that are properly the domain of Congress, and certainly not the domain of a properly lobotomied bureaucrat.
There are, it seems, some sporadically enforced regs against lobbying by federal employees, the sport being reserved for the private sector. Now you will remember from Trivial Pursuits that the origin of the word "lobbyist" originated right here in dear old downtown DC during the Grant Administration when representatives of special interests would ambush Senators or even President Grant in the lobby of the Willard Hotel when they were en route to getting a drink at the Willard Bar. An exasperated President Grant is said to have complained about being "lobbied" by every highbinder with an eye to a government contract or project.
Today, the lobbyist is actually considered a profession of sorts, a profession that has received the ultimate accolade of having a television series based upon it ("K Street", I believe it was called.) The idea of the lobbyist is still the same as it was in Grant's time; to influence legislation and/or the spending of government money.
Now there are "good" lobbyists campaigning for "good" causes such as clean air and such and "bad" lobbyists campaigning for dirty air (they understandably prefer to call it "economic growth".) The point is that all lobbyists cost money. Even the "good" ones have children to feed. That means they must obtain funds from some source to pay for an office, staff, computers, phones, travel, and "research" to show the "justice" of their cause.
What we are driving at is that it is highly unlikely that Chief Chambers had the dedicated resources necessary to be seriously considered as a "lobbyist" in the normal sense of the word.
So if Chief Chambers was not a lobbyist, what exactly was she?
Jackie Lowey, the breezy daughter of a formidable Congresswoman and no slouch as a politician in her own right, suggests that Chief Chambers was basically an educator. Describing her own role as a Clinton political appointee in the National Park Service, she allowed as how much of her time was spent "educating" various congressmen on the needs of the National Park Service.
The Bush administration minions did not look at things that way and decided that Chief Chambers was a lobbying sinner of the first water and that she needed to be removed.
Now this is where things got ugly.
You see, unlike any other profession, the dismissal of a peace officer requires a ceremony.
When a medical doctor is suspended for malpractice, the other doctors do not solemnly cut up his/her stethoscope. When a judge is disbarred, the other judges do not break his/her gavel and burn the pieces, the disgraced doctor, judge or lawyer just goes away.
Not so the suspended peace officer. For everyone's safety, you have to get their gun away from them. This requires a grim little ceremony not unlike the medieval "bell, book, and candle" rite of excommunication.
How the "ceremony" is done depends upon circumstances and sometimes the humanity and good judgement of the officer's supervisors.
In extreme cases, the officer is treated as an armed criminal, being cuffed and disarmed with an much force as necessary to accomplish the task.
In other less extreme cases, the officer is told that there is a "problem"; that the officer is to lock his her gun, other defensive equipment, and badge in his/her desk and put the key in an envelope and is asked to meet with senior officials where he/she will hand over the envelope pending resolution of the problem. This is one way of handling the situation. There are of course, other ways.
Now a peace officer's badge and gun are incredibly emotional symbols, far more so than the doctor's stethoscope or the judge's gavel. They are the symbols of trust, dedication, and commitment.
Even officers who have gratefully retired after decades of service often have to hoe back the tears when they hand in their gun. This is not due to the loss of "Half the power of God on your right hip" or some other nonsense, but a realization that the community will no longer be dependent upon them for protection. It is a real sense of loss.
How much more so when the officer in question, in this case, Chief Chambers, believes that the charges were unfair and unjust. Additionally, if we are to believe witnesses, Chief Chambers was disarmed in the presence of smirking members of the Bush junta in a "Star Chamber" setting to which she had been "invited" under conditions of less than full disclosure. If this is the way it went down, then the Administration has managed to shoot itself in the foot again. As one fellow Republican remarked to me "It doesn't surprise me how often Bush's people shoot themselves in the foot, what surprises me is how quickly they reload!"
"FISH" AND COFFEE
| "Whenever we try to separate anything, we find that it is connected to everything else in the universe. |
| -- John Muir |
There is a natural tendency among humans, particularly bureaucrats, to say "I don't have to think about it, it's not in my job description and it's not connected to my agency."
Refreshingly, this does not seem to be the mind set of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. They have taken John Muir's words to heart and see the Big Picture beyond the parochial boundaries of their agency.
Now the Fish & Wildlife Service is among the most diffident of the federal land management agencies. Their managers keep a low profile and do not generally have the panache and brio of the U.S. Forest Service or the National Park Service. One reason for this apparent lack of color is the nature of their bureaucratic habitat, which tends to be flat and wet. (Though there are spectacular exceptions.)
Flat and wet sort of precludes avalanches, forest fires, mountain rescues, towering trees, foaming rivers and thundering waterfalls. It is possible to find interesting things to do and see in a marsh but you kind of have to work at it.
And work at it is what the dedicated men and women of Fish & Wildlife do. "Fish", as the agency is fondly called, has a higher percentage of field biologists than the national park service, and they are generally in the field as you will discover when you visit a F & W refuge; the contact office will be almost invariably closed (unless they have a volunteer) as the manager and his/her biologists are out seeing to the welfare of some feathered wayfarer.
This does not mean that "Fish" is secretive or reclusive. Although wildlife promulgation is definitely first priority, "Fish" does have some excellent interpretive programs.
For example, a "Fish" naturalist will take you deep into the swamps of the Alligator River Refuge on the Atlantic coast of North Carolina in the blackness of the night. There, in the spookiness of the nocturnal swamp, you will try your voice at "howling up a wolf". If you're good enough, one or more wolves will answer you. (Didn't know they were there, did you? Neither did I.)
Or, if you are lucky, you can watch Grizzly bears catching salmon at Kenai Refuge in Alaska, thirty feet from your eyebrows.
Although "Fish" is in charge of "charismatic megafauna" like wolves and bears, and of course, sport fish, it makes its money, so to speak, in birds.
Fish is interested in all kinds of birds, but most famously in migratory birds, particularly the large, spoon billed kind you can shoot and eat. While ducks and geese are its feathered bread and butter, indeed the main reason for most of its refuges, the non-edible migratory song birds are not neglected by "Fish". Indeed, over the years, "Fish" has come to see the wisdom of that John Muir quote about everything being connected to everything else.
This is illustrated by the coffee and candy bars in the "Fish" visitor centers.
Now "Fish" visitor centers are not as rare as duck's teeth, but they are sort of uncommon. Unlike units of the NPS, each of which has its own visitor center because the site is unique, the "Fish" refuges are similar enough that there is no point repeating one's self at every marsh. Where the terrain or species are markedly different, then "Fish" makes an educational statement with a visitor center. It is a careful husbanding of interpretive resources.
The theme of the "Fish" visitor center will differ depending on the location, but there is one constant theme. They all sell coffee and candy bars.
Coffee and candy?
Well yes. Remember John Muir and everything being connected to everything else?
I must admit that your kindly editor had forgotten the wisdom of John Muir until he visited his first "Fish" visitor center at Chincoteague National Wildlife. There, among all the stuffed birds and exhibits was a discreet little book store selling among other things, bags of coffee beans.
I thought this a rather strange item for a nature center to be selling and said so to the young woman at the sales desk.
It turned out that it was a "Shaggy dog" sort of interpretive gimmick, sort of like the old story of the guy who goes into a bar and notices right away that the bartender has a big yellow banana stuck in his ear. At first, the guy ignores the banana, but finally his curiosity gets the better of him and he asks the bartender about the banana in his ear. The bartender ignores him. The guy finally shouts "WHY DO YOU HAVE A BANANA STUCK IN YOUR EAR?" The bartender looks vaguely irritated and yells back "CAN'T HEAR YOU! CAN'T YOU SEE I'VE GOT A BANANA STUCK IN MY EAR!"
You see, the whole idea this of this interpretive shaggy dog trick was not to get you to buy a bag of coffee, but to get you to ask WHY the Fish & Wildlife Service was selling coffee. This would become as Freeman Tilden tells us a "teachable interpretive moment in which it is possible to educate the visitor."
The young "fish" naturalist gave me the happy smile of a fisher person who had gotten a trout to rise to the fly.
"Well, she began, "Many of our songbirds are migratory. That is they spend much of their lives, including their breeding time in Central America, nesting in the tropical rain forests. Then there are the really tropical birds like the parrots and the Toucans, those Walt Disney type birds that are all beak, that live in the rain forest year around. Needless to say, both the migratory and non-migratory birds need the rain forest.
The bad news is that the rain forest is being cut at a rapid rate, in order to plant cash crops like coffee and cocoa, the good news is that it doesn't have to happen; certain varieties of coffee like Arabica grow well in the shade of a rain forest, and they command a better price than the sun grown coffee from the big agribusiness plantations that chop down the rain forests and then use lots of pesticides herbicides and fertilizer to produce artificially high yields at the expense of the environment." (boo! hiss!)
In addition to saving the song birds, the rain forest and the environment, the shade grown coffee was generally produced on relatively small farms by pious mom & pop and the kids organic farmers as opposed to the greed head agribusiness corporations with their remote and overpaid board of directors (I could sense this girl was not going to vote for George Bush)
The argument was roughly the same for cocoa the source of chocolate, the West's other great addiction. Cocoa could also be grown in a rain forest friendly manner, hence the "environmentally friendly" candy bars also on sale at the Fish & Wildlife Centers. Now it is unlikely that any "Fish" visitor center supports itself through the sale of coffee or that the sale of "Fish" coffee would in itself save the environment, but as John Muir said, everything is interconnected.
All in all, I thought the Fish & Wildlife Service was making good use of John Muir's wisdom and really doing something to make people think about the interconnectedness of Nature.
I was curious to see if there was a similar program in our own National Park Service, the organization that never hesitates to advertise itself as the Last, Best hope of Mankind when it comes to nature preservation.
Using the NPS website, I found some NPS areas that were hot spots for neo-tropical birds. I called the visitor centers of a representative sample of each of these "hot spots", some on the East Coast, some in the Southwest. I asked the person at the desk if they had any shade grown fair trade coffee or rain forest friendly chocolate bars for sale.
At the first park, winsome ranger Melissa suggested that if I wanted a cup of coffee, I should go to the park lodge and no, they didn't sell coffee beans or candy bars.
At the second park, they flat out didn't sell food stuffs of any kind.
The third park was also puzzled by the coffee and candy bar request.
The fourth park didn't sell any food stuffs except National Park Cookies.
The fifth park stated they were a national park, did not sell coffee and did not particularly care if the Fish & Wildlife Service did so.
Now there is no point in embarrassing any people or any parks by identifying them, but it would seem that John Muir and his connective philosophy seemed to be more alive in the Fish & Wildlife Service than in the National Park Service.
I was curious about Fish & Wildlife's coffee supplier. It was not Folgers, or Maxwell House or any of the name brands. It was a small company called Thanksgiving Coffee, operating out of the obscure town of Fort Bragg, California.
Fort Bragg is a busy, somewhat gritty little fishing port and former logging town located in the Redwood fog belt around 150 miles north of San Francisco. Although fishin" n' loggin' are macho guys sort of work, they are sort of marginal industries, short on work, 'cause, well, the macho guys seem to have caught too many fish and cut too many trees. (Like Muir says...)
As it is unlikely that Toyota will put an assembly plant in Fort Bragg, the locals are forced to rely on that demeaning ol' debbil, tourism. Not directly, as Fort Bragg is the bedroom community for an impossibly twee little tourist attraction called Mendocino, about seven miles south on storied Highway One.
Mendocino (pop. 1,000) is a sort of foggy, wooden Williamsburg. It is a 19th century northern California coastal town frozen in time like Brigadoon. Its shops, stores, and Victorian houses have been lovingly preserved on a wild, storm tossed, cliff bound coast. It's restaurants have attracted some of the best chefs in North America and some of the continent's priciest artisans. If you have disposable income, you will be able to dispose of it here. Naturally, as in Williamsburg, the tourist workers who staff the place must live somewhere else as the rents are too high. In the case of Mendocino, that place is Fort Bragg.
My wife Joan loves Mendocino and every trip to Northern California means a pilgrimage to Mendocino for eating and shopping. I don't mind the eating and the scenery is spectacular.
A visit to Mendocino would also be an excuse to visit Fort Bragg and the Thanksgiving Coffee Company and that is what we did.
Like I say, Fort Bragg is a former basic industry kind of town, trying to mop up a few of the spill over tourist dollars from Mendocino, though it is hard to make a "historic district" out of 1950's style buildings. The main attraction is a scenic railroad and a "glass beach" (the town used to dump its trash directly into the sea and the sea and sand polished the old bottles into interesting "gems".
Up a hill a few hundred yards from the Fort Bragg commercial fishing docks lives the Thanksgiving Coffee Company, the "Ben and Jerrys" of coffee.
Thanksgiving Coffee is one of the hundreds of little one-horse corporations that are beginning to pick up the economic pieces in little mill towns when the primary industry, coal, steel, textiles timber, or fishing goes belly up (or migrates to another hemisphere searching for the holy grail of cheap labor and no environmental restraints)
Thanksgiving Coffee was founded in 1972 in Fort Bragg by two "Ben & Jerry" type hippie business people, Paul and Joan Katzeff who enjoyed a good cup of coffee. The Katzeffs hoped to combine their love of coffee with their enthusiasm for social responsibility and the environment.
Coffee is the second most traded commodity - right after oil. One would think this would be good news for the producers. This is not necessarily so. The demand for coffee has led to the cutting of rain forest, monoculture and the entry of non-traditional coffee growing in countries like Viet Nam. This results in a coffee glut, low wages and environmental degradation. There is no OPEC for coffee.
In 1976, The Smithsonian Institution's Migratory Bird Center studied the impact of sun-grown plantations on migratory songbird populations and discovered that they had 80% less biodiversity than shade-grown coffee. The American Birding Association approached Thanksgiving Coffee and asked them to develop a shade grown brand of coffee. The result was "Song Bird Coffee", which is marketed by zoos, bird sanctuaries, pet stores, and of course the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Thanksgiving Coffee has sought to provide a fair price for family farm produced shade grown coffee
The folks at Thanksgiving Coffee were most accommodating, giving us a tour through the coffee roasting operation, sorting, bagging and how they turned out their line of shade grown gourmet coffees and preached John Muir's gospel of interconnectedness.
Very little in the Thanksgiving Company operation is not recycled and the company subjects itself to an annual environmental audit. This audit resulted in the purchase of a more energy efficient coffee roaster which saved 2000 gallons of propane annually and the installation of low energy flourescent bulbs in the plant which saved an annual 43,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. The yearly 6,000 bags that the coffee beans come in from all over the world are recycled by the local fishing industry. The residue of the coffee beans becomes either mulch or compost.
Thanksgiving Coffee then calculated the environmental impact its operation has on global warming. Counting the fuel from the trucks and ships that transport the coffee to the propane needed to roast the coffee, the audit determined that the company adds 440 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and that its customers add an additional 800 tons when they brew the coffee.
To offset this greenhouse gas debt, Thanksgiving Coffee has contracted with TREES FOR THE FUTURE to plant 69,000 trees in Ethiopia, where coffee was "invented." (One hopes that the Haliburton Corporation has a similar audit and a similar tree planting agenda to reduce corporate sins; If not, well, I'm sure they have other talents!)
Perhaps the most interesting of Thanksgiving Coffee's environmental projects is its interest in biodiesel. Biodiesel is fuel made from vegetable such as canola oil or soybean oil or from recycled cooking grease from fast food restaurants. Thanksgiving coffee has converted its fleet of delivery trucks to run on biodiesel. This is a bit of an economic sacrifice as biodiesel runs about 50 cents more per gallon than the fossil oil diesel purchased from Saudi Arabia (However, unlike the Saudis, the Thanksgiving Coffee people have no interest in killing you, so consider the 50 cents an investment in your future!)
Now then! Here we have a socially and environmentally aware company in a mutually beneficial relationship with a thoughtful government agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, that benefits the environment and people! Should not the National Park Service develop a mutually beneficial relationship with Thanksgiving Coffee or one of its competitors and save the world?
Joan thought so and wrote a letter to the Director of the National Park Service with that thought in mind:
| November 2, 2003
Director Fran Mainella Dear Director Mainella: Over the years, my husband and I have visited many of our parks and monuments. As a university professor, I have always been most impressed with the educational quality of your visitor centers. I did not think they could be surpassed in making one think. However, you may have a rival in the visitor centers of your sister agency, the Fish & Wildlife Service. When we visited the Fish and Wildlife visitor Center at Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge we found that they were selling, of all things, bags of coffee! I thought this a strange thing for a visitor center to be selling and said so to the person on duty. I received a lesson in ecology. It seems that many of the song birds we know and love here in the United States winter and/or nest in the tropical forests. Many of these forests are being cleared to make room for large plantations of quick growing sun tolerant coffee. This of course destroys the habitat of our migratory songbirds as they have no place to shelter or nest. However, some coffee, the less productive (but tastier) variety can be grown in the shade of tropical forest trees, usually by small scale farmers. Certain ecologically minded coffee companies encourage this by marketing "green" or shade grown coffee. The Fish & Wildlife Service in turn encourages this enterprise by selling the coffee in their visitor centers. (This is apparently nation wide as we have bought coffee in Fish & Wildlife Visitor Centers in Maryland and North Carolina) Not only does it help a worthy cause, but it provides an invaluable teaching tool to educate the public on the interdependence of man and Nature. I am surprised that the National Park Service visitor centers have not adopted this practice of selling environmentally friendly coffee to the public as the national parks host many of the same migratory bird species. (The Fish & Wildlife Service also sells environmentally friendly chocolate bars made cocoa beans grown in an ecologically sound manner). I hope your agency can soon implement this very useful environmental teaching tool. If there are any regulatory problems, please let me know and I'll contact my congressman. Sincerely, Dr. Joan Rubin |
Alas! More than a month has rolled passed! Still no reply. No word from Fran! Understandable. She has been quite busy with this outsourcing and things! Perhaps she did not even get the letter!
Ah, but there is one thing that will get the old bureaucratic circuits circulating and that is the dread "Congressional". When one tires of the leisurely pace of governmental response, a taxpayer can ask his/her congressperson to inquire as to the status of the letter and/or issue at hand. This is known as a "Congressional Inquiry" or "Congressional" and immediately gets the attention of the most jaded Schedule C or permanent employee faster than Anthrax.
So I will pass a copy of Joan's letter on to my Congressman, Chris Van Hollen and we will print Fran's response in issue # 256 of THUNDERBEAR.
THE RETURN OF THE SAFETY MESSAGE
Now neighbors, in order to improve its service to the American people and its control over you, the Department of Interior has recently implemented a program in "which electronic documents would be stored until Judgement Day" (I am not making this up, it is really happening!)
This is both "good" and "bad" depending on your outlook. It is "good" in that your heroic efforts at saving the habitat of the Yellow Crested Titmouse will not be lost in the Mists of Bureaucratic Time. No Dead Sea-Scrolls-lost-in-a-cave-in-the-desert anonymity for you! Your good work will endure!
On the other hand, if you have been busily accessing the "Hot Russian Chicks" porn site most of your working career with the DOI, then your "accomplishments" in that field will also be duly recorded (date, time of entry, time of exit and so on) in the Sacred Annals of the Department of the Interior. Naturally all this information "good" and "bad" can be dredged up by the massive, golem-like search engine of the DOI. All that is necessary is a key word or acronym; like, oh, let's say, ACLU, or PEER or THUNDERBEAR. Use of key words like this could help the DOI determine who's been naughty and who's been nice, as far as strict interpretation of the use of the government computer is concerned.
Now when you think about it, it is a bit of a stretch to expect privacy when you use a government computer. After all, it doesn't belong to you even if you have been assigned to it. So what to do? If you are really paranoid about your boss's attitude, you can simply refrain from accessing THUNDERBEAR on the government computer.
On the other hand, should this prove inconvenient, you can simply state that your reading THUNDERBEAR is necessary to the health and safety of NPS employees and the visiting public. Why? Because we are resuming our practice of embedding a safety message in each issue of THUNDERBEAR. As there is no table of contents and no order to THUNDERBEAR, you must read the entire issue to find the Safety Article. You can tell your boss that while you stand shoulder to shoulder with Mainella and Norton in your hatred of the radical Bullmoose Republican ideas expressed in the rest of the newsletter, you must read the Safety Message in order to safeguard the staff and public. As "Safety Concerns" is a crucifix that can be held up to thwart the vampires of criticism, you should have absolutely no problem from your boss (Or Fran & Gale for that matter) So here's the latest Safety Message.
STEALTHY DECEIVER
It is stealthy, colorless, tasteless, deceptive and dangerous; and it's coming to get you! No, its not the Bush Administration, it's Carbon Monoxide!
Carbon Monoxide is truly a great deceiver on several levels. First is the insidious way in which it kills. It takes advantage of one of Mother Nature's errors: for some as yet unknown reason, our red blood cells that dutifully carry life sustaining oxygen molecules to all parts of our body, have a strange affinity for carbon monoxide molecules, (very much like an Irishman's affinity for beer) and like Mike's willingness to spend the rent money on Guinness, the red corpuscle will choose to carry the carbon monoxide molecule rather than the oxygen molecule at a rate of 200 to one, according to one study.
Therefore, with a vital part of your own body in cahoots with the bad guys, you can be in mortal danger from even a small volume producer of Carbon Monoxide. Carbon Monoxide, or CO is produced when anything containing carbon is burned. This covers pretty much anything that you burn to keep warm or go somewhere (All the fossil fuels, plus wood)
The OSHA threshold is at 9 parts per million, above which at least certain members of the population suffer symptoms. Normally, an enclosed space is necessary for a deadly scenario, but if the concentration is high enough (12,800 per million) you can get yourself killed outdoors in one of God's national parks in one to three minutes flat! That has happened rather spectacularly at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area when swimmers encountered a concentration of CO at the waterline of a idling houseboat where hull configuration and a lack of wind had trapped a concentration of CO.
The medical treatment of CO is compounded in severe cases by the fact that CO has a "half life of 5 hours. That is, it takes 5 hours for the patient's bloodstream to get rid of half the CO load. This means that simply getting them to fresh air or even giving them oxygen is not enough. They will require an oxygen saturation treatment in a hyperbaric (decompression)chamber. As a hyperbaric chamber is a piece of equipment not always found in Panguich, Utah, as Safety officer, you might inquire as to the location of the nearest one, what the local hospital plans to do, and the possibility of helicopter transport to such a chamber before the neighbors of the nice old couple in the motor home in the park campground note that they don't appear to be answering knocks on the door.
The second deceitful property of CO poisoning is ability to mimic flu-like symptoms (headache, nausea, lethargy, general malaise etc). As we are constantly being bombarded with news that we are in a big flu season, we are conditioned to regard CO symptoms as flu in the wintertime, when we are also running our stoves.
The best defense is defense in the form of CO detectors. About 50 percent of CO cases occur in homes, 40% in vehicles and the remaining 10% in the work place. The best defense is a good detector placed in those areas. Most of them cost in the range of smoke detectors (which will not detect CO) and have various bells and whistles, but the important thing is that the detector must be certified UL 2034 (American)or EN 50291 (British) or BS 7860 (European). The October 2001 issue of CONSUMER REPORTS has their usual excellent survey of the various models, prices and best buys of the various CO detectors.
There are portable CO detectors for use in cars and hotel rooms, but they seem less than reliable. Do not depend on any that do not have the UL seal of approval. Most CO auto deaths are pretty obvious; warming the car up for 20 minutes in the closed garage before walking into a lethal cloud of CO, trying to keep warm by running the heater in a car stuck in a snow drift with no place for the exhaust to go, transporting the neighbor kids "Just for a short distance" in the camper shell of a pickup, something that is illegal as well as dangerous for a variety of reasons.
Remember, take care, as CO is Winter's great deceiver.
THE HURRICANE
Washington, DC has rarely considered the possibility of a hurricane strike on the Center of the Universe, that is, itself.
After all, it is usually Washington that attacks Nature rather than the other way around.
Insipid, wimpy weather was a large factor in the selection of Washington as the site for the Nation's capitol; not too hot, not too windy, not too snowy, not too cold, not too anything; weather mediocrity at its best, the finest weather imaginable for Congressional windbags and bureaucrats. Above all, no hurricanes or Noreaster.
The Nation's capital is handily located in that narrow coastal belt that is (normally) too far north for hurricanes and too far south for Noreasters, the deadly storms that occasionally rake New England.
This is as it should be neighbors. In order to lead the nation in times of disaster, we must make sure the disaster does not happen to us.
It is easy to deal with a category V hurricane when it is bearing down on the usual suspects; Miami, Galveston, or New Orleans. However, it is difficult to come up with the usual panache and sang froid when you find that it is aimed at you.
Hurricane Isabel was a highly different storm. For one thing, in addition to being a Category V (sustained winds of over 175 mph, with gusts of over 200 mph), secondly, it was immense; more than 300 miles across, with a spectacularly well defined eye: The Devil's own donut.
It was not going to hit Florida, the normal goal post for one of these things; it was going to hit US! There must be some mistake! Washington, DC does not do hurricanes! We administer the effects of hurricanes, but we do not experience them! This was out of the question! Surely, DC has some sort of natural disaster diplomatic immunity that puts us above such things! God, we realize that earthquakes are for California, tornados for the Midwest, and hurricanes for the South, but couldn't we settle for high summer humidity for Washington? Come on, God! Be reasonable! It can't be true!
But it was true. The great 300 mile wide tumbril of doom was turning gracefully northwest toward the middle Atlantic states, targeting an area from the Outer banks of North Carolina to New York City, with Washington, DC comfortably in the middle.
There would be no "heavy showers associated with the remnants of a dying hurricane in Texas". This was the real thing! Isabel was coming to get us! We belonged to her.
Now, the laws of physics are not suspended in a Category V hurricane, it only seems that way when 175 mph winds set millions of tons of water in motion.
So what to do? One intelligent thing to do is get the hell out of town, which is exactly what our esteemed leader, George Bush did, lighting out for the high ground at Camp David in the Maryland hills. (Can't say I blame him, he is only a tenant at the White House and under no obligation to help sandbag NPS property.) Also absent was Dick (Seldom Seen) Cheney, that rarest of observed Republicans.
Property owners in the DC area had less obvious choices. One was to join the President in flight or attempt to ride out the storm in your property. The last course of action seemed increasingly viable as Isabel as Isabel would soon be methodically cutting roads. very much as an army besieging a city.
We had of course, all of our disaster gear. (Osama Bin Laden had seen to that) I had sandbagged the front and rear exits of the house and stored or tied down anything that would move.
All we had to do was watch television as Isabel, like the actress of the century, had preempted all the channels.
The TV people were milking this thing for all it was worth. Finally, finally, they were important. There were endless shots of them standing by the surf on the Eastern shore of Maryland. The surf was most uncooperative, running about four feet high and looking rather inviting, even though the TV people assured us that these little waves would soon grow like a politician's promise, to engulf all of Eastern Maryland.
This was not to be. As Isabel neared DC, it began to dramatically drop in intensity. The TV people were visibly disappointed, very much like recipients of a mail order bride who wasn't living up to her picture.
"Isabel is now a Category 1 hurricane, but it can still get back to category 4 or 5 before it hits us", the TV people said hopefully, very much like a DC sportscaster describing the Redskins down by 20 points in the fourth quarter.
Alas, for the TV people, Isabel arrived in DC as a tropical storm, albeit a massive one. There was some flooding, but by far the most damage was the attack of the Tulip poplars.
The Tulip poplar is not a poplar, but actually a huge magnolia and is the biggest, tallest, heaviest tree in the Eastern forest now that the American Chestnut has gone extinct. The wood is easily worked and is a standby in the furniture industry. No less an authority than Daniel Boone said Tulip poplars made the best dug out canoes. It is the state tree of Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee and is a strong contender against the California Redwood for the as yet unnamed national tree of the United States.
The "tulip" in the name comes from the showy, tulip shaped yellow flowers which are mainly enjoyed by God as they occur in the top most branches of the tree. It is a fast growing tree, reaching a maximum heights of 120 feet in about as many years, with a 4-5 foot diameter, though heights of 80-100 feet are more common.
This makes it a favorite of housing developers as you can get a stately shade tree in a relatively short time. God, however, had designed the Tulip poplar for a forest rather than a housing development, thus when there is a permanent opening occupied by a house or other structure, the surrounding shade trees tend to lean toward that opening to get more sun, overarching the housing and providing shade, a mutually advantageous situationuntil there is a big storm.
It was for this reason that Joan and I were camped in the downstairs living room during the night of Isabel. The average roof, at least the average American roof will keep out sun, rain, a foot of snow, squirrels, birds, and falling acorns, but not falling trees.
Every so often you read about some couple who were skewered to their bed by the branches of an intruding tree like beetles on a Ryker mount. Fortunately, the floor (ceiling) joists will save you if you are on the first floor (Unless of course, your house is next to the General Sherman Sequoia)
So that's where we sat out Isabel, watching television on the ground floor, listening to the wind increase and waiting for one or more of our great ligneous time bomb tulip poplars to fall on the house.
About 2 Am the power and of course, the TV went off. There was nothing to do but go to sleep. The tulip poplars would come knocking if there was anything important.
Dawn came sullenly overcast. The back yard was full of branches, but the trees were basically still standing. However, all over the neighborhood and all over the DC metro area, tall old trees had gone down like ten pins, taking the power lines with them. There was no power. In fact there was hardly any power anywhere in the metro area.
Naturally, the attack of the oaks and tulip poplars had been foreseen by PEPCO, the cheerily named local power company, and crews had been brought in on standby from as far away as the Midwest.
Still, they were overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the destruction of the local power grid. It would be "some time" before service was restored to everyone.
So everyone got a chance to participate in a sort of Colonial Living History Program whether they wanted to or not. ("And now, boys and girls, we are going to see how much fun it is to read by candlelight! You have all noticed that interesting smell! That's food going bad! A common smell in Colonial times! Let's collect some charcoal and cook and eat at least some of it before we become botulism statistics. You can be Martha Washington and I'll be George!
After two days and nights without electricity, Joan was getting tired of playing and wanted to switch to a different channel. Now Joan is the best of sports. She likes to camp preferring a sleeping bag and tent over a motel any night and her own campfire cooking to restaurants.
"I don't mind a wilderness experience, I just don't like it to be in my house! She said as I opened yet another bag of yummy good freeze dried trail food and poured in boiling water, courtesy of the bluet camp stove.
"Well, if you don't like it, we can go to Philadelphia! No hurricane damage there!" I intoned. We were instinctively replicating Man Quest for Fire with our own quest for electricity; a magical place where everything worked when you pressed the right button! Philadelphia suddenly became the Land of Oz to Joan and she was happier than Judy Garland to hit the yellow brick road for that city.
What happened next was not exactly what the Sierra Club would like to hear: The automobile was the only viable means of transport in the DC metro. All three airports were shut tighter than barnacles at low tide. There was no rail service as there were trees on the tracks. There was no bus service as there was bureaucratic dithering on what routes should be open until the answer became "none."
So, unless you had a horse or really good shoes, this pretty much left the automobile. But what about all those trees, the ones that destroyed the power lines? Weren't they also blocking the streets, thus immobilizing the automobile until the "authorities" could clear the road? Yes, that would have been the case if one waited for the "authorities", but fortunately, every block in suburbia contains at least one chain saw Walter Matty, just dying to demonstrate their machine, and in a very short time most secondary roads were cleared of fallen trees. The primary roads were opened just as quickly, either by the "authorities" or by private citizens who either cut up the trees with chain saws or who got enough people from the resulting traffic jam to muscle the tree to the shoulder of the road and send everyone on their way. Team work! Group endeavor.
Highways and cars are famously flexible; if one way is blocked, you can take another route. Rail, the Sierra Club's favorite transportation solution to transportation woes is rather fragile in an emergency situation; if a railway bridge is damaged, it is very difficult to reroute a train and trains are notoriously sensitive to damaged track, cars less so to all but the most enveloping pot holes.
Then there is the human element: Not every train or bus driver is cut out to be a hero and may not be willing to take a risk to get you where you want to go (and I don't blame him/her!) There are union rules and insurance rules to be considered.
The relative ease of highway evacuation from a threatened city is certainly something to be considered in the light of 9/11. It is inevitable that the President will get a call from the Jihad Kebab House down on Connecticut Avenue telling him that they have a former Soviet tactical nuclear weapon in the basement of their restaurant and they are going to fire it off in 12 hours if we don't denounce Israel and short skirts. The President, as he climbs aboard Marine Corps One is going to suggest that you leave town by the quickest means available, which will be your car. He will not advise you to go to Union Station and take a train.
The flexibility of highways is what intrigued the father of the American super highway system, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who regarded it as his greatest accomplishment (The Normandy Invasion would have stuck in my mind, had I been Ike, but Eisenhower was an engineer.)
Ike was on the first attempt by a convoy of vehicles to cross the US from Washington Dc to San Francisco, Ca, a distance of 3,251 miles in 1919. It took the 81 vehicles and 295 men nine weeks to do the 3, 251 miles, averaging around 51 miles a day. If Ike and his men and trucks had chosen to go to San Francisco by steamship it would have taken him only 13 days. In 1919 America was well served by rail, which could get you to the West Coast from Washington in three days or less, but Ike foresaw the need for flexibility, if not spontaneity and that's why we were on Highway 95, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Freeway, bound for Philadelphia and electricity.
Ike's interstate highway system has contributed a great deal to the flexibility and spontaneity of American life. We sort of define ourselves by our willingness and ability to "switch channels" by traveling somewhere else either temporarily or permanently if we feel a bit unhappy.
Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, the "authorities" were suspicious of the idea of folks traveling around without permission or a mission. Today that is all changed and Russians are getting the bug to see Russia. There are plans for a road all the way across Russia from St. Petersburg on the Atlantic to Vladivostok on the Pacific! The longest road in the world, spanning 12 of the world's 24 time zones. Right now there is a thousand mile gap of trackless forest wilderness to be spanned between the two completed sections, but in less than a decade the road should be completed, then any Russian, whether bothered by a hurricane or an unfortunate love affair, can, like a Russian Huck Finn, get in his car and "Light a shuck for the territories!" (To be continued)
GETTING RID OF GEORGE BUSH
With the capture of Saddam, a modest optic in the economy and other factors, it should be obvious even to the dullest of Democrats that the Republicans will win the 2004 election.
The "other factors" are demographics. Americans tend to be rather conservative and tend to be located in most of the country. The Democrats tend to be concentrated in major urban areas of the Northeast, the Pacific coastal rim from Seattle to San Francisco (but not an inch lower!) and in Austin, the only Pagan city in Texas.
The South is solidly Republican as is the Rocky Mountain West as is much of the Midwest. Governor Arnold will be able to hand California's thumping number of electoral votes to the Republicans as an unexpected but welcome lagniappe. Due to some masterful spin doctoring on the part of the G.O.P., millions of people seem to be prepared to vote for candidates who will not necessarily work in their best interests.
Now neighbors, while it is true that the Republicans will win in 2004, it does not follow that Bush and Cheney will be the party candidates.
There is no reason and no law that says Bush & Cheney could not be challenged by Senator John McCain for the GOP presidential slot with Rudolph Guiliani on the vice presidential ticket, Should these two heroic and very popular Americans fail to dislodge Bush & Cheney at the Republican convention, they could run in 2004 as Bullmoose candidates!
But why would they do that? Because they are patriots, that's why!
But why should we want them to run? If you can ask that question, you've been dead for the last four years. Bush & Cheney have or will try to undo the environmental work of every Republican president since US Grant, not to mention every Democrat president. The work of Richard Nixon, The Environmental President, will be rolled back, his Environmental Protection Agency, paralyzed and gutted, a living husk of itself.
They will run because they are noble (and because McCain is mischievous, an endearing trait in a politician.) But first we have to ask them.
Fortunately, Arizona is a warm state. Many NPS types have retired there. What you must do if you live in Arizona and are a register voter is to write to Senator McCain and beg him, shamelessly, if necessary, to challenge Bush for the GOP nomination at the convention in New York City this summer. Fortunately, Rudy Guiliani lives in New York City, not far from the convention site and can stride to the stage to accept the VP slot -- or the establishment of a Bullmoose Party to run in the 2004 election should McCain not get the nomination.
You must do this now! The nation and the environment depends on you!