Hurricane Update

This is the first time I have been able to communicate since the hurricane hit Thursday night. The situation here is catastrophic. The hurricane dropped its load of water here in the mountains of North Carolina. All cellular towers are down. All power lines are down. I-40 is closed and so is I-26, eliminating the major ground lines of communication with eastern N, SC, and TN. Locally our county seat has no power or phones, although I have heard that 911 is back online for anyone who has a phone that can call them. No cellphones work, but some landlines do.

Our rescue operations are 24 hours a day currently. I can report steady progress; yesterday at dawn it took me five hours just to cut my way out with a chainsaw to reach the highway and the rally point. Today we have saw crews and a three man team from DOT with earth moving equipment to clear landslides. We have established a temporary shelter for the elderly until they can be moved to proper facilities, but our hospitals are overwhelmed-- one of them is closed, but yesterday all of them were.

This is going to take a while. Power restoration is estimated between 5 days and weeks, depending on who you consult. I have Internet while standing next to this one fire truck with a mobile Starlink system. Many people have generators, but fuel is an issue: with the interstates down supplies will dwindle, and the economy is cash only because credit card systems can't reach their banks. We are especially concerned about elderly on oxygen, supplies of which will also dwindle.

I will be in touch as I can be, but expect that to be limited especially at first. I have not heard anything about when cell towers will be back online. Once power is restored, I'll have Starlink from home. I haven't been at home much, though.

The community is pulling together in the best traditions of America. The support systems are heavily stressed, though.

"Let the hoarding begin"

The EU enacted a law intended to prevent members from buying all kinds of products without first requiring overseas suppliers to prove they weren't deforesting. It's not working out quite as hoped.

Well, I'm sure EU residents will be happy to do without. When I hear the EU anthem now I always fill in the lyrics in my head as "Schadenfreude."

Flying to Peril

I’m sitting at an airport bar in Dallas, waiting for a flight that will carry me to the outer bands of this hurricane. My fire/rescue district is dead center of the bad zone on this map. 

It’s been a pleasant two weeks, which looks likely to be followed by some interesting days. 

UPDATE: Through already-heavy rains, we made it home. We’re on station for what follows. 

UPDATE: We've had one land slip with downed trees and power lines so far; the rain has continued to be heavy, meaning that the earth is saturated with water and the heavy rains/winds to come will be more dangerous. The National Weather Service is being comforting.

This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era. Record flooding is forecasted and has been compared to the floods of 1916 in the Asheville area. The impacts from this event are expected to be greater than Tropical Storm Fred from August 2021, the mountains in 2004 from Frances and Ivan, and in Upstate South Carolina the Saluda River Basin flooding from 1949. 

We plead with everyone that you take every single weather warning very seriously through the entirety of this event as impacts will be life-threatening and make sure to have multiple ways to receive the alerts. The protection of life and property is the overall mission of the National Weather Service, and we pledge to stand by the folks of the western Carolinas and northeast Georgia. We cannot stress the significance of this event enough. Heed all evacuation orders from your local Emergency Managers and go to a storm shelter if you do not feel safe at your current location.  

Hurricane Helene will make landfall later this evening near the Big Bend of Florida. Significant to catastrophic, life-threatening flooding will occur along and near the Blue Ridge Escarpment. Historic flooding will be possible in this area as an additional 9-14" of rainfall will be in store. Many landslides will occur as a result, with a few large and severely damaging slope failures or debris flows are likely.  

Possible hurricane-force gusts in the North Carolina mountains, northeast Georgia, and the western portion of Upstate South Carolina. 60-70 mph wind gusts possible elsewhere. The combination of strong winds and super saturated soils will lead to widespread trees down and numerous power outages. 

The day has been spent in preparation, and I suppose we are as ready as we can be. Any of you who happen to be local to this region, batten down the hatches. It should be over by tomorrow evening, and then we'll start figuring out how hard it will be to put things right.

American Wildlife Museum

One of the best things about Jackson Hole is the national wildlife art museum. I highly recommend it if you’re ever out there. 

Note to Frank in IF

Thank you again for the kind invitation. It turns out that my mother, my sister, and my wife fully planned my weekend for me, and I had no leeway for a trip. 

My mother volunteered me to tie a knot board for the local community, the sort of thing that rescuers and Boy Scouts use to learn knots. Here it is in progress. 

My sister planned a lengthy hike near Teton Canyon, as well as a dinner I was to cook for friends and family. 

And my wife planned yesterday’s expedition to Dubois. 

So my life was quite completely ordered by the women, which I am told is the best thing for men. I am sorry that I didn’t have time to get out your way. Thank you for the asking. 

But it's OUR immunity

This is the kind of immunity people should be worried about.

Dubois Rhymes with Cowboys

Today we visited the extremely scenic town of Dubois, Wyoming. It is located on the western edge of Wyoming’s badlands, so that if you ascend the ridge by the town cemetery you will be able to look West upon a mighty gap with ascending trees, or East upon a barren land of colored and banded hills. Look either way, or any way, and you will face stern and glorious beauty. 

Mrs. Grim photographs the scenery.

The town itself is less glorious. It does have an Old West charm, a general store that plausibly claims Butch Cassidy as a former customer, at least one good restaurant called the Cowboy Cafe (est. 1937), and two bars. 

Schrödinger's Rental Car

I had hoped to post some nice photos for you today, as a complement to Grim's travel pics. However, apparently reserving a rental car in advance no longer guarantees that there will be a real car waiting for you at the appointed time and place. Some of you, maybe all, probably knew that but I discovered it yesterday. I had reserved a car two days in advance and, in the past, I'd always been able to rely on my reservation.

(Below the fold you may find the rest of this rather pedestrian story explaining why you may or may not ever get a rental car again, along with comments on Schrödinger's thought experiment and even a dramatic suggestion.)

Mesa Falls

Regular commenter Thos. and I met for lunch the last time I was out this way, and he suggested that I go to Mesa Falls. I didn’t have time last year, but this trip we got out there. It’s a beautiful volcanic area with a healthy river, Henry’s Fork, that is heavily aerated by the falls. It is therefore rich with life, including fish and the bears that prey on them (the land below is called “Bear Gulch”).

It’s got an upper and lower waterfall, the upper one being less tall but more beautiful. 

Thank you for the recommendation, Thos.

Jews awake

In my old firm, adding my colleagues' identity as lawyers to their predominantly being Jews and New Yorkers meant a triple whammy for their political alignment. They were intensely capitalist but almost uniformly Democrats.

For years I've wondered if the increasingly obvious anti-Semitism on the left would push them into the arms of the GOP or even--gasp--Trump. After October 7, 2023, I watched even more closely. It seems the moment may have arrived at last.

1 Cor. 13:13

A friend's grandson was just born perilously early, at only 20-21 weeks, as they believed. When early labor commenced a couple of weeks ago, they tried to suspend it ith drugs and by the almost desperate tactic of sewing the cervix shut. In this way they managed to buy about six more days before the mother began hemorrhaging and had to be delivered, but in the meantime they got some steroids into the baby and lots of magnesium into the mother. The family then prepared for the worst, because there was little reason to believe the baby could survive birth.

Whether from pure mercy and good fortune, or the good effects of the steroids and magnesium, or because the gestational age had been misestimated and the baby was really more like 23-24 weeks along, the little guy began breathing, had an APGAR of 6, and has been doing surprisingly well for over a week now. He is taking a little milk and has suffered only a couple of concerning episodes which so far seem to have responded well to treatment. He's tiny, closer to 1-1/2 lbs. than 2, but hanging in there.

At one of the pre-birth crises, when both mother and child were in danger and rapid decisions had to be made in the operating room, the mother called out for quiet. She said she had to do something to calm down and be able to make decisions. The anesthesiologist backed her up and called for quiet in the room. Mom said she wasn't sure whether she needed to pray or to sing, so she began singing "Jesus Loves Me." Immediately the anesthesiologist joined in, and then so did the rest of the staff.

Perhaps many medical teams would have been flummoxed and exasperated by this non-medical interlude. It took kindness, faith, and courage for them all to recognize the mother's need and remind themselves to ask God for help in a moment of such abject grief and fear.

Early in the ordeal, the medical staff leaned toward terminating the pregnancy, believing that the fetus was hopeless and the mother was in unreasonable danger. The parents firmly told them to pull out all the stops to save their son. They had already lost their first pregnancy at an earlier stage, only nine months ago. They are strong young people.

The Big Holes

This year I stuck to the ridges instead of the lush canyons, and consequently saw little wildlife but vast landscapes. 

Elementary Arithmetic

Mom is chaperoning a trip to the Grand Tetons National Park for my niece’s school tomorrow. As a reward, the children of families who chaperone got to choose the groups. 

So tonight mom was complaining to another mom that Clio had made her life difficult by choosing a group of five with TWO boys in it, boys being unruly compared to little girls. 

“I did not!” my niece exclaimed. 

“You didn’t?”

“No,” said my niece. “I chose FOUR boys.”

The Yellowstone, Day II

We spent the morning in the northern section of the park, crossing Dunraven Pass a little after noon. 

The Yellowstone, Day I

Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from Artist’s Point.

Leaving Eden

I've just thoroughly enjoyed a 2018 book by an author new to me, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott. The author challenges the assumption that the great civilizations that sprang up after the dawn of agriculture improved things for anyone. Without romanticizing the hunter-gatherer life, he reports solid evidence bearing on the severe disadvantages of sedentary agriculture, and explores the considerable changes (including genetic) it wrought on the human race. He argues that sedentary agriculture succeeded for millenia before agrarian states arose. He draws a parallel between tax-collecting states and the surrounding barbarian civilizations engaged in what must be recognized as a protection racket. Both treated the farmers essentially as domesticated livestock and extracted as much as possible of the excess food they produce via the momentous replacement of hunter-gathering with sedentary cultivation.

Scott's prose is a pleasure. There is no tiresome hectoring against colleagues who might dispute his revisionism. He organizes his thinking clearly and makes a sustained argument with solid evidence and logic--something that shouldn't be rare in academic literature but sadly is. I'm off to read some of his other books, including one on anarchy, a subject he obviously has grappled hard with. It's no easy thing to construct a society that restrains people from seizing the results of other people's labor by force, rather than requiring us all to proceed by some form of consent.

Tetonia

Two of the three businesses are bars. 

Prophecy versus Psychological Warfare in Dune 2

On the long flight out here, I had time to watch Dune Part II. It’s different from the book in a number of conceptual respects. Most of these are predictable refusals by contemporary writers to honor the vision of their ancestor (and benefactor) where it defies their own ideals. The young are shockingly alienated from all human history. 

One place where an interesting dialogue develops, though, is in the film’s criticism of the Bene Gesserit. It’s interesting that the current generation would criticize the Bene Gesserit, since it represents a successful feminine wrenching of power from the male structures: the Emperor is really mastered by them, and the Guild hates them because it recognizes their power over the mental magics of the Spice. They successfully prevent the generation of a male who can do and be what Paul is for generations by controlling reproduction, seduction, bloodlines. 

But they do commit one sin against the mode of the young, and that is colonialism. They wage sexual war against all men, the Guild, the Emperor, and the Great Houses: well enough. But they also tell stories to the Fremen, and others, to colonize their minds. That’s where the film really gets sideways with them: colonizing a third world minority group to establish psychic control over them. 

There’s a subplot unique to the film in which worldly Northerners (Fremen!) reject the superstitions and fundamentalist religious beliefs of the Southerners (still Fremen!). The Southerners are totally captured by these religious forces, which the Northerners doubt. The conquest of Paul and Jessica of the minds of the Fremen is treated as a kind of hostile, manipulative psychological war. 

Yet it is also a prophecy, one that comes true at important moments in ways not in human control. Yes, Paul ‘knows the ways of the desert’ because worldly feminist Chani teaches him (‘we are equals, male and female,’ she says while submitting to Fremen social roles that silence women in sacred places). But Paul really does summon the Grandfather Worm, and rides him; you can make up a story about that, and tell it for generations, but ultimately it is up to the worm if he comes. 

It ends up leaving a question about how much of these Bene Gesserit tales were psychological warfare and how much were true prophecy. That is the road by which the divine gets in: however much the stories were lies, were colonialist modes of control, were wiles aimed at mastery, somehow the truth got in. Somehow, in spite of all attempts at manipulation and mastery, the tales were true for the Fremen after all. 

Up the Teton Canyon

I really enjoyed this hike last year, and this year my wife was able to come along. It was a beautiful day and a fine hike — praise the day at evening— and we had a wonderful time together. 

Facing into the canyon from above, you can see the peaks that you will be slowly approaching.

A panoramic view of the canyon from the junction with the Alaska Basin trail.

For Mike G.

The elk antler arches now stand at all four corners of the Jackson city square. A brass plaque explains that the antlers are collected after the shed by the local Boy Scouts, with many additional ones auctioned off for charity. 

One arch on the right, opposite the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Hank Williams, Jr. played there not long ago, and it has many artifacts from the great years of Outlaw Country as well as the Old West.

Another arch from inside the square. Today there was a busker playing Waylon Jennings outside it, which drew a donation from me.