Watching Ice Melt

Weather: Several storms passed that dropped a little moisture, but no real snow. Afternoon temperatures have gotten into the high 40s, and the snow from 16 January is slowly melting.

Last snow: 1/16. Week’s low: 16 degrees F. Week’s high: 54 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Everything facing north and west is under snow or ice. The junipers, yuccas, and other evergreens, grape hyacinths, vinca, and coral bells are still green.

What’s turned red: Alfilerillo and coral beards tongues.

Tasks: For some reason, the local big box had picnic tables for sale today. Indoors, there were large displays of weed killers clogging the aisle. The corporate headquarters are in central North Carolina. The temperature there today was only about 10 degrees warmer than here. Why would a promotions manager think the whole world was like Florida?

Animal sightings: Footprints in snow show the rabbit now is entering my yard from my east neighbor’s side. My north neighbor has dogs that bark and make a habit of going through their fence to use my drive as an outhouse. The rabbit wasn’t the one to figure out this was the safest way to bypass them. It was a cat who pioneered the path.

Weekly update: Watching ice melt probably ranks with watching grass grow as a metaphor for boredom to a city person. Of course, they probably don’t have to think about how to get out of their house after a storm.

When it snowed 16 January I thought I’d play it smart. I didn’t shovel the snow the next morning. Instead, I thought, since my car was already parked outside the gate, I’d let the snow melt away.

Alas, it turned to ice so high it prevented me from opening the gate.

Late this afternoon I finally went out with a hoe and chopped the ice. Underneath it was a layer of mud.

It’s that time of year when water is trapped between the frozen ground and whatever snow still covers the ground. That snow lies in the shadow of fences, buildings, and shrubs. In my drive, the snow sweeps out around the winterfats, and narrows to ice where no tall plants grow. That area is too soft to walk — or drive — upon.

I thought at first I had created the ice problem for my gate when I built the retaining wall last spring. It wasn’t quite two feet high, but it still created a shadow. I realized instead the shadow was cast by something my neighbor had installed in the area.

I had an area where my feet sank several inches outside the gate. When I looked at it this morning, I realized it was a ramp between the compacted general drive, and the hardened drive to my house that’s several inches lower. The ramp was soft dirt.

I went to the big box to buy some bags of river rock, a fancy word for stones. I dumped some in area of the ramp, and walked over it to get it to sink into the mud.

Then I looked and saw my neighbor’s yard, where a tire had broken through the hardened crust to the mud below. His drive is slightly higher than mine — it’s the reason his dirt drifts down into my drive. The water probably also flows down from the shadow of his house to the ramp and area in front of the retaining wall.

Watching ice melt may not be exciting, but it’s the only way to discover what otherwise is invisible about the workings of wind and water.

Notes on photographs: Taken 27 January 2020.
1. Leaves on Coral bells (Heuchera sanguinea) are still green, under a protective blanket of leaves from a flowering crab apple.

2. Damage done in my neighbor’s drive by driving on soft ground.

3. Snow remains in the shadows of fences and shrubs in my drive.

Road Hogs

Weather: It snowed last Thursday. About 5" lay evenly on the ground. Since then, afternoon temperatures have melted some, and refrozen it at night. The surface in the graveled drive is now dimpled.

A crust has formed over the top. On the ramp that leads to the house, the snow continues to melt from below, leaving an thin icy overhang.

Last snow: 1/16. Week’s low: 9 degrees F. Week’s high: 50 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Everything is under snow.

Tasks: When afternoon temperatures don’t rise to the mid-40s, the only people who work outside are those who must.

Animal sightings: Scattered footprints in the snow around the Siberian pea.
 

Weekly update: When I was a kid in the 1950s, my father used to complain about road hogs. This was before the interstates, and all the primary roads were two lanes. There was some cut and fill done in my part of Michigan, but roads still followed the hills and curves of the land.

A road hog was someone who drove with two wheels over the center line and forced oncoming traffic to go onto the shoulders. At least in Michigan, there were shoulders.

I met a subspecies when I lived near Abilene, Texas. There people had no sense of lane in supermarkets. No matter how wide or how narrow the aisle, they pushed their carts down the center. I thought then the problem was people had not grown up with any sense of partitioned space. After all, the land and the sky were flat and vast.

More recently I’ve found a more rational reason for hugging the center. In this area, many of the roads are just wide enough for two cars to pass. When the weeds grow up, even I tend to move to the center. At this time of the year, the edges of the pavement are fraying, and one moves inland to avoid sharp drops.

However, there is an etiquette for country roads, common here, in Texas, and in Michigan. When one sees someone coming one either moves to the right, or pulls over and stops until the other car passes. Drivers then exchange waves to acknowledge each other.

Another subspecies of the road hog has been invading the area. Many are people who grew up in cities who don’t know the local rules of the road. I suspect some are afraid of scratching their paint. When you meet these people, you’re forced off the road, or, if there’s a ditch at the side, you stop, stare them down, and force them to shift their position. No waves, though other hand gestures are considered.

I recently had one of these creatures at my house. The maintenance man was from Albuquerque. I told him he could bring his truck inside the gate, and park it. He looked at a gravel drive that was more than two cars wide and said he couldn’t get out if stopped there.

It was like, he could steer. You either back up, admittedly maneuvering a right angle through some gates, or you go a bit, stop, back up, re-aim, and repeat. Of course, there was some tall grass in places, but it’s never a problem.

I said people didn’t like to go farther because it got narrow, but he had seen the turn around space. That was all he knew.

He had a tall van with a ladder bracketed to the top.

When he drove in, the top branches of the apricot scrapped the ladder. When he left, he went even closer to the tree. There was a shrub on the other side which might scratch his paint.

When he returned the next day, he drove even closer to the true, and made a joke about pruning my tree.

I didn’t see what happened when he left. I was out at the gate.

When I came back, a large branch had been wrenched from the tree, and left in the drive. He hadn’t bothered to get free when it was caught, and didn’t offer to move it when he left. In fact, he said not a word.

Apparently, the branch got caught in the ladder bracket and it continued to pull until the wood broke.

If I had the limb pruned, the wood cutter would have lopped it off about an inch from the main trunk. This pulled it out of the

trunk, cutting off the flow of nutrients to the branches above. Hopefully, it will recover, although I suspect that part of the tree is permanently damaged.

The alternative is the man could have left his truck outside the gate. That’s what some maintenance men do.

But then, they are local. They understand the rumors about Española being a dangerous place are exaggerations. They know where it is safe, and not safe. And, of course, they have no problem walking fifty feet.

But a man from Albuquerque who can’t back up and can’t steer, also can’t walk. He can only destroy.

Notes on photographs:
1. Dimpled snow and the apricot branch, 18 January 2020.

2. Torn bark on the apricot branch where it got caught in the ladder brackets of a maintenance van, 6 January 2020.

3. Hole left in apricot trunk by forced removal of a branch, 6 January 2020.

No More Water, It’s the Fire Next Time

Weather: It’s silly to say Friday was the coldest day of the year and decade, when each was only three days old at the time. However, -3 was as cold as I remember here, certainly the coldest since I had an outdoor thermometer.

The day after New Year’s it snowed. Because the temperatures only rose above freezing for a few hours, it lingered. The frigid temperature came the day after the snow when nothing had melted into humidity and no clouds existed to hold in what little heat was generated.

That morning, around 8:45, the air was so cold the moisture condensed on the bare twigs of trees into frost. This wasn’t a snowfall, which lays flat, even when piled in a jumble of large flakes. Each droplet of water was turned into a separate flake that stood erect on the boughs, turning everything into a classic winter scene.

Last snow: 1/2. Week’s low: -3 degrees F. Week’s high: 51 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: Everything is under snow.

Tasks: I’ve begun the annual task of creating templates for the new year’s record keeping. I begin with the checkbook, then move on to plant records. Each year I’m forced to work around whatever changes Microsoft introduced during the year into my database software. If my computer was capable of responding to my voice commands, it probably would have shut itself down and refused to come back up.

Animal sightings: No animal tracks in the snow yet.

Weekly update: I had a stitch in my side Monday evening, a sharp cramp on the left side of my chest. Of course, one immediately wonders if one should get to the emergency room. The location didn’t seem right, so I took an aspirin and rubbed an herbal ointment over the area. Within an hour, everything was relaxed.

By chance, I had an appointment for a message the next morning. After the therapist found the offended intercostal muscle and asked the usual questions, he said one function of those muscles was to expand the space between the ribs when the lungs needed more space to operate.

That made sense to a mind that quickly slipped from scientific fact to speculation.

Earlier in 2019, I had replaced my undergarments because the elastic had gotten so tight that it made it difficult to breathe. I assumed I had just added a layer of fat there, to match the other layers that were replacing muscles. Somehow, I get fatter without gaining weight as I age.

In the past month or so I started having problems again. It didn’t make sense that I had added that many extra cells in so short a time. Besides, I had no problems in the morning. I only had to shed in the late afternoon and early evening, often when I was doing my nightly hour of walking.

Tuesday I reasoned the problem wasn’t me, but bad air that was causing my lungs to work harder for air. The question was: why was the air worse this year?

I talked to a man in line at the post office before Christmas who said he hoped it would snow, because there was so much pollen in the air that it needed to be cleared. My therapist said he’d been suffering and would blame his juniper allergy, only he knew it was the wrong time of the year. He also estimated some 90% of the people he saw were complaining of some kind of respiratory problem.

A sudden flash of enlightenment. That morning I’d seen a news story about the 4,000 people trapped on a beach in Australia who were driven there by wildfires.

Those fires have been raging since October, which was before I started having problems with elastic encircling my rib cage.

Lord knows what’s in the air. The heat is so intense in Australia, it’s creating its own weather systems. Those storms and fire tornadoes are localized. [1]

All I know is that it is burning scrub and grasslands, not forests. I don’t know if any of those plants are like Russian thistles and contain noxious chemicals that protect them from predators. [2] Many of the local animals have been incinerated [3] and sucked into the atmosphere’s dust.

It’s easy to get a false sense of security in this country. The common weather maps only show the United States. They don’t include the oceans were storms begin, except during hurricanes. Then, it’s usually the Atlantic.

Last week I considered the possibility our recent storms were related to one that affected the Philippines about the time I was talking to that man in the post office about the possibility of our getting snow.

One wonders how something so far away can reach us here in the Española valley. In 1883, a volcano in Indonesia’s Sundra straight erupted. Krakatoa sent a sulfur-rich cloud into the atmosphere that effected the ability of people everywhere on the planet to see the sun for five years. [4]

The winter of 1887–1888 was so severe it wiped out the open range cattle industry on the great plains, and ended the era of the cowboy and drives along the great trails to Kansas railheads in places like Abilene and Dodge. [5]

Scientists have problems moving from hypothesis to fact because the weather is not a simple phenomenon. They need to factor out concurring events to establish clear causality. And, of course, the mere presence of alternative events provides the evidence used by their critics to discredit their work.

With Krakatoa, the weather turned cold before the eruption, and the weather was warm immediately after. Record rains were recorded in Los Angeles. [6] Then the cold set in, and lasted until 1888, with the most severe storm occurring in mid-January.

Weather forecasting was then in the portfolio of the army. Thomas Woodruff issued no warnings for the January 1888 blizzard. Climatic data collection was in its infancy. Possible omens existed, but were outside the scope of his instructions. David Laskin concluded his

"failure, if one can speak of human failure in the face of a storm of this force and scale, is that he lacked imagination. A common failing in a person trained and drilled all his adult life in military discipline."

No imagination is as bad as too much. When one removes all the competing theories, one is still left with facts that need explaining: the death of cattle on the Great Plains, the fires in Australia, and people’s breathing problems this winter. They exist, whether of not the connecting tissues of scientific explanation can be established.

Notes on photographs:
1. Frost on flowering crab apple, 3 January 2013.
2. Frost on Stella sweet cherry (front) and globe willow (back), 3 January 2013.
3. Snow on Stella sweet cherry, 23 February 2019.

End notes:
1. Reuters. "Australia Bushfires Are Creating Their Own Weather Systems." Posted by Huffington Post. 4 January 2020.

2. Burning Russian thistles (Salsola pestifer) were discussed in the post for 19 December 2010.

3. Sophie Lewis. "Australian Wildfires May Have Killed Half a Billion Animals." CBS News website. 2 January 2020.

4. Wikipedia. "1883 Eruption of Krakatoa."
5. "Open Range." Encyclopædia Britannica website. 20 July 1998.
6. Wikipedia.

7. David Laskin. The Children’s Blizzard. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Quoted by "With a Bang: Not a Whimper: The Winter of 1887-1888." Minnesota. Department of Natural Resources website. 10.