Drupelets

Today when I picked up Button, our seventh-grader, from school, she told me, "Tomorrow we're going to have a lockdown."

I spent the next several moments lost in confusion. The only place I've heard the word lockdown used is in TV shows and movies about prison, when there's a riot or a breakout. It's not a word I associate with junior high school—or ever want to. The image of kids locked in behind barred windows is too disturbing.

So I asked her what she meant. She said a state trooper was coming to explain what they should do if there's a threat in the school. The state police wanted every school to practice.

I'm having to forcibly censor myself, to keep from going into a Maddox-style rant of profanity. But the insanity, the complete inappropriateness, the sheer censored misguidedness of rehearsing a lockdown at Button's school simply infuriates me.

We live in the Ozarks, in Middle America—not East L.A., not Washington, D.C. Button does not go to some run-down inner-city school where the kids have learned how to smuggle butterfly knives past the metal detectors. She goes to a small, quiet junior high with only about 350 students. There has never been a shooting, a knifing, a clubbing—any assault at all more serious than childish fistfights—in the history of the school.

But it's just a few weeks since the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings (and Newtown, Connecticut isn't exactly the ghetto, either, I have to admit) and nearly everyone seems to think: I must do something to make our kids safer.

Nevertheless I can't help thinking, Stop terrorizing my children!

Life isn't safe. But there are much likely dangers than somebody invading Button's school. The way some of the other parents drive, I think she's in far more danger walking across the parking lot. I drive a Honda Fit, one of the smallest cars Honda sells in America, and I sometimes have trouble maneuvering in the crowded lot. Yet every day I see some happy idiot sailing through at twenty or twenty-five, ignoring the marked lanes and speed bumps, often talking on the phone as well. I'm not the least worried—not in the slightest bit—that someone is going to shoot up Button's school. But I'm way worried that one of these cretins is going to clip Button with her Lincoln Navigator.

Life isn't safe. I teach my girls this. I talk to them about common dangers and how to avoid them. Bug and Button wear seat belts. They don't eat spoiled food. They stay out of strangers' cars. They look and listen before they cross the street. They don't play with matches. They get flu vaccinations. They don't smoke or do drugs. (I sincerely believe this last, at least so far—but I also teach them about the dangers of peer pressure.)

Life isn't safe. Things can go wrong in the blink of an eye, and I never hide that from my girls. But that doesn't mean we should rehearse for every conceivable threat. I don't teach my girls to worry about someone coming into their school with a gun, just as I don't teach them to worry about falling sperm whales or drifting clouds of chlorine gas. In this part of the country, they're in more danger of being caught in a serious earthquake than a school shooting.

I'm tired of the culture of terror that's arisen in the U.S. If I'd had somewhere to go (and if the FAA had allowed it) I would have climbed onto an airliner on September 12, 2001 with no more fear than on September 10. Today, I'm far less afraid of terrorists on a plane than I am of being arrested by the TSA for my bad attitude. But the prevailing attitude in the media—and in many people I know—is that if it happened anywhere, once, it could happen here, tomorrow. So we must protect ourselves!

I'm a little afraid every time I get behind the wheel of a car, because I've been in two serious collisions in my life, Morgan has been in another, and I've only missed several others by great good luck, good reactions, and the nimbleness of the little cars I drive. Nearly every day I watch some idiot blatantly run a red light; I had a very near miss just a couple of months ago. In the U.S., the number of people killed annually in car collisions is still in the tens of thousands, despite improved airbags and annual increases in seat belt use. The risk is real.

So I drive carefully, and I wear a seat belt.

But the number of people in the U.S. killed by terrorism in the last century is still only several thousand—most of those in a single, unlikely-to-ever-repeat cluster of actions.

I might as well take precautions against tiger attacks as against terrorists.

I'm a subscriber to Bruce Schneier's attitude that "if it's in the news, don't worry about it." For the average person, it's the things that are so common that they don't make headlines, like car wrecks and influenza, that are the real dangers. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 160,000 people died of lung cancer in 2012 alone; that's the population of Springfield, Missouri—and nearly all of those deaths were from a preventable cause. So where are the headlines saying, 3000 Americans Killed by Lung Cancer in 1 Week?

The headlines don't show the real risks—they show the dramatic ones.

When you teach children about risks, look at where the real risks lie. If you live in desert country, teach them about heat stroke and flash floods; if you live on the bayou, teach them about water moccasins and drowning; if you live in a big city, teach them about burglars and bicycle messengers.

But don't teach your kid to watch for tsunamis if you live in Kansas City. Children have enough to fear without being terrorized by the latest improbable boogeyman from the headlines. If you teach them to guard against even the wildest improbability, you teach them that there's no foundation to their world.

A child who really, truly believes, "Any day now someone will come into my school and start shooting people," is not that far from believing, "Any day now, an asteroid will hit the earth," or just, "Any day now, the sun won't come up." And if the world's that dangerous every day, why worry about a little extra risk from smoking crack or shoplifting jewelry? Why worry about getting AIDS or getting pregnant?

A child who never learns to make realistic judgments about risk can't make realistic judgments about benefits, either. "Any day now, I'll win the million-dollar lottery." So how is she supposed to decide whether spending four hard years getting a college degree is a wise choice? Where does she learn the skill to decide between the fast-talking dude with a Camaro and no brain and the hard-working guy with an old clunker and a scholarship to MIT? How will she understand that getting a thirty-year mortgage instead of paying monthly rent can actually make sense?

Life isn't safe. When you teach my girls about a real risk, you help them stay safer. But when you make them take precautions against something that has Irish Sweepstakes odds of ever happening to them, you teach them that every danger is equally great—or that every danger is equally meaningless.

Labels: Children, Having a Moan

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An update to this post from February: The plague of suicidal skunks abated by mid-March, but now something else has come up. I've lived in this town for nearly twenty years now, and in all that time I didn't see three dead raccoons on the streets. But in the past three or four weeks I've seen eight or ten dead coons, scattered all around town. They've been full-grown animals, not callow juveniles, up to maybe twenty-five pounds.

I've seen roughly as many dead coons in town in the past month as I've seen on highways across the whole state in my entire life. Heck, the raccoon body count has been higher than the possum count.

Now, raccoons are smart animals. Not like possums, with brains still stuck in the Cretaceous era—at least one science fiction writer (I can't remember who) suggested that after the human race has killed itself off, the coons will most likely be next to develop into a race of tool-using world-changers. I've heard stories of raccoons that could turn lights on and off, unhook screen doors, and generally make a nuisance of themselves with trash cans, bait buckets, and other sources of tasty tidbits. Crossing the street without becoming a ring-tailed statistic shouldn't be much of a strain on a raccoon's intelligence.

So why are they piling up in the flipping streets? Did they reach some level of population where the pheromone saturation triggered the "Duh" gene? Have herds of them suddenly started migrating south for the winter? Have farmers started live-trapping them and dumping them in town, the way we used to live-trap our excess squirrels and take them out of town?

There could be some natural process at work. But I'm beginning to suspect something more sinister.

Unselective breeding

For who can say how long, humans have been working to protect themselves from their own stupidity and carelessness. Not just themselves personally, but themselves as a group, total strangers as well as family and friends. Altruistic guardianship, you see.

(I don't mean seat belts in cars—I wear a seat belt to protect myself from other people's stupidity. I don't mean safety latches on cabinets to protect children from their own ignorance and their parents' stupidity. And I don't mean the absurd warning labels you can find these days [yes, these are supposed to be warnings people have actually seen]: "This hair coloring should not be used as an ice cream topping." "Do not use blowtorch while sleeping." "Do not attempt to drive car with sun shade in windshield." "Do not use toilet brush orally." Warnings like this are to protect the manufacturer from asinine lawsuits; they're not going to stop a careless person from using her curling iron on her eyelashes.)

• Your steam iron has a sensor that turns it off before it sets your shirts on fire.


• Your power saw has a blade guard and double-action trigger so you have to make a real effort to cut your hand off.


• Your shower head has a high-temperature shutoff so you don't parboil yourself by carelessly turning the wrong knob.


• Your birth-control pills have dummy pills for the days you don't need hormones, so you don't get knocked up from forgetting what week it is.


• Your town has a fire department so that when you use gasoline to start your charcoal grill, you only burn down your deck.


• Your government mandates food labeling to help you remember that pork rinds and ice cream are fattening.

Nowhere are you more zealously defended from yourself than in your car:

• Your car has an air bag so that if you forget your seat belt you can still avoid leaving brain matter on the windshield.


• In case you, at the first sign of trouble, generally try to stomp the brake pedal through the floor, your car has anti-lock brakes so that you don't totally lose control.


• Your car even has a little warning light on the gas gauge and little warning chimes for when you leave the headlights on, so that you don't find yourself stranded in the cold with an empty tank or a dead battery.

Is all this protection a good thing? If you're a stupd or incurably careless person, probably so, on an individual basis. But in the long run, do measures like these tend to make the human race as a whole grow gradually more stupid?

What would happen if casual, everyday stupidity was fatal?

You start your car and back out of the driveway without fastening your seat belt. As you shift into Drive, the "stupid" relay in the car's black box trips. Suddenly, your car takes control, and drives you in front of an oncoming freight train.

You open your washing machine without waiting for the spin cycle to end. A cable shoots up, loops around your neck, and drags your head down to drown you in the drum.

You put a movie in your DVD player upside down. As you press Play, The Matrix shoots out at warp speed, slicing you neatly in two just above the clavicles. There is no stupid.

You press the Power button on your computer without shutting down Windows first. A muscle-spasming surge of electricity zaps through your body, throwing your heart into fatal ventricular fibrillation. (And just in case you survive, Windows deletes your files and transfers your bank balance to Planned Parenthood.)

Would the human race be improved? Would the average human become smarter, tougher (at least a few people would survive the locomotive and the electric shocks), more efficient, more graceful, more talented—a race of supermen living in a murderous utopia?

Or would we simply breed out that class of useful if not terribly bright drones that does the dull repetitive work, so that our garbage cans are emptied or our chickens processed or our tires rotated by a genius with the clockwork precision of Tiger Woods, the flashing dexterity of Eric Clapton, and the unworldly grace of Peggy Fleming, but who is terribly, unavoidably bored by his life, until ennui drives him to desperation and one day, in a fit of Nietzschean despondency, he deliberately attempts to open his aspirin bottle bottle without first aligning the arrow on the rim of the bottle with the arrow on the cap, triggering a deadly burst of poison gas?

Are you still with me? I said I was beginning to suspect something sinister.

Selective speeding

The human race has been protecting itself from individual and to some extent collective stupidity, and it may be that we've therefore reached the limits of our intellectual evolution. But what if the raccoons have reached some critical evolutionary cusp and become aware of themselves as a race, in direct competition with us? What if they've begun a conscious breeding program? What if they've found a way to make stupidity fatal?

"What here? Are you crazy?" "Nope, this's the spot, Rufus. The Coon Council says this is the only place we're allowed to cross Van Buren at night." Whizzz! "Boy, they washed their brains and can't do a thing with'em. With that sharp hill there you've got, what, two seconds of visibility from here?" "It's easy. Just watch me. As soon as this car goes by—" Whizzz! "—I'll show you. See the way that bush just lit up? Three—four—five—six—seven—eight—" Whizzz-zzz! "See, Rufe? It catches the headlights before the car gets to the crest of the hill. Gives you a good five seconds of extra warning." "Okay, I'll try it." Whizzz! "Still dark. I'm going!" Scrabble–scrabble–Whizzz–THUMP! "Oooh, too bad he didn't notice how that service station sign shades the bush when the wind shifts." "Well, Rufe never was the ripest acorn on the tree."

Picture two curves on a graph. The higher curve has been rising for a long time, but leveled off a few hundred years back and is now beginning to trend downward. The lower curve has been rising more slowly, but now it suddenly takes on a sharp upward angle, with the slope gradually but steadily increasing. The curves won't meet in a year, or a hundred years—but someday there will come a convergence.

Protect the future of the human race! Don't run over raccoons in the street!

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A few years ago a friend sent a collection of "cat haiku" to Morgan. We lost the original list, but it turns out to be readily available on the internet. According to at least one site, the poems in the original list first appeared in Microsoft's internal employee forums.

Okay, it's my turn to toss out a few of my own creations:

I bring you a mouse From outside. Yes, it's alive— Don't you want to play?

Please don't be dropping Anything heavy on the Lump in the bedspread.

Some fool put a plant Blocking the window that gives The warmest sunlight.

Get the flashy thing! My peep has gone under the Refrigerator!

But I've always run Through here! You're not permitted To move the sofa.

Some links to other sites with good cat haiku:

http://www.geocities.com/sandytracker/cathaiku.html

Cat Fanciers: Cat Haiku

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I'm alone with Bug and Button today. Morgan's grandfather is in serious condition, so Morgan drove to Tulsa yesterday to be with him for a while. So this morning I took the girls to an Easter egg hunt at their school, and this afternoon we dyed eggs.

Every year this is a process of experimentation, but we've gradually gotten more scientific about it. Morgan, being the more organized one, makes notes on file cards about how the color dyes work, and what ways we've found to improve them.

We use Paas color kits, just like we have since I was no older than Button. In the last couple of years they've gone from a six-color kit to a nine-color kit, adding pink and a new green and blue. Dyes have improved a bit in recent years, and are nearly as good as I remember when I was a kid, before the FDA banned Red Dye #2 and everything red or purple from Paas to M&Ms went blah.

This year I pulled out Morgan's notes and the new Paas kits, and got a surprise: They renamed four of the nine colors! (Mr. Bill voice: Ohno!) I think I've properly identified which colors go with which names, so I now post our conclusions (mostly Morgan's, with some additions from me this year) as to the quality of each color, with additional comments on combining colors.

Dyeing tips

Buy two Paas kits. Use the regular instructions, dissolving the tablets in vinegar. But use 2 tablets of each color, and add only 1/3 cup of water. Mix the dyes in clear plastic 9-ounce cups; these are deep and narrow enough that the reduced amount of liquid will still cover an egg, and you can see the color through the side. (And when the dyeing is done, you can throw them away.)

The eggs should be near room temperature before you dye them. If you've just boiled them, let them cool at least half an hour. If you've had them in the refrigerator, let them warm up a similar amount of time, then wipe off any condensation.

Color notes for Paas kits

When combining two colors, it's usually best to let the first color dry before dipping in the second color. Giving an egg a wash of a color means to dip it briefly without letting it soak.

Yellow — usually nice.

Orange — usually even, but not very dark. A wash of red deepens the color slightly.

Red — Often a nice dark color, but can get spotty on some eggs.

Purple — Dreadful most of the time. Almost always blotchy and weird.

Blue (formerly Turquoise) — Very nice! Better than the original Blue.

Pink — Very nice and vivid, almost magenta.

Teal (the old Green) — Often nice, but more blue than green and gets spotty on some eggs.

Spring Green (formerly Chartreuse) — Very nice but quite pale. Teal with a wash of Spring Green makes a nice medium green.

Denim (the old Blue) — Depends on the egg, but usually not great. A dusty grayish blue at best.

Pink followed by Blue — A better purple than Purple. You can also try Red followed by Teal.

Don't try to combine Purple or Denim; these colors wash off too easily and get even streakier than usual.

I was going to post photos, but my camera just won't reproduce the colors correctly, especially shades of blue, green, or purple.

. . . And now for something completely different.

I've had the John Philip Sousa march "Liberty Bell" stuck in my head all evening. Just this week I learned that our local PBS station has started running Monty Python's Flying Circus again. I caught an episode just last night, and the theme music stuck, as it always does. I kept whistling "Liberty Bell" while we were dyeing eggs, and darned if Bug wasn't whistling along with me.

No question but that Bug and Button are getting exposed to a fairly catholic assortment of music in this house. Sousa, Joplin, classical from Mozart to Copland, salsa, Afropop, rock from Beatles to Phish, bluegrass, Celtic folk, pipe and drum bands, show tunes, movie musicals, Cats, blues, Irving Berlin, jazz, and even filk. Not to mention: "We have both kinds, country and western!"

Two good weekly podcast music programs I've found:

The Bluegrass Preservation Society Radio Show of the Bluegrass Preservation Society of Gassaway, West Virginia. Two hours of great bluegrass music, recorded at local West Virginia concerts (many of them at the local bowling alley). The show is hosted by Ewell Ferguson and his three-legged bluegrass kitty cat Buster, who "mans the sound board and pushes them buttons." Ewell is so corny sometimes that he makes Hee Haw sound like the BBC, but he is funny, and the music is often flat out terrific. The podcast feed is [http://www.bluegrasspreservation.org/index.xml].

Radio Macondo, an hour of salsa music. I'm no expert on salsa, but this is great stuff to listen to. Thankfully, the program is hosted in English. The podcast feed is [http://rmacondo.libsyn.com/rss].

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Last week, the skunks came out of the woodwork and onto the streets. Taking Bug and Button to school (a matter of about 6 miles) I passed two freshly-killed skunks, one a few blocks from our house and another a mile or so from the school. Half a mile past the school, on the way to work, I passed a third fresh corpse.

The next day I passed two more, and they've been everywhere since. One of the skunks was on the main drag, half a mile from the mall in the most dense commercial zone in town. It's like the streets have been carpeted in sable and argent.

We don't live out in the country—we live in the heart of the largest city for eighty miles in any direction. Although over the years I've seen a considerable variety of wildlife up to one roaming coyote, it's not unusual for me to go several months without seeing a freshly-killed skunk.

Morgan reminds me that a few years ago there was a similar outbreak of sail-squirrels (the ones you can peel up and sail like frisbees). We had noticed an unusual number of squirrels in our yard—in fact, we'd been live-trapping them and taking them to a park; you haven't been cussed out until you've been cussed by a pissed-off squirrel—then suddenly they all ran out into the streets at once.

It's as if there's some particular population density at which the pheromone levels or competition for food or something suddenly causes an 80% drop in survival instincts, and an entire species suddenly turns into Walt Disney lemmings. Only the fastest and smartest survive—the species as a whole is improved.

While lemming stampedes are a myth (Wikipedia.org), I've read that locusts actually undergo a physical change when their population density reaches the swarming level: after a locust's hind legs have been bumped into enough times, it changes color and gets larger and begins eating everything green in sight.

Heaven help us if this should happen to anything larger than skunks and possums. If deer and bears suddenly started running out in front of cars here in town, we'd have chaos.

I don't hunt, myself, but I grew up around hunters and fishermen and I understand the serious hunting community (as opposed to the beer-swilling-morons-with-shotguns community). Most of the serious hunters I know are also conservationists, and prefer a balanced wildlife system. But the large predators have been mostly cleared out of the Ozarks. Cougars, wolves, and even coyotes are scarce or altogether absent.

So for deer and other large herbivores that leaves a choice between hunting and overpopulation. Several years back, in response to calls for reducing or outlawing deer hunting, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission published their predictions of what would result. They estimated that, without human predation, deer would be overrunning farms within five years, and that within ten years there would be over 50,000 collisions per year between deer and cars.

A woman I used to work for did hit a doe here in town, right on the interstate. A small doe, but the front of her car was folded up like an old coke can; she was lucky the deer didn't come through the windshield into her lap.

So I can handle the little animals, the skunks and rabbits and possums and squirrels and maybe the occasional raccoon, but let's hope that nothing averaging bigger than fifteen pounds or so decides to suddenly thin out its population here in town. I just couldn't stand the excitement.

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Rain on Hallowe'en, again. It's cloudy and dark, but not actually raining right now. The girls are getting dressed to go trick-or-treating, dressed as a slumber party. They've got new flannel nightgowns that we made this weekend, out of matching floral prints in different colors. (For warmth, they've got t-shirts and sweatpants on under the nightgowns.) We've put curlers in their hair and cold cream on their faces, to complete the costume. A third girl from Bug's class at school was supposed to go with them, but canceled because of the rainy weather.

We did jack-o'lanterns yesterday. Button, the five-year-old, chose a slightly scary face designed by Bug (based on past designs by me), while Bug went in a totally new direction this year, doing everything in lozenges, including a mouth made of disconnected lozenges suggested by Morgan. The lozenges work surprisingly well as a face, and saved me a good deal of trouble, since Bug chose a pumpkin with nearly two-inch thick walls, which would have been almost impossible to carve into curves with a regular knife. I had trouble even pulling the knife back out after making a cut, the wall was so thick.

This year and next year might be the last ones where the girls get to go trick-or-treating in darkness; in 2007 the new rules for Daylight Saving Time take effect, and sunset will come an hour later on Hallowe'en from then on. But maybe by then they'll be old enough to stay up enough later to still go about in the dark. I hope so: Trick-or-treating just isn't as much fun when it's still light outside.

18:15 - The girls have just set out with Morgan, all dressed up, after the traditional taking of numerous pictures. I wait at home, armed with a bowl of candy and a CD of Bach organ fugues, with the bass on the stereo cranked up to floor-shaking level. (Oh, how I wish for a sub-woofer for these recordings!) So far this evening we've only had one trick-or-treater come here; no idea yet whether this will be a slow year or is just slow getting started. Of course, we would normally consider two dozen kids to be a heavy year, even if it's not raining. There just aren't as many trick-or-treaters as there used to be (especially when Hallowe'en falls on a school night). It's a little sad.

21:15 - The rain started again about 45 minutes ago. The pumpkins are sitting on the back deck, staring in the kitchen door: "Let us in . . . It's cold out here . . ." We got about ten trick-or-treaters altogether. A fairly quiet night.

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Last weekend we took a family trip, the first one in several months. We reserved a hotel room in Harrison, piled overnight bags in the van, and took off.

Click any thumbnail for a larger image

The primary goal of our trip was Rush, a ghost town near the Buffalo River, but we also hoped to see some nice fall colors across the Ozarks. Morgan and I both took our cameras; Morgan also intended to scout for more barns and rough buildings; some of them may appear in Morgan's next show.

The Trip

Quick summary: Saturday we drove to Harrison, checked into a very small suite in the Comfort Inn; then drove on to Rush for a quick tour with the last of the afternoon; and returned to Harrison after supper. Sunday morning, although it was much colder, we drove out to Rush again, spending more time on the trails and roads; then we headed home through Harrison, catching a late lunch at a Waffle House (smoke-free by city ordinance!); we arrived home in the late afternoon.

Bug is eight and wants to know everything. For much of Saturday morning I was pointing out trees to her, explaining how oaks look different from maples, talking about the types and colors of leaves, the way the branches grow, how sweetgum leaves are star-shaped, how hickory trees have compound leaves. How the limbs of most kinds of oaks grow sturdy but crooked and ungraceful, but pin oaks grow tall straight trunks with long straight branches, so that when a pin oak gets good color it looks like an exploding firework. How there are more different sorts of oak trees in Arkansas than of any other type of tree, and how I was taught in school that the "oak-hickory association" is the basis for forests across the Ozarks.

Later as we hiked around I pointed out leaves and branches to her, teaching her to recognize oak trees by the way the buds cluster at the ends of the twigs, explaining the difference between palmate and pinnate veining in leaves.

Button, on the other hand, is five, and while she was impressed with the pretty sugar maples we passed, she was just as happy to read or take a nap. Both girls were a little drowsy, since Morgan gave them Dramamine before we set out.

As it turns out, we were a week or two early for the best colors, although we saw enough to keep us happy. Maplewood Cemetery in Harrison is worth remembering; there we saw some of the prettiest maples we've found. Morgan took a ton of pictures over the weekend and I took no few myself; I would have run out of space on my camera if we hadn't picked up another flash card for it at the Harrison Wal-Mart Sunday morning. (But that was partly because before we left I neglected to offload pictures of Button asleep at the supper table.)

We also lucked into a good (if out of the way) place to eat: the Gravel Bar Restaurant in Caney, between Yellville and Rush, where we had supper on Saturday evening. They have live music on Saturday nights, and we were lucky enough to hear a small band called Rio: a gal singer, two guitarists, and a percussionist, all middle-aged and skilled, playing light rock and folk. They started off with "Big Yellow Taxi", then ranged from early Beatles to Alison Krauss. I liked (and could sing along with) nearly everything they played, even though some of their choices were a little odd, like the old Loggins and Messina tune "House at Pooh Corner". When it was time to leave, Bug was eager to put a tip in their jar, but Button had an attack of the shies and Mama had to do it for her.

But the real prize was the traveling itself, on a beautiful weekend with nearly-perfect weather, chilly but very clear. Despite repeated offers from me, Morgan did all of the driving, partly because of a tendency to carsickness in the mountains (where the girls get it), but also just because it's Morgan's van. So I was left with nothing to do but relax and watch the landscape roll by.

We saw countless vultures, several hawks, about eight deer including one six-to-eight point buck, and one wild turkey that flew across the road as we were leaving Rush Sunday morning. We also discovered the Land of Green Scum, along Highway 412 between Harrison and Yellville, where most of the stock ponds were so heavily scummed over they looked like you could walk across them.

Rush

Rush lies about an hour eastward of Harrison, down small highways and county roads. If Rush Landing wasn't a popular access point for canoeists along the Buffalo River, Rush itself would probably be completely overlooked today. But at the end of the 19th century it was one of the largest towns in northern Arkansas, because of zinc mines: the Morning Star, the McIntosh, and more than two dozen others. At its peak during World War I the valley had about 5000 residents.

Rush had a telephone exchange, but no sewer system. Even in 1915, ore was carried out to the railroad terminals in wagons hauled by mules or oxen. A six-ton chunk of zinc carbonate ore from the Morning Star mine won a gold medal at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair; another, smaller chunk was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

But the ore was difficult to find and expensive to extract, and after the Great War's end the town just evaporated. In 1958 somebody tried to open a new mill, but failed disastrously.

What can you see today? Eight or ten somewhat preserved wooden buildings: a few houses, a blacksmith shop, something that looks like an old store or other business. A fair number of concrete foundations and chimneys and rock walls, a few mine openings with bars across them, and a crude stonework erection labeled "Smelter", possibly the original smelter built in 1886, just fifty years after Arkansas statehood, when prospectors thought they'd found silver.

The town is now maintained by the National Parks Service, as part of the Buffalo National River. The surviving buildings have fences around them, and signs that say, "Historic Building / Unsafe to Enter / Unlawful to Deface". Two of them have fresh boards visible, indications that somebody is trying to maintain them beyond simple preservation. But the largest of them, the supposed store, is already partly collapsed.

How do you deal with a "ghost town"? If you restore it, you've obviously destroyed the air of ruin and abandonment that makes it "ghostly." If you simply let it rot away naturally, then in a few more decades the entire place will simply be piles of rotted wood. How do you maintain an abandoned building with holes in the roof and entire walls missing, without making it look "preserved" like an exhibit in a museum? It's surely a philosophical puzzle for the National Parks people.

It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that someone was mowing around the buildings. Otherwise, the undergrowth would have quickly hidden them at least up to the middle of the walls. In fact, without at least that much maintenance the buildings would probably have forty-foot oak trees growing right through them by now.

Saturday afternoon we walked around the few buildings and the smelter, and drove down to the river landing. Morgan got a very good picture of Bug leaning against a fence rail; several prints have already been given out. I got a few decent pictures myself, although I'm not the photographer Morgan is.

Sunday morning we tried the trails around the valley, some of them rather steep and rocky. Bug wanted to go on and on, and Button wanted to go home, but each of them was a good sport in her way, as we went further and just a little further along the highest trail, but still stopped far short of walking all of it.

There are chunks of concrete and old bits of rusted pipe scattered all around, but other than such durable artifacts the trail seems to wind through much the same sort of woodland that you'd find elsewhere in the Ozarks: oak and hickory, sweetgum and maple, with scattered dogwood and spruce and pine, and sumac or poison ivy where the trails open out.

But walking along a dirt road a couple of miles from the remaining buildings we came across a curious shrub, with long vicious red-tipped thorns branching from glossy green stems, bearing bright yellow-orange fruits the size of ping-pong balls. We couldn't identify it, so we took pictures. It took nearly an hour on the internet to find it after we got home: Poncirus trifoliata, also known as hardy orange or flying dragon, a native of China and Korea.

Ninety or a hundred years before, some housewife had imported this plant's ancestor to cheer up her gardens—or, in light of those thorns, to border her watermelon patch. Her homestead was long gone, even the foundations likely buried or crumbled, but this unlikely alien from the other side of the world still grows among the oaks and briars of the Ozarks.

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I keep wanting to put down some of my thoughts about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It's been more than a month now, and the news has stayed bad. Some of my earliest thoughts are beginning to be supported by the national news.

Basics

I've no head for dates; I had to get the date from Wikipedia. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans on the morning of Monday, August 29th. She was originally aimed dead at New Orleans, which expected to have a storm surge come right up the river, if not right overland; instead the eye curved east more quickly than expected, as Rita would do three weeks later. The first reports were that New Orleans had some flooding from heavy rains, and considerable wind damage (I saw video of a major hotel with every window on one side blown out) but that the levees had held. But a few hours after the eye had gone by, levees or flood walls breached in several places, allowing Lake Ponchartrain to flood something like 90% of the city. Even parts of the French Quarter that were actually above sea level got flooded at least briefly.

No one seems to know—yet—just what caused the breaches. Some experts say the levees show a high-water mark a foot or so below the top, and that no surge ever overtopped them. I heard one story that a drifting river barge or small ship rammed one. There are rumors going round, almost certainly groundless, that the government breached the levees on purpose to drown the blacks who were unable to evacuate.

But the story can be better gotten from the national media than from me. I want instead to put down some of my personal thoughts.

A Loss of History

One time, well over a decade ago, I drove down the highway along the Mississippi coast, probably through Gulfport or some such, a highway that ran right through town, between a broad public beach and a solid line of huge Victorian houses. I was interested mainly in the beach and the Gulf itself, but I remember the impression those wonderful old houses made on me. I always wanted to take Morgan down there to see them. Probably not a one of them was more than eight feet above the high-tide line. Probably every one of them is toothpicks and matchsticks now.

One of the fundamental facts of life, one of the ones I try to get across to my children, is that things always change. Nothing lasts forever. "This too shall pass"—the most hopeful and mournful saying in English. Those houses would inevitably go, one day, as even the sturdiest of Roman ruins will one day be gone from Europe, as even Stonehenge and the Easter Island statues will someday be gone. But I'll never be able to take my love to view that wonderful sight.

New Orleans, especially the French Quarter, was without a doubt the grubbiest, most decrepit tourist town I ever saw. Especially in the Quarter, a general atmosphere of genteel decay was a central aspect of the town's appeal. We still joke about a restaurant where we ate lunch on a narrow wrought-iron balcony that sagged a good six inches from wall to outer railing. Morgan and I made an agreement, if the balcony started to collapse into the street, which of us would grab which child in our leap for the French window. The Saint Louis #1 cemetery, one of New Orleans' most famous, lay in an area of town so poor that you were advised only to visit it with a very large tour group.

I visited New Orleans for the first time back in the early 80's, staying in a hotel on Canal Street and walking over into the Quarter every chance I got. I stood outside Preservation Hall listening to the band because even standing room in that tiny place had filled long before I got there. I marveled at the shops, everything from weird magic shops to art galleries, from strip bars that kept their doors open until the last bit of G-string was about to come off to fortune tellers on nearly every block. My boss, Dave, who had been there as a teenager, was acting as tour guide, marveling at how little things had changed. Except now, he noted, even the fortune tellers took American Express.

I remember standing on a corner looking at little square tiles embedded in the sidewalk, spelling out the name Pete Fountain, where he had once had a club. I listened to Pete Fountain albums when I was a kid, the ones my parents bought, him and Al Hirt and Boots Randolph, the big names in jazz in the 60's. It was a curious feeling to see his name embedded in a sidewalk and know that the peak of his fame had passed but this landmark still survived. It's what I imagine it must be like to visit Grauman's Chinese Theater and try your hand against the handprint of Barbara Stanwyck or Jimmy Stewart.

Of course, my memory of that moment is slanted by what happened next: My boss quietly said, "Don't make a big deal of it, but look over at that balcony across the street and see if you see any women on it at all." As casually as I could, I looked, and saw plenty of couples on the balcony and in the large room that opened onto it, but no women. Dave remarked that as another change since his earlier visits, that gay bars were so much more open about it. Fortunately, he was no more offended by it than I was, just amused and a little astonished at the openness of it.

What's going to happen to the essential character of the Quarter now? How much of it will have to be demolished? Will even the relatively undamaged portions of it get swept up in the rebuilding craze that's going to overwhelm New Orleans in the years to come? How do you rebuild an entire city without losing its historical flavor, without turning it into an unintentional parody of itself?

Race

Let me say first that I don't believe race had much to do with the pattern of evacuation. The poorest people were the ones last out or left behind, the ones left in the dubious shelter of the Superdome or the chaos of the convention center, which wasn't ever intended to be used as a shelter.

I don't believe the CIA deliberately dynamited the levees to drown the blacks who were unable to evacuate. New Orleans had too much to lose to the water for anybody but a lunatic to deliberately breach the levees. Nor do I believe that blacks will be mysteriously unable to get building permits or insurance payments that will be readily available to equally-provided whites.

But race had everything to do with the distribution of wealth in the area, had everything to do with who the poorest people were. And race will have just as much to do with who can afford to return.

Touring cemeteries in the city, Morgan and I drove to the Saint Louis #1 by the very worst possible route, down back streets we got onto by accident, that looked like they might dead-end in a housing-project parking lot at any moment, that with parked (and abandoned) cars were only one lane wide in places, past shotgun houses that probably dated to the Depression, the only such houses I'd ever seen anywhere except the poorest farm country. The idea of an entire block of shotgun houses shoulder-to-shoulder instead of placed one or two on every forty acres was incomprehensible to me before that afternoon. We drove through a mile or so of that neighborhood before we came to Saint Louis Street that runs along the northeast side of the cemetery, and for that entire time we and our daughters were probably the only four whites in the area.

That was only the second time in my life I was frightened of the people around me strictly because they were black. It wasn't their color that frightened me. It wasn't their obvious poverty, though I was shocked deeply by that. It was the fact that they were so completely segregated, that the very fact that we were white identified us as people immeasurably more wealthy than anybody around us, that even though nearly everyone around us was surely a decent person who'd have been happy to let us use a phone or help us change a tire, our color marked us as a plain target for that little fraction of these people who might not be so nice. I had the same feeling driving through the center of St. Louis back in 1986.

According to Google Earth (which seems to have a problem with negative elevations), Saint Louis #1, about half a mile northeast of the Superdome, is dead at sea level, which means that entire area was probably under several feet of water during the worst of the flooding. Almost certainly, every single shotgun house and shabby apartment building we passed in that area now has an appointment with a bulldozer. And those will not be the first houses rebuilt, not by private builders, not by the city government.

More than a million people were evacuated for Katrina, about half of them from New Orleans. At least half of those people have no homes to go back to, and won't for years to come. Thousands of people, tens of thousands, have already gotten jobs and bought homes in Baton Rouge, Houston, and places even more remote.

New Orleans has, by force of circumstance, accomplished something that New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities would pay billions to accomplish, if they could figure a way past the political outrage that would result: New Orleans has removed all of its poorest, least employable—and blackest—citizens and dumped them on other cities, many of them never to return. Cincinnati or St. Louis would surely think a few billion dollars a small price to pay for the more-or-less permanent removal of a quarter-million of their most impoverished residents.

Now what will happen? First the repairable homes and businesses will be repaired. Then the people with the best insurance and the best jobs and the best locations and the best reasons to return will rebuild the best parts of town. Enormous efforts will be made to preserve the oldest houses, dating right back to the days of French settlement.

But no restoration of the thousands of Depression homes and rental ruins will take place. If the most completely devastated areas are rebuilt, it will be in one of three ways: Developers and speculators will take over entire areas and build modern homes for outright sale, not for rental; or the government will slowly build projects that will hold only a fraction of the poor people that have been pushed out; or—worst case—developers will build what an NPR newsman called "neo-precious", a fantasy of what New Orleans means to the rest of the country—New Orleans as theme park.

In none of these cases will there be cheap homes for a quarter of a million displaced poor folk. Oh, there'll be some blacks brought back; somebody has to change the sheets in the hotels and sweep the aisles of the Superdome (or whatever they build in its place), and there've been several different benefits already to finance the restoration of New Orleans' largely black musical community, but a huge number of the very poorest and least desirable will never be allowed back. The racial balance of New Orleans has been altered for decades to come.

Art and Salvage

Among the other losses of the flooding, I can't help remembering the art galleries I saw in the French Quarter. How deep did the water get in the Quarter? Is there a LeRoy Neiman painting like the one I once saw there (not a print, an original painting) with mud and sewage soaked into its canvas? Are hundreds of prints, books, and paintings ruined?

The last trip down to New Orleans, if we'd had thirty thousand dollars we didn't need for anything else, I'd have come away with a Glenna Goodacre bronze I saw in a shop there. The life-size sculpture of a tall slender woman in jogging clothes, one of several ranging in price from a couple of thousand to over sixty thousand, made a tremendous impression on me, although we'd have had to build another room on our house to have a place to put it. Now, though, I imagine that bronze, and the others I saw there, with a high-water mark anywhere from knee to breast.

If it were mine, I would have it cleaned, if I had to ship it back to Glenna's studio in New Mexico. But how many thousands more would be added to the price now, if that bronze were accompanied by a certificate attesting that it survived the 2005 New Orleans flood? How many purchasers would carefully coat the staining or corrosion to preserve them forever, to show to everyone who saw the piece its dramatic history? Is a LeRoy Neiman painting with mud halfway up its brilliant colors ruined, or merely converted to a different sort of collectible?

I predict that Ebay will soon have (if it doesn't already—I haven't looked) a section dedicated entirely to relics of the New Orleans flood, water-damaged trinkets that were worth a couple of bucks in July now being bid up to hundreds of dollars. If the Superdome really does have to be demolished, the owners can probably finance the rebuilding by selling the original seats for several hundred apiece.

Like thousands of other people, my spouse has a piece of the Berlin Wall, which fell a few months before we met, while Morgan was in Germany. But there will be millions of pieces of debris, flotsam, and jetsam from this flood, enough to provide souvenirs for anyone on earth who can afford one. Somebody somewhere is probably already planning how to build a house entirely from salvaged lumber from New Orleans or Gulfport or Biloxi. Somebody's probably already applied—maybe hundreds of people—for whatever licenses are necessary to salvage and resell the ruins.

I've seen disasters before, fires and floods and back in the 80's a town ripped to pieces by a tornado; I was watching live as each tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. When a tornado hit my home town several years back I felt no desire to go out and view more damage, and what damage I did see was largely because Morgan had never seen tornado damage and wanted to know what it was like. I don't want souvenirs from New Orleans myself; I'd think I was being morbid if I did.

But as morbid as it sounds to collect pieces of such a disaster, I don't condemn anyone who wants a bit. I think it would be worse if no one made any attempt to commemorate the losses at all. But I can't help but want to spit on the people who lost nothing to Katrina, but will make a fortune off her leavings.

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I am a subscriber to the plan put forth by fire departments (and battery companies) that you should change the batteries in your smoke detectors every spring and fall when you change your clocks for Daylight Saving Time.

This is really a pretty good memory trick to make sure your batteries never go dead. For a college business class, Morgan, my spouse, had to do a report on a public service program that was also good marketing. Morgan chose the DST–battery link—it saves lives and sells batteries. The report got a good grade.

I'm not really worried about being caught out with a dead smoke alarm when the house catches fire. A smoke alarms these days won't just go dead; when the battery gets weak the alarm will start to emit a piercing chirp every few minutes as a warning. And I'm not one of those people who'll pull the alarm down and throw it in a corner when it starts chirping, then die in a fire because I was too lazy to replace the battery.

But it seems like whenever a smoke alarm's battery gets weak, the alarm picks about three in the morning to start telling me about it. So I faithfully replace the batteries twice a year, just to protect my sleep.

Except that apparently last spring I missed one.

This morning in the wee hours, I woke up and heard, Chirp! I realized foggily that I'd been hearing it for a while, at intervals. After further foggy consideration I identified it as a smoke alarm with life-support failing. There are several smoke alarms in our house, and this was far enough away I thought I could ignore it. I was eventually successful, and fell back asleep.

A little after four my alarm went off for my morning ride. But this morning was the coldest so far this fall and I chickened out; I decided to snooze on the couch for a while. No sooner had I stretched out under my old plaid blanket than: Chirp!

I tried again to ignore it, but this time I was too much awake and it was too close, so I got up to look for the little offender and rip its 9-volt Ray-O-Vac guts out.

You learn the acoustics of your home, consciously and unconsciously: the way sounds carry and echo, the distances from one part to another. Lying in bed, I'd been pretty sure that the chirps were coming from the alarm in the kitchen. Lying on the couch the impression had been even stronger. So I unsnapped the kitchen alarm, popped out its battery, laid them both on the counter until daylight should provide me the strength to deal further with them, and went back to the couch.

Chirp!

Oh, crap! It still sounded like the unit in the kitchen, so it had to be the alarm in the front hall, just a few feet away, originally intended to serve the two front bedrooms. So I got groaning to my feet, grumped out into the hall, and dismounted and disembatteried another alarm.

Now, the kitchen unit has a hush feature, so if you burn toast or boil over a pan on the stove or forget to take a pie out of the oven you can make the smoke alarm shut up for a few minutes while you ventilate the room. It works like this:

1. Something starts to smoke
2. The alarm starts shrieking insanely
3. You have a full second of blind panic
4. You press the HUSH button five or six times as hard as you can
5. The alarm stops shrieking and starts saying Chirp! once or twice a minute
6. You open the door and turn on the vent fan while your spouse painfully stifles laughter
7. After eight or ten minutes the hush feature turns off, and either the smoke alarm falls silent or begins shrieking again, at which point your spouse abandons all pretense and giggles hysterically until you threaten never to cook again.

The problem is that, when you first put a battery in the unit, the hush feature sometimes turns itself on, and the little beast chirps happily away for the next ten minutes or so. So I didn't put the kitchen unit back up; the hall unit and its suspect battery joined the group on the kitchen counter.

And I went back to the couch, where I once again made myself comfortable.

You guessed it. Chirp!

Now, there are only so many smoke alarms in our house. You may wonder at this point why I didn't just rip all of them down and remove every battery (and maybe pile them all up in the yard and make a bonfire and dance around them leaping and chanting). I thought I knew where the sound came from. It was too quiet originally to be the unit in our bedroom. It was too loud later to be in either of the front bedrooms, which are normally kept closed. So I had been certain that it was one of the two I'd already taken down.

But a couple of years ago, we'd put up a new unit in the girls' bedroom, because we normally kept their door closed so that the one in the front hall was inadequate. It was a different make, I reasoned now, so maybe it was louder than the older ones; maybe it sounded that loud even through a closed door.

So I quietly opened the girls' door, reached above it, and took down their unit. I then suffered several moments' confusion, trying to find the battery hatch on the back, only to discover this one ate its battery through the side. I popped out the battery, added two more items to the line on the kitchen counter, and lay down on the couch again.

Chirp!

What the— I thought I'd taken down the last unit in the front of the house!

Okay, maybe when we put up an alarm in the girls' room we'd also added one in the front bedroom, which we use for storage. So I got creakily up off the couch again and padded down the hall to the front room, cracked open the door, and looked up. Sure enough, there perched another of the new units, like a white limpet mine above the doorframe. I pulled it down, popped its battery with something like real competence this time, and lined it up on the counter with its fellow sleep-murdering demons.

And went back to the couch. Chirp!

At this point I began to seriously consider poltergeists. I had now taken down every single smoke alarm upstairs, except for the one in our bedroom, and I knew it wasn't the one I was hearing. It was only eight feet from our bed, for pity's sake; if it'd started chirping I'd've leapt right out the window.

The only possibility I saw left was that we'd put one up in the basement and forgotten about it. I vaguely remembered plans for that, as I'd vaguely remembered the unit in the front room. The basement stairwell opens right by our bedroom door, though, so it should have sounded louder in our room than in the living room. But where else could it be?

By now it was about a quarter to five; any chance of a nap was past. But I bloody well had to know what had been chirping at me for the last half hour.

So I went to stand in the stairwell. If a chirp came up from below, I'd be certain of the direction. (You don't go down in our basement in the dark unless you're certain. The front bedroom is storage; the basement is desperation.) I stood there, and stood there, and stood there. And stood there.

Chirp!

The sound didn't come from the basement. The sound didn't come from the basement. I was left with three unlikely possibilities: The unit in our bedroom was louder from the living room than from our bed; one of the disabled units on the kitchen counter was possessed; or I was suffering piercing auditory hallucinations.

I chose the least scary of the options, and slunk back into our bedroom to pull down the unit above the closet door. The kitchen counter was pretty well crammed by now, so I decided to lay this one on the washing machine. I closed the lid of the empty washer.

Which promptly roared into a spin cycle.

Apparently Morgan had stopped the washer just before the end of its final spin, and emptied it out without clearing the cycle. I jerked the lid back open, waited for my hand to stop shaking, and punched in the knob. With still-racing heart, I laid the fifth smoke alarm, the last one in the house, on the washer next to its battery.

I turned around and leaned on the washing machine to calm down a little more, and there it was, lying loose on the narrow counter between the dryer and the kitchen sink.

A sixth smoke alarm.

My vague recollections of our plan to put a unit in the basement were real enough. We'd bought the unit, but we'd never installed it; it had just been left lying in the utility room.

But some idiot (me, probably) had put a battery in it.

Later that morning, when Morgan asked me, with a worried look about the eyes, why all the smoke alarms we owned were spread out on counters, I did not find the explanation easy. Or brief.

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Improving the species – February 7, 2006
Initial research into Blogspot – September 13, 2005

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Easter eggs – April 15, 2006
Hallowe'en – October 31, 2005

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Rush – October 30, 2005
New Orleans – October 9, 2005

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I have not yet begun to moan.
— John Paul Mones, 1779.

Improving the species II – September 14, 2006

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New Orleans – October 9, 2005

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Cat Haiku – May 4, 2006
The Death of Sleep – October 7, 2005

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Improving the species II – September 14, 2006
Easter eggs – April 15, 2006
Improving the species – February 7, 2006
Hallowe'en – October 31, 2005
Rush – October 30, 2005

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My spouse, Morgan, wants to start something midway between a blog and a magazine, but I'm the website writer of the household, so I'm doing the initial research. Blogspot seems like the obvious place to start, since it's about the easiest.

Personally, I've never had that much to say to the general public, but it's always possible I'll get obsessed with the idea.

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