Fort Clatsop - March 14, 2012

Our big adventure today was a visit to a wonderful sculpture garden in Trenton. It's been a beautiiful couple of days here in New Jersey, and apparently it's been similar in Minnesota. Tomorrrow promises more of the same.We've noticed that it's been more humid here than in Minnsota. It generally is. Not that Minnsota doesn't get muggy—it does—but New Jersey summers are worse. Not as bad as Washington DC, or the almost-swimmable humidity of summer in the Deep South.

In regards to wetness (and humidity) I've been thinking of the Lewis and Clark expedition's winter at Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon. It was a long, miserable inter, not because of cold, but because of the incessant damp. Out of the 106 days they spent at the fort, it rained 94. They could not perserve meat in the ways they knew how. Clothes rotted off their bodies, and bedding off their beds.

At Christmas, "We would have Spent this day the nativity of Christ in feasting had we any thing either to raise our Sperits or even gratify our appetites. Our Diner concisted of pore [lean] Elk, So much Spoiled that we eate it thro' mear necessity. Some Spoiled pounded fish and a fiew roots."

So what were they doing the local native tribes weren't, and vice versa? Is this another of those cases, like Shackleton's refusal to wear parkas and other "native" clohing, of blind cultural obstinacy?

Johnstown - Marrch 13, 2012

Another beautiful day in New Jersey, strolling around Princeton. Geocoaching with Daniel... not much budding out on the trees, but high temps in the 60'sF. And Anya is happily at home with Betsy and Ramon who are housesitting.

I read through David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. What I said in an earlier post about survivability still holds: people build for an everyday life with a "usual" regular crisis in mind... the people of Johnstown knew the river would flood in the spring, most likely. It usually did. They were used to the houses nearest the river getting water in the basements. And there had been talk forever about the dam upstream, and how it was unstable and "likely to go at any time." But then it kept not breaking, and people got used to that.

And then there was a storm of the century. And the dam overtopped, and more than 2000 people died, and several towns were effectively wiped from the map.

One of the most terrifying things about any disaster is the randomness of survival. Some entire families (99 according to McCullough) died outright. Many more lost members, and McCullough goes into harrowing detail about how families were split up: one young girl huddled in the third floor of her house, and watched while two other household members literally feet away fell through the floor and were drowned. She floated away on a mattress and survived.

Some disasters simply swallow everything and everyone in sight: volcanoes and firestorms for example. Some mudslides. Some bombs. And it feels as though floods ought to be the same way, especially wall-of-water floods like Johnstown. I've always pictures tsunamis as like that: a literal wall of water slamming into the shore. But water doesn't really work like that: it wants to spread out and seek its lowest point. And so, if you watch films of the recent tsunamis in Japan and Sumatra, you see a surge of water not as a cresting wave but as a sudden rise in the normal rushing flow. The net effect in terms of what gets submerged is the same: areas that were dry are suddenly underwater. And it doesn't really matter that it's a rapidly rising flow and not a "wall of water" that hits structures and pushes them around: water is heavy and rushing water contains a lot of force.

I think this is the thing that seems counterintuitive about flooding to landlubbers like me: we forget just how strong flowing water is. It doesn't take a cresting wave to knock you down. Waist-high water with less-than perfect footing will do just fine.

floods - March 11, 2012

We walked around Washington today for the third day in a row. Our dog finished her overnight camp experience at the dog boarding place and got picked up by the house sitters, apparently OK. We met lots of dogs and it was in no way, shape or form winter. Maybe I just need to stop pretending, and start writing the spring section of this project. Keeping the cold out is a big project, but people also mostly want to be dry, in part because wee lose body heat faster when we are wet. Of hypothermia cases, the majority involve people falling into cold water, not getting overexposed on land. Witness that tale of the chechaquo from earlier this blog: He died of cold, but it was the wet foot that really did him in. So keeping water out. It has a lot of forms: we wrap ourselves in waterproofing, or our legs and feet at any rate; we put a roof over our head and drains around our house to move rain and meltwater; we use umbrellas, sou'westers, ponchos, oilskins, and so on to let us walk out in the rain without getting soaked. And then there's flooding. From Noah and Gilgamesh, the story of surviving the flood is one of just getting out of the way. Whether the flood is from a tsunami, a broken dam or melted ice dam, a sudden downpour, or a rapid snowmelt, floods are metaphors for unstoppability, washing everything before them. Like other big weather, but unlike snowfall, a flood is only to be danced around and avoided, not tamed. Well, no. I'm curious about the line between the "tameable flood"— and there are a multitude of flood-control systems out there—dams, levees, diversion canals—and the monsters you can only get up to higher ground and watch.

Rock wool and other curiosities - March 10, 2012

What cvan I say? I've been working long hours and now I'm on vacation. It's been not vvery wintry in Minnesota, and decidedly spring here in DC, where I am now. There are a few things I wanted to look at beefore the season is over and I offficially look at spring and wetneess. The first one is rock wool. I had never heard of rock wool unil I began looking into home insulation. Rock wool is, well, Wikipedia sums it up:

Mineral wool, mineral fibers or man-made mineral fibers are fibers made from natural or synthetic minerals or metal oxides. The latter term is generally used to refer solely to synthetic materials including fiberglass, ceramic fibers and stone wool. Industrial applications of mineral wool include thermal insulation (as both structural insulation and pipe insulation), filtration, soundproofing, and germination of seedlings.

Rock wool, the wikipedia article claims, was first manufactured in 1871 in Germany. The idea of insulating buildings using materials that slowed heat loss, as opposaed to just making the wal draft-proof, seems to have been a late one. It really onlly makes sense with timber-frame housing, which has airspace between the insside and outside walls. With older homes (like ours—1890) it makes the most sense to fill the walls with lose cellulose. These days the cellulose is made of treated (fire retardance and mold resistance) ground-up newspaper. But apparently use of cellulose has a long history: straw, corncobs, sawdust, all were used historically. What's amazing to me is that is took so long to make this kind of thing the norm. Energy costs aside, insulated walls are just warmer and less drafty in winter, and keep the house cooler in summer. Our house anyway. But you don't get the sense that this kind of thing ever even occurred to the Ingalls family almost freezing to death on the South Dakota frontier. Rock wool. I don't know that I'd ever head of the stuff beffore. Fiberglass, yes, but somehow meltiing glass and extruding little wisps of glass fibers seems more commonplace than doing the same with rocks. People blow glass... From the little I've read, Scandinavia seems to have been a hotbbed for both fiberglas and rock wool. Lots of market there for insulation. More reseach required.

Winter themes - March 4, 2012

I took Anya around for a walk this morning, and for a visit to the dog park this afternoon... both happy, uneventful romps. It's not especially warm thermometer-wise, but the ever-higher sun makes a huge difference. I'm realizing there's a much more complicated dance going on than I had realized, amongst air temperature, wind, ground temperature and cover, and solar heating.

This blog is meant to be a kind of notebook in developing a book-length project. Originally I had thought the themes might develop chronologically—I was thinking about the year laid out in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. But it's been a lot more scattershot. So even though I have a couple weeks to go before I switch over to a new season, I want to gather my thoughts.

I see three broad themes:

1. Winter clothing. I want to trace the piecemeal bits I have now into a history of modern winterwear. In particular, the slow adoption of the Inuit anoraaq and parka as standard Western forms.

2. Winter driving. How has our increasing reliance on individual wheeled transport changed how we treat winter roads? Trace the development both of winter vehicles and winter road- and street-clearing. Also work in the increase in home-like features of the car, as people spend more of their lives in them—this latter theme will, I think, carry into later sections.

3. Winter fuel and insulation. I still want to work up those US census stats on changing home heating fuel since 1940, but since similar shifts happened in the UK, I'd love to get a more global perspective on this. How about Russia? Sweden? Central Europe? China (especially northern China)? Related, I would like to know more about home insulation.

I think that about covers things. Probably the piece I've left least covered in my reading so far is the bit about insulation. Maybe I can get some energy into that over the next couple weeks.

50 Words for Snow - March 3, 2012

It snowed some this morning... enough to make a walk with Anya and a friend around St Anthony Park an adventure in hidden ice. More slippery adventures driving during the day, sliding into parking spaces near Lake Harriet. Funny how some light snowfalls can slick up the road like crazy, while some heavier snows just leave pretty drivable slush. It's a kind of dance, layers of ice and snow, compacted or loose, wet or dry.

It's a myth that Inuit languages have hundreds of words for snow, or really more words for snow than English does (flurry, blizzard, slush, drift, powder... not to mention all the adjectives that can characterize snow: light, heavy, wet, dry, granular, compacted...). The Saami (Lapps), on the other hand...

But why does a variety of words mean we think something is more important to discuss? It doesn't. "Love" and "God" and "war" are all topics of endless discussion, without lots and lots of words for them. Reproductive organs, on the other hand, carry a seemingly infinite number of terms in slang. Which are more important in our culture? Never mind. Don't answer that one.

What a variety of terminology, in the case of weather anyway, is indicative of, is how important it is to characterize it by type. In the case of love and God, the focus tends to be on equating different forms, and on approaching a singular ideal out of a mass of experience. With weather, we want to know the difference in effect between a scirocco and a chinook, or between an F1 and F2 tornado. Why? So we can respond most appropriately and keep ourselves safe and healthy.

In the case of snow, what I in my house and car want to know is: what will driving or walking in it be like, and how hard will it be to shovel. Icy, powdery, or slushy on one hand. Dry or wet in the other. Really, for driving what I want to know is not the nature of the snow, but of the road surface: how slippery is it,and what kind of ice is forming: packed-snow slipperyiness, black ice (formed from frozen water vapor from vehicle exhaust, rutted ice, ice under snow or snow under ice... you don't actually need a lot of different words, you just need to be able to arrange them in order to describe what's going on out there.

Or maybe you just like having lots of words for snow.

50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush with Stephen Fry from John Vallis on Vimeo.

Back from the dead - March 2, 2012

What can I say? My laptop broke. Then it got fixed. So now I'm back and I only lost 4 days of blogging.

When it comes to the weather though, it was one heck of a four days. The whole middle of the country got walloped: almost 50 dead from tornadoes Tuesday and today; a foot of snow and howling winds along Lake Superior; every imaginable kind of precipitation.

We had some heavy rain, which turned to snow, which mostly melted into big puddles... but not all that big.

I'm not sorry we got missed by the serious drama. People die in that kind of drama. Our kind of drama was a dog who hates to get her feet wet, whining about having to walk.

In terms of the larger picture of this blog, I've done bugger-all. Well, not that little. I've been reading Arctic Clothing. I'm finding myself distracted by the really enormous range of discourse Inuit people for whom it is a personal experience, paired up with someone giving a dry electron microscopy analysis of caribou and seal hair. It's kind of cool in the same way that I really like NACIS: the conversation ends up being about conversation.

But this has little to do directly with my intended subject. Or maybe it does.

I've been approaching the matter of protection from the elements—wintry elements for another few weeks, until the equinox—from a casually historical direction, mostly. But sometimes I think this approach—a search for running themes and patterns, broad cultural movements and so on—distracts us from what is really going on, which is a much messier, scattershot approach to living.

I got a sense of this when, in 1992, I proposed a paper for the History of Cartography conference. It was to be on the design history of the road map. And the closer I looked, the less pattern I saw. People didn't have the kind of Great Stylistic Ideas that art history is so find of. They used a design until it got tired and they were worried about losing their business, and then they freshened it up for another decade or so. They used new technologies as they became available, most of which were generic to printing, not specifically cartographic technologies. They sometimes experimented with a new look or element (how to draw the Allegheny Mountains was popular place for one-time experiments in inserting relief into the road maps). But mostly, they muddled along.

Not much of a paper, is it? I kind of imploded. I was fresh out of college and had no idea that this in itself was an interesting conclusion. Maybe I should propose it again, 20 years later.

Or not.