Something Entirely Different

This morning, I was reading an article by Henry Paulson in Foreign Affairs, and was so irritated by it that I sat down to write some kind of reply, if only to myself. Then I decided I'd post it as a diary on Daily Kos, the left-political group blog. So today's blog is over there, if you are interested in reading what I think of Henry Paulson, Sec'y. of the Treasury, as a writer. You can find it here.

Back tomorrow with the wind and weather from the Sunshine Coast.

Pardon Whom?

We’re down to the last six weeks before the changing of the guard and now facing one of the last awful parts of all presidencies: the pardons. The blogs and the political droners all have lots to say about who needs a pardon and who is likely to get one. There are said to be 2,300 applicants already for this honor (or dishonor, as the case may be). The Washington Post, last night, had a poll up where we brainless readers could provide our opinion as to whether Bush would in fact pardon those on their list of the top six: Edwin Edwards, Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham, Michael Milken, Marion Jones, Ted Stevens, and Scooter Libby. I made up an opinion so that I could see what my fellow Americans had to think on this topic about which they have no information and it turns out that Scooter Libby is very high on the list of those whom we expect to get a pardon. A potential two-time winner: not only a commutation of sentence but also a pardon. What a guy.

Over at Slate, Dafna Linzer has a longer list of potential pardonees, as well as an estimate of their probable success in winning Bush’s heart. Her list is long enough that it needs to be divided into six categories including Sports Felons, Texas Felons, Bush Team Felons, Congressional Felons, Team Abramoff Felons, and White Collar Felons (including Martha Stewart). (Regardless of category, there are an awful lot of Republicans on this list.)

With respect to the success of all these requests, my position is largely that of Luke 12:48: For to whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more. And I don’t think that includes asking for a pardon when one has been convicted of a crime. The idea that Michael Milken will be pardoned (considered a very good possibility by Linzer) is a drag upon my spirit. To err is human; to forgive, divine; to forget, impossible. I don’t want Milken forgetting what he did or being able to pretend it never happened, and I’d just as soon nobody else forgot or pretended either.

However, with all this talk of political felons and potential felons (such as all the torture planners and law debasers in this administration) being pardoned, there is one felon not much discussed in the U.S. but of great interest to Canadians. Google ‘Conrad Black’ ‘presidential pardon,’ and you get the usual billion links, the first page of which is all Canadian sources. And that is because U.S. residents and citizens would mostly be saying, ‘Conrad who?’ Canadians, would not. They know Conrad well. He’s a former Canadian business mogul from Winnipeg, the CEO of Hollinger International which controlled newspapers in Canada and all over the world (including many U.S. community newspapers).

What the Canadians have against Conrad (and why they are interested in his pardon request) is not that he was rich and powerful, nor that he was found guilty in the U.S. in 2007 of using very large amounts of the company’s funds for his personal use, but rather that, in 1992, he gave up his Canadian citizenship in order to get a seat/title in the U.K.’s House of Lords. (Canadian citizens may not hold titles in another country.) And insulted Canada and Canadians on his way out. Eric Reguly wrote in The Times, "The great man fled his native Canada for Britain. He couldn’t wait to leave, he said, because Canada was turning into a Third World dump run by raving socialists." He is Conrad Black in Canada, but in England, he is Baron Black of Crossharbour. Nevertheless, he is currently residing in a U.S. prison (in Florida) serving a 7-year sentence that was accompanied by a $6 million fine. My sense of talking to Canadians is that they are okay with him being in the U.S., but prefer it to be without the pardon.

So here’s another difference between Canadians and Americans that I wouldn’t know about if I didn’t live here. The Canadians couldn’t care less about Scooter Libby; by contrast, the Americans couldn’t care less about Conrad Black. Caught in between, my advice is pardon none of them, none of the rich and famous and well-placed: God will recognize his own.

Fear Not!

Yesterday, I received an email from an old California friend who moved to Whidbey Island about six months ago. We’ve been trying to find a time to go visit her, but it’s been hard what with one scheduled event or another. She writes that they will be in residence in December unless they have called a moving van by then, responding to their neighbors’ warnings of fearful power blackouts and gray skies and relentless rain. I doubt if she is actually thinking that there will be any call to the moving company or is fearful of gray skies or rain because she is a stalwart trouper, but I think that is how people feel that city people are likely to respond to life in the rural (or sort of rural) northwest. It is true that there are regular power outages, it is true that the skies are really gray in these dark months, it is true that it rains a lot (this morning, for example, when it was hard to believe that anything but staying in one’s pajamas, in one’s bed, in one’s bedroom, with one's engaging novel ought to be happening, never mind those scheduled events on one’s calendar.

Still, you can buy a generator if you are too worried about losing power; and you can put up some cheerful LED light strings and buy sunlight-corrected light bulbs to fend off the gray days, and you can buy a nice raincoat or a sturdy umbrella for the rainy days. It’s not like living in, say, Minnesota in the winter after all. It’s not dangerous. Hardly anyone I know has a generator, when it comes to the fact. A friend who lives on Salt Spring Island just bought one because there, he says, they have periods of a week without electricity, and if it’s going to be a week, you are going to lose whatever is in the freezer. That’s a reason not to live on Salt Spring Island, maybe, but it’s not a reason not to live on the mainland, where the power, at least in my 16 years up here, has never been off more than 48 hours, which a refrigerator/freezer can manage if you are not opening it all the time. In neither Point Roberts nor on the Sunshine Coast are we in danger of flooding from excess rain because everything runs very quickly into the ground, down the ditches, and into the ocean. We don’t have local rivers that overflow. (Flooding can (and does) happen from the ocean, of course, if the tides are high and the wind is strong and from the wrong direction, but even that is pretty much restricted to houses proximate to the beach. And that’s a reason not to live too close to the beach, I guess.)

Overall, however, there’s not much to worry about, or at least not much that is within one’s control (as contrasted with, say, earthquakes). I don’t know what will be the effect on the northwest if the Big Three auto companies fold, but I don’t suppose that any of us has much to say about that outcome. But this is life in the time of fear, which has become the U.S. brand; but it’s also life in the time of a big belief in personal control of one’s life. We’d be better off it were Life in the Time of Stoicism. The Stoics thought that the goal of life was to live in agreement with nature. I’m pretty sure that would include gray skies, lots of rain, and power outages. Californians! City People! Be Not Afraid!

Please! Help! Or Not?

Two weeks ago, the Point Roberts Garden Club people sent out a notice on the Point Interface Email List to inform their neighbors that it was time to come down to Tyee Drive and plant this years’ new daffodil bulbs in the easements so that next spring we will all be gobsmacked by the sight of 20 dozen or so daffs smiling up at us day after day. They were planning the planting for two hours on each of three days the coming week. Monday didn’t work for me because I had a quilting student, but I planned to go down on Tuesday and Thursday to help out. Monday afternoon, I drove by and saw that they had gotten a good start because all the beautiful pink cosmos on one side of the street had been unpended and were lying behind the now-bare raised beds.

But Tuesday morning, the rain was pouring, and I figured that there would be no bulb planting that day. Thursday was no better: more rain. By the weekend, another notice came out as to when they needed help. But that week had its own problems with everyone’s rain and my previously scheduled activities. And, as it happened, the bulb planting still didn’t get done. Finally, a third notice of times came out and I planned to go on the third day. But when I drove by in the afternoon of the second day, it looked like it was already finished, so I didn’t show up on the third day. And it turned out that that was the day they actually finished.

So, what we’ve got here is a failure of communication, or something. The bulbs are all in the ground and I did nothing to help that happen. And that’s okay because other people did manage to get there to make it happen. But I think I need to be either harder on myself, or more generous with others when I notice that they are not showing up for some community work that I did manage to get to do.

I can imagine that one of the conditions for living here would be doing community service. Sort of like military service. Everyone would be required to do five units of community service each year. Okay, I can see right away that that is a genuinely crazy idea because who would decide what constituted a unit of service, who would keep track of laxness, what would punishment be for failure to do service (eviction? exile? who would enforce that?), who would decide who could be excused on grounds of …well, then also who would decide what conditions would be grounds for an excuse? Obviously a bureaucratic nightmare. Better just personal responsibility. It would be a good thing, indeed a morally good thing, if everyone tried to do something for the community each year. But it’s up to each of us to make that happen. The alternative is not a good choice.

Christmas Decor

I was driving east on Benson the other day and turned to look through the Drewhenge Arch as I passed it. I usually do this because I am interested in discovering where Mr. Drew’s black-and-white-spotted metal cow is pasturing from day to day. This realistic objet d’art sometimes is facing the road, sometimes has his back (or side) to passersby, sometimes is close to the arch, sometimes is far back. I imagine that at night he crosses the road and crops the grass closely in the field opposite. I imagine this because that field is always close-cropped and I’ve never seen people or machines cutting it. Must be the work of an artistic cow.

Anyway, there was the cow. But, on the other hand, the cow was not exactly the cow I expected to see. Today, the black and white spotted cow has become a Christmas cow. He is red and green spotted. Not a bright and garish red and green, but instead a subdued, tasteful red and green, the kind of Christmas colors you see in high-end stores.

I have to laugh to think of Mr. Drew thinking to do this. If I had a metal cow, I probably wouldn’t move it around, and I probably wouldn’t change the color of its spots to celebrate the season (will they be yellow and lavender for Easter?). But I am glad to know that he is thinking of these things, and now he is making me think about them, too. I am wondering what else he could do. Will the cow have a mortar board with tassel when we come to graduation time? Will the cow get a parka for the winter? Will the cow ever get a friend? Does Mr. Drew need outside help in thinking about this? I am also thinking of knocking on Mr. Drew’s door and asking him what he’s about. Probably an inventor not only of locking stones but of something even more amazing. Something to do with cows, I imagine.

Knocking on Doors

Sometimes I think that what I might best do is just knock randomly at doors in Point Roberts and ask the occupants to tell me about themselves: what they do and why they’re doing it here. A couple of days ago, we did approximately that and did we get a story! It wasn’t entirely random, of course, and we were invited to come to hear the story, but it wasn’t anyone I knew, although I had been introduced to him at a party once.

The P.R. resident in question lives over on the bluff on the east side of the Point, which means that his front room windows open onto a grand view of Boundary Bay, as well as the far shore down south to Bellingham, and across to the majestic Mount Baker. The sunrises, he confided, are beyond beautiful. As a late riser, I’m likely never again to see a sunrise, but I could surely imagine how beautiful they would be from this perch.

Our host is a gentleman in his mid-80’s, a retired physician (cardiac research) with a British accent. Ed first came to know of him because he is the only person on the Point with his own helicopter. Next to his house was a funny, helicopter-shaped shed where the machine was kept when not in the air. It’s empty now because he has exchanged it for a small, fixed-wing plane over at the P.R. airport. (I’m thinking about the perfect purpose for this long, thin, and now empty shed/hangar.) I first heard of him because a quilting acquaintance was working with him on his post-retirement work, which was inventing an electric car. Which he has done, complete with patents and business. You can read about his work at his company’s website.

What he’s got going is a modular car. It has two parts: the upper part with the seats, enclosure, steering, etc., is called the Ridon; the bottom part, which has the wheels, the mechanical aspects of a car, and the batteries, etc., is called the Modek. Together, they form the Ridek. The idea is that you buy the top part (which can be as stylish as you’d like it) and you lease access to the bottom part (this lower module is not really visible except for the wheels and the module has a life of about 30 years). When your battery runs low, you take the whole thing to a battery station and they exchange the bottom part of the car for a newly charged one. The bottom and top are connected by latches and the whole trade out takes a matter of minutes because, other than the mechanical connection of the latches, the breaks, and the steering, everything else connects wirelessly.

Now, this all sounds like leggos to me given my total lack of knowledge about cars and how they work, but after a couple of hours of explanation, I got it. One thing is that a battery-powered car is a lot less complex mechanically than a gas-powered car, so a lot of the parts that I vaguely think of as essential and complex would not be there…carburetors, pistons, intakes, gas tanks (certainly the last—even I can figure that out). Thus a modular mechanical car isn’t that complex a deal.

He already has an agreement with a Peruvian who wants a fleet of Rideks for use as taxis in Lima. That’s a perfect starting point because it’s a contained use: one company that owns all the Rideks and can create all the battery exchange places, with uses that involve single trips of relatively short distances. The infrastructure has to be available only in Lima. Point Roberts might be another perfect place. An entire country, though: well that’s another matter. But as we talked, I saw/I heard that he is decades ahead of me in his mind, thinking not only about how to make this happen, but also about how this will happen, whether with the Ridek or something else very much like it. I looked at the model (which includes solar panels on the roof to power the air conditioning), and thought, ‘but it doesn’t look like a car.’ And then I thought about the Model T and the SUV and how little they look alike, and the way in which change happens and happens. We live through it incrementally, but it happens over the long run, too. That is the change that he lives in, while I’m here back in the little day-to-day change. Some door to knock on!

(A final benefit of this visit is that I can now talk (if only vaguely) about V2G, which means ‘vehicle to grid.’ This is a much discussed proposal in which a world of battery-powered cars are sitting around with power stored in them that is not, at the moment, needed by the car. If they were all connected to the national power grid when parked, it could help to deal with the electricity companies peak load problem, not least because the greatest draw of power for the utilities is during those periods when the cars are likely to be sitting unused, with stored power (i.e., at night, and during work hours). Well, I said ‘only vaguely.’)

Juice!

Early last week, we went over to the houses of a couple of absent friends—one gone for the winter, the other gone for the week—and cleaned up their apple trees (with prior permission, of course) to prepare for the Fall Juice Event. Many years ago, good friends of ours on the Point managed to barter a quilt for a home apple press. It’s not a terribly big machine, as the picture shows, and only the hopper part is electrical--the small motor is there on the left of the flat top. The rest of it operates by hand. We had picked about a 100 pounds of apples for the event, and others had brought as much again. An evening’s worth of diligent work lay ahead with the promise of an excellent product from our efforts.

Our friends got the press 8 years ago or so and they juice on several nights in October and November, every fall. We usually manage to get to at least one of these occasions. There are five or six discrete jobs involved in this process, so it’s good to have at least that many people, although if you have more than that, everyone can take a brief rest now and then. It’s not hard work, but it does involve standing on a concrete floor for three or four hours. The floor leads to a certain need for respite among the older crowd, especially.

On Saturday night, we went over early with apron in tow. It’s a sticky business, this apple juicing. There were five of us working. Here are the six jobs: washer, cutter/culler, plopper, barrel changer, presser, and bottler. The barrel changer can also double as bottler. First the apples are washed in warm water; then they are cleaned up (the bad parts cut out) . Next they are cut into reasonably-sized pieces. Finally they are plopped into the hopper of the machine. (There are pictures here of the process and the workers.) At that point, the serious pressing begins.

I always work as a plopper. This means I take the cut apple pieces and drop them one piece at a time into the hopper. If you get them in the hopper too fast, they will clog and then the whole process gets slowed down as the grinding has to stop to unclog the machinery. I throw them gracefully into the hopper. I like to throw things, generally. However, I don’t get much opportunity to throw in this life because I can’t catch anything. I can’t catch because when an object comes at me, I close my eyes. So I never get to throw because virtually all throwing also requires one to be willing/able to catch. I toss the apple pieces into the hopper with the intent of hitting a particular spot and then they get crunched up, and I never have to catch them because they don’t come back to me.

I don’t know that it’s the best job, but it’s the best one for me. Of course my co-workers may also think it’s the best and may think of me as a terrible plopper-hog. The plopper also has to sense when the small barrel under the machine is almost full of smooshed apples. You can visually check this, but it isn’t easy to see and you don’t want to keep checking because it requires you to get in other people’s way. Once that barrel is full, you turn the motor off, and the barrel is moved forward so that the presser can take over. He turns a handle with a screw mechanism that presses the juice out. The juice flows down into a bucket. The bottler takes the bucket and fills and labels the bottles (ie, date and to whom the juice belongs). The barrel changer is the person who disposes of the apple mass that remains in the small barrel after the juice has been pressed out. This mass is called ‘pomace’ and it can be fed to chickens or composted. The barrel changer replaces the once-again empty mesh bag into the small barrel and puts it back under the hopper. And then you repeat the whole process. (This is beginning to seem like a Wiki-How.)

By 10:30, we were done with many, but not all the apples, and we called it a night. There’ll be another juicing yet to come with different workers, different apples. We made maybe 15 gallons over the course of the evening. Could have been more, but I wasn’t counting. Some of it will go to the P.R. Food Bank, some will go to one of the descendants of the first Icelandic families (who remembers when some of those strange, now wild, old apple trees were planted), some will go to us, some to the press owners, some to people who come around and long for a draft of fresh apple juice. You bring apples, you work the press: you’re guaranteed juice like nothing that comes from a grocery store, not even Whole Foods.

It’s not only different from what stores offer, but it’s also different from itself. Each small lot tastes different than the next one because each lot uses different kinds of apples or has a different mix of apples in it. Some juice is very sweet; some is spicy, some tastes more fruity, some is slightly astringent. We all have little sips, little tasting glasses of each lot, and note that they are different, but we still have no language for the experience. The wonder of apples: we are rendered speechless.