Rain Forest Living

When Rural Ways went to bed last night, it was raining. It rained all night. When we got up this morning, the trees were dripping, there was standing water in the yard, and the sky was full of heavy clouds. Today's forecast is for more rain. None of this would be noteworthy in Costa Rica, but this is southern Utah. Moreover, this has been going on for much longer than 24 hours. In the past month there have been parts of Iron County, where we live, that have received more than five inches of rain. In fact, over the last two weeks, Parowan has reached a level of precipitation that is more than 300% of "normal" for this time of year (pictured). It is nice to be out of the drought, but I can't keep up with the weeds.

Grape Harvest

In the past I've speculated about what it would take to make a batch of jam from the Oregon grape (Mahonia repens). In my experience, it generally produces about three or four fruits per stem, and the labor of collecting enough material to feed ourselves has seemed overly expensive. Until now. This week, I was walking around in Indian Creek and I noticed that the ground was covered with Oregon grape. Not only that, but every stem had a cluster of fruit like you'd see at Safeway—fifty to a clump. I'm tempted to send the girls out there to collect a couple of full buckets. They say it takes only about three pounds of the fruit to make a batch of jam. (Of course, the "grapes" are so sour that each batch also calls for about five cups of sugar.)

Minor Kitchen Renovation

The Homestead was built in three to five phases, starting with a one-room adobe cabin (circa 1880) and concluding (we think) with an indoor bathroom sometime after 1930. The building phase that created the most indoor square footage was completed around that same time (~1930) and included a fairly large (200 sq. ft.) kitchen. It is the same kitchen we are using now. In fact, the kitchen cupboards and cabinettes were built on site (in situ) by the same man who built the kitchen, and they are still in place.

What the '30s era construction did not include was insulation or heating. At the time it may not have mattered because it looks as though the cooking was done, for many years, on a cast iron wood burning range. Rural Ways has not had the priviledge of living with one of those, but they look as though they must have given off a great deal of heat. It seems as though the work of cooking would have kept that end of the house warm all the time—probably too warm in the summer.

In any case, at some point during the 1950s though 1970s, the wood-burner went away and was replaced, at the same location, by an electric range. The picture above shows the set-up. The current electric range is an old Gibson from some other era—probably the 1970s. Notice, however, that the wall is tiled with a heat resistant or heat reflective brick. The tile has been painted over, but each piece consists of an outer layer of brick with an inner sandwich of some other heat resistant material. (It does not look like asbestos.)

The reason I know the tile's composition is that I have started to remove it. (See the upper right section of the wall.) VSO doesn't like having it there because it is grungy. You can see from the picture that dirt and grease get into all the cracks and can't be cleaned out. Under the tile is plaster, mostly cracked, and then lathe. What I'm going to try to do is remove the tile while leaving as much of the plaster in place as possible. Then, I'll skim coat the plaster with drywall mud and we'll have a cleaner looking—though textured—wall behind the range. Speaking of the range, Grandma and Grandpa have recently donated a newer model that we will try to install.

Reisner v. Mitchell

The only thing, said Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, his seminal work on the arid American west, that we are running out of faster than water is oil. Mr. Reisner's view was common among Malthusians of the 1970s, who liked to say that America had reached the era of limits. Reisner's belief was that the water necessary to settle the eleven western states was over-allocated by the 1970s, and that the extractable volume of fossil fuels used for energy had peaked. I don't know where we are with water, although I do know that the western states have added approximately 20 million residents since Reisner wrote his book. But, the thing that really struck me as I read his comment was that America is, today, on the cusp of energy independence, and will likely become a net exporter of energy soon. This is, admittedly, something that could not have been foreseen, even ten years ago, and Reisner has been dead longer than that, but it gives fresh strength to one of the key arguments against Malthus: That he failed to account for human ingenuity.

Likewise, Reisner. While he was writing his book, George Mitchell was working to extract oil and gas from the Barnett Shales beneath Fort Worth, Texas. For thirty or forty years Mr. Mitchell labored to perfect a pair of drilling techniques—directional drilling and pressurized rock fracturing (fracking)—which have come to revolutionize energy production, not only in the United States but around the world. There is now essentially no limit to the volume of fossil fuels available to provide energy to the American public. Mr. Mitchell is dead now, too—he died last month—but, in an obituary, The Economist noted that, before he died, he changed the world. Whether that change is "good" or "bad" will undoubtedly be debated for many years: Burning fossil fuels is blamed for climate change, and fracking is blamed for water pollution. (These are problems that, evidently, concerned Mr. Mitchell, too.) The fact, however, remains that where Mr. Reisner saw limits, Mr. Mitchell saw opportunities.

View from the Office

This week we've been working, you guessed it, on the Routt National Forest in north central Colorado. Much of the area is good moose, elk, and deer habitat. Unfortunately, I mostly just see deer, which isn't very interesting. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of an elk, which is a little better. But, this week, we found three moose, which was kind of fun—a cow with two calves. In this picture, one of the babies is laying down, so it is difficult to see.