One Hundred Eleven

Are any of the rest of you freaked out by the number 111 when it comes to naming a temperature?  Michael Palmer of The Weather Channel says that temperatures in the Northeast are going to be 5 to 15 degrees above normal again today.  The summer numbers have been going up steadily for the past five or six years.   I remember thinking that that heat would be difficult to bear if I still lived there.  Then another summer, I remember thinking that it was strange that it happened two years in a row.  Now, it seems to be happening one year after the next.

Climate is changing.  Who gives a shit if the politicians agree about who caused this.  It's hot out there.  I watched Al Gore's movie.  It seems pretty obvious to me.  It's a closed system, folks.  You can't triple one number without getting a reaction somewhere else. 

But let's leave the political argument out of this for a bit.  Let's say you don't agree that our lifestyles have caused this.  What are we going to do when the temperatures reach 120 degrees?  130?  150? Will that change our lifestyles or will we continue to hunker down in our air conditioned huts, going to the grocery store in the morning, wishing away the summer?  It's happening - summer for many people across the country has become what it used to be for people in Arizona. 

These changes call for action, yet I don't hear anything in the news except a lamentation.  Trees can draw in carbon dioxide and release oxygen.  Why can't we figure out how to do that?  Why aren't we working on this problem with more of our resources?

If global warming is left to continue, life is going to continue, you know.  Sure, it will get hot.  Many species will die out, including, possibly, ours.  Oh, we'll try to migrate to cooler areas, but many of those areas have wickedly cold temperatures in the winter.  It's going to be 75 degrees in Fairbanks, Alaska today.  I like being able to check the weather anywhere in the world on The Weather Channel.  I wonder if they're site is popping with activity these days.  I could imagine people in that 111 degree weather are checking it multiple times a day in hopes that the numbers will start to come down.  Michael Palmer will be very popular on the first day he announces an 80 degree day in Chicago. 

So, just what is going to happen with all this climate change?  The face of the continents will change.  Will deserts arise from the extreme temperatures?  I've already heard that the zones have changed across the United States. The plant species in those changed areas will have to change.  The animals too.  Will plant species have time to migrate north?  Animals will.  Will we? 

So, it's going to look different, the United States.  Will it make the Sahara look small?  Will Canada accept the bid for entry for a few million immigrants?  It's going to be 75 degrees in Mexico City today.   Will they allow us to come through?  There would be some irony in that, wouldn't there?  Just saying.  What will people do when their air conditioners fail? 

Can you see the movie that they would make of this?  It's a stunner.  One small band of people, from, say, Chicago, will travel by foot through 125 degree heat to Dauphin, Manitoba.  Yes, I did have to look that town up. Sorry.  They'll walk during the night because the days are too hot to manage.  Someone will die because their small party can't support everyone, but don't worry, it'll be the mean guy, the one who was willing to leave a child behind.  Wildfires will rage around them.  During the day, they'll sleep in the shade of trees whose leaves have already fallen prey to the heat.  They'll battle the border guards, struggle to carry enough water.  They'll arrive just as the temperatures drop in time for the fall, bedraggled, followed by a few million of their closest friends.  The next installation of the movie will have to be how they get through the winter with all the new people in the area choking resources, but it will never be made due to budget constraints.  Society will have begun to break down by then.

So what can we do to stop this terrible movie from being made?  Hunkering down in our air conditioning isn't going to help.  Neither is the jaunt I need to take to the grocery store this morning for one essential thing.  What will it take to make us change our lifestyles?  Catastrophe.  I'm sorry, but that's the gist of it.  We don't want to change.  It's pretty cosy in our big houses with our televisions and our refrigerators running 24 hours a day.  We like being able to pick up packages of food from a shelf.  It's quite a bit easier than going out for a hunt two or three times a week and picking different bits of grass to eat out of our yards.  We like driving comfortable cars to jobs where we move paper around before throwing it out, writing stuff that other people will never read, gathering at meetings to find ways to comply to what the FAA asks for so we can keep those airplanes in the air so we can visit the family in the Midwest this summer. 

If these numbers, the 111s and the 108s, continue to rise, we're going to have to face the truth that something will have to change.  Will we be able to change with it, invent inorganic trees that take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen?  Will we be buying them at our grocery stores and placing them in our yards like pink flamingos, garden gnomes and yellow ribbons?  Will they work?

Time will tell, my friend.  Only time will tell.

Thank you for listening, jb

Talking to Strangers

I love Saturdays.  This afternoon, I took Teddy out to the Three Forks Off Leash Dog Park in Snoqualmie after he chewed up the yellow pages in the truck while waiting for us to get back from Nick's snowboard lesson.  He had found some napkins, an old food wrapper, and a bubble wrap envelope too.  Shredded.  All of it.  The thick book of yellow pages was the most telling.  He had never eaten a book before. 

Don't worry.  He didn't actually eat it.  He just tore it into little bits, a message really, in case we couldn't see his displeasure at our languid return to the truck.  The yellow pages was years out of date.  He'd had to crawl under the seat and pull it out.  I'd even forgotten it was there.  Who even uses three-dimensional phone books anymore anyway?  I just use my iPhone. 

Have I ever told you how much I love my iPhone?  I sometimes use it as a phone, but more often, I text, check definitions for Scrabble on Safari, play Scrabble, Facebook, check Weather Channel weather by location so I can see what the weather is like at the pass, Google Earth for places I want to see before I die, check bids on eBay, get directions, monitor my walks on Runkeeper, monitor my sleep on Zeo, and entertain my boys with a myriad of free games.  Information is at my fingertips.  Did you know that you can see Egypt's pyramids from the satellite images on Google Earth?  Maybe I should look for Notre Dame too (not the university - I've visited the university).  So you see how I could forget that there is a thick yellow pages book under my front seat?  I hadn't needed it in quite a while. 

The remaining job of those yellow pages in this incarnation (I did recycle it) was to soothe a restless puppy.  Sometimes I forget that Teddy is still a pup.  He's a good-natured dog.  He likes his walks, but he can skip a day here and there if he had a decent walk the day before.  He likes to play tug of war and expends some energy that way, though he gets upset if we try to play in the kitchen.  The floor in the kitchen is vinyl and he can't get a good grip with his feet.  The way he shuffles his back legs and whines, sounding very much like an eleven-year-old boy is very funny.  Sometimes, when we're behind with walks, we throw his toys down the stairs for him to retrieve.  Those are only temporary solutions to his excess energy.  Even the cats get to looking at me, asking silently if I'll take him away and later bring home the much quieter, more tired dog that they prefer. 

So today, since I was tired and he was still energetic after shredding everything but my backpack in the truck, I took him to the off-leash dog park.  It was perfect.  The late afternoon sun was golden across new grass, only leaving us momentarily behind dark clouds to remind me to look up at the sky.  I quickly joined a crowd of people standing in the middle of the field.  This park doesn't encourage you to walk the way Marymoor does with its network of trails.  This park is simply a large green field of grass with Mt Si as a backdrop.  People tend to stand in a row facing the mountain.  By the time I got there, it was already turning a dusty purple in the light.  Why do mountains turn purple at sunset?  It doesn't seem to matter what they're covered with, rock or green trees, they still do that. 

I had joined a friendly group, a woman with an Australian Kelpie mix, a couple with a sweet Pit Bull, another couple with a four-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog, a woman with a Shar Pei mutt with no wrinkles, and another couple with a pair of herding mutts that looked like littermates.  The dogs took just minutes to size up us newcomers, Teddy being perceived as no threat at all, but the herding mutts forming a pack against the existing one for a bit until they ironed out who was alpha.  The Pit Bull just wanted cookies from my pocket.  She was already worn out from being there a while.  The Mountain dog pup wanted to be petted, but Teddy swooped past to make sure she knew I was his person and she shouldn't get too attached.  There was no aggression, just a shoulder bump and a loop around.  The Kelpie didn't like when one of the men ran and he backed up against his owner barked his protection orders.   His owner said that she this dog had been abused and he was making great strides.  Oh, the damage that people sometimes do.  It's so hard to undo.  I knew what she meant because I used to have a cat who squatted and peed in fear when you jangled your keys or picked up a rolled newspaper. 

I love that I can join a group of total strangers and begin and then end a relaxed conversation.  Like Teddy, I seemed to fit right in, though some of the other people seemed to know each other.  Later, I found out that they only know each other though their dogs. Everyone was relaxed and having fun.  Even the guy who'd been barked at was feinting a run now and then just to press the Kelpie's buttons, but not too much.  We all laughed as we watched the dogs race and tumble and dodge.
When everyone left, I wasn't ready to go, but somehow didn't want to be left standing there by myself, though I could have used some time to actually walk.  Teddy was tired out and, though I'd gotten little exercise, so was I.  As I walked back to the car, I noticed streaks of clouds that washed over my head in what looked like rows of waves.  They were fanned out from the perception of perspective.  If someone had painted a picture like this, it would have felt contrived, like the ivy-covered cottages of Kincaid, a little too sweet.  But this was my own sky, not a photo or a painting.  I stood, after everyone had left, and waited for the pink to turn to gray, before I left to come home.  Teddy waited patiently at my side, his look telling me we could go since all of his friends had gone. 

When I walked in the door, the cats were happy to see I'd transformed the dog yet again.  It was a good Saturday. 

Thank you for listening, jb