It Really Seems Like Spring

No real winter yet (except for that cold 10 days in December), and now everything has decided to spring early.  It's astonishing to drive around and see the fruit trees springing forth with blossoms.  There are azaleas and rhodos making early presentations; daffodils abound everywhere that there is sun to encourage them to open.  Many of my raspberry bushes are leafed out; the currants and Indian plum are almost past blooming, and the crocuses have finished in my yard.  People are starting to put in gardens, or at least do the preparatory part, the part that usually starts in April.

And there's still time for a sudden frost.  I'm a little overly concerned about things suddenly going bad at the moment, but it doesn't help to have the Associated Press trumpet Chile's earthquake as a model for Vancouver/Portland/Seattle/Point Roberts (well, OK, they didn't mention Point Roberts, but it's obviously part of that triangle) and their coming giant earthquake.  So far, though, I haven't seen a news story headlined, Vancouver's Olympic Snow Could Still Arrive from the Skies.  I'll check the papers more carefully tomorrow, though.

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!

Be Prepared

So many things to be prepared for. Girl Scouts didn’t really fully equip me for either economic depression or community disaster, so I’ll just hope that the Boy Scouts among us are better situated for life as it continues to surprise us. Listening to the bailout bill go down this morning in the House, I thought about how we sat around and listened, moment by moment that time when the news came from Texas, almost 45 years ago, now. A different kind of unbelievable moment, but just about as unbelievable. I used to work for the House of Representatives—in the 60’s—and one thing I learned from that period was how organized the House really was. People knew what was happening before it happened; there were no surprises. The whip knew how to count votes, and when something had to get done, it got done. Not so much anymore. Be prepared for almost anything, is my new watchword.

And continuing in that vein: someone wrote me today asking whether Point Roberts had a plan of preparedness for unexpected events. I’m not entirely sure that it’s right to say it has a plan, but it certainly has a group of people who are working on a plan: Point Roberts Emergency Preparedness, PREP. PREP has already arranged for special disaster preparedness training for some residents, has set up a hotline and a website, and is currently working on a residency database to establish who is likely to need what kind of help in the event of a community emergency. PREP meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m. in the Community Center, and everyone is welcome to attend, to get involved, to be prepared!

PREP’s main point is that, in the event of a real emergency (earthquake is surely the most likely, in my view), Point Roberts could be cut off and would need to provide its own help for some time. Even if the landbridge to Canada was unaffected, the Canadians might have some priorities ahead of us. According to the group’s information sheet, PREP thinks ‘we need to be prepared to go it alone for up to 3 weeks following a disaster.’

If you are not inclined to go to meetings, try this: Washington state has put out several informational packets, including a 44-page Emergency Resource Guide, as well as a quick little ‘Home Preparedness’ guide, and a ‘task of the month’ guide. I picked up copies at the post office, but they are also available at the Aydon Wellness Clinic. We went through the big L.A. earthquake in the 90’s and thus are somewhat more sensitive than many people may be to what can happen to a house in a big earthquake. When we moved up here, we were astonished to find that the house we bought had no structural earthquake protection: in the event of a big quake, it would have simply jumped right off the foundation. So one of our first ‘maintenance’ tasks was to get it bolted down. Neighbors we talked to were astonished: never heard of such a thing. I hope they never have to hear of it again, but I feel the better for knowing about it and knowing that it is done.

A Point Robert’s friend who also came from L.A. understands in a different context what happens in a significant earthquake. She has a large pottery collection and has been very careful about securing the contents of her cupboards. I’ve not done much about that because in the L.A. quake, nothing in my cupboards broke, although an apple pie I had made the night before did bounce off the counter and the glass pie pan broke, rendering the pie inedible, alas. So now, when I make a pie and leave the remains on the counter at night, I wonder whether it will be there in the morning for me. How's that for learning? We learn from our experience, but it would perhaps be better to augment that experience with others’ experiences as well as the information that is being made available to us. So get it, read it, do something about it. At least if you live in Point Roberts. If you live somewhere else, your mileage may vary.