JLfromNH

The Flume

On May 3rd 2003, a major tourist attraction in northern New Hampshire known as the Old Man of the Mountain finally crumbled away in a landslide. This was not really an unexpected event as everyone knew that eventually the rocky ledges which created the profile would give way.


Old Man Before	Old Man After

The Old Man was a natural formation produced by several granite ledges that lined up to create the famous craggy profile only when viewed from the side. If you had looked at it directly ‘face on’, you would have only seen an odd jumble of rock ledges. However because the Old Man was composed of granite which contained feldspar, it was particularly vulnerable to weathering. Numerous efforts were made over the years to shore up the ledges of the profile, but the end was never really in doubt. Gravity finally overcame human ingenuity and the ‘face’ collapsed.

The outpouring of anguish, especially from local tourism boosters, may have puzzled out-of-staters. The fact is New Hampshire is a small state lacking the outstanding vistas that many western states can boast of, such as the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming or the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. The Old Man was the only spectacular attraction that drew large numbers of summer tourists into the area. With him gone, the feeling was that the tourists would vanish as well.

Well, actually they didn’t. They’re still coming. Even without the Old Man, there are many places in New Hampshire attractive to tourists. In the winter, there is downhill skiing, snow-boarding, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling and snow shoeing. In the summer, there are lakes for boating or swimming, rivers to canoe on, camp grounds, hiking trails and dozens of small scale attractions that are family-friendly and just plain interesting to visit. One of these is the Flume.

Located at the southern end of Franconia Notch, the Flume is a narrow gorge about 800 feet in length and varies between 12 and 20 feet in width. While Native Americans were likely quite familiar with it, it was not ‘officially’ discovered until about 1808 by a remarkably spry 93 year old lady by the name of Jess Guernsey who was looking for a good place to fish (anglers take note: your hobby is conducive to longevity!) . Millions of years ago a huge blob of molten magma pushed up under the overlying rock though never breaking the surface. As it cooled slowly, vertical fractures formed into which basalt oozed and also cooled. Over the eons, weathering eventually exposed the granite and since the basalt dikes more easily eroded, this created the narrow gorge that is the Flume.

Like all natural formations, the Flume is constantly morphing under the influence of rain, frost and snow. When Jess first came across it, a huge boulder could be found wedged in the narrow gorge.

In June of 1883, a heavy rainstorm triggered a landslide which swept away the boulder and deepened the gorge, creating Avalanche Falls. While the boulder itself was never found again, the damage left by its passage has since healed over, leaving a beautiful series of small waterfalls, an excellent subject for videos and photographs.

Another point of interest is the Sentinel Pine Bridge, a pedestrian bridge constructed in 1939. The bridge is so named because originally a huge pine by that name, 90 feet tall and five feet in diameter, once grew in the area. The Great Hurricane of 1938 uprooted this venerable plant so the tree was cut up and used as the base for the foot bridge bearing its name. The trunk of the old pine is still visible if you walk across the bridge and up the trail a short distance and look back.

The Flume Gorge is open during the late spring and summer into October. A series of walkways allow visitors to stroll through the gorge itself as well as the surrounding woodlands. There are a few caveats; mainly it requires you be a reasonably good walker as the full loop through the area is about two miles, which can be hard on the elderly and the handicapped. Also pets are discouraged. The entry fee of $16 for adults and $13 for children over 6, may discourage those of limited funds, but the walk is well worth the effort and money.

It is possible to access the Flume during the winter though the wooden walkways going through the gorge are removed when the weather chills, so you are better off not trying it alone. However a view of the Flume during winter is truly spectacular and hardy souls not afraid to brave the cold and ice will appreciate its beauty.

In recent years movements have cropped up in reaction to the corporate effort to control every aspect of our lives. Slow Food arose in reaction to the industrialization of food production and its accompanying loss of quality. Slow Democracy is an effort to help citizens regain control of politics especially on the local level. Now we see efforts to create Slow Tourism. While this may be a bit of overkill, the idea of simplifying travel, reducing its expense, distance traveled, avoiding canned tours, is beginning to grow in popularity.

A visit to the Flume fits in very well with this. Take a stroll through this small but scenic gorge. Take an opportunity to see nature close up, instead of flashing by while you are driving down the freeway. If you’re ambitious enough, visit it in both summer and winter, and get a real feel for the ever changing face of the world you are a part of.

Return of the Space Bats and Random Thoughts about Storytelling

For those who like to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, the Space Bats contest has become nearly a yearly ritual. The challenge that John gave his readers was to come up with plausible stories placed in the near or far future showing what life after Peak Oil might look like. Many (including myself) took up the gauntlet. As the readers of his blog tend to be well educated and thoughtful, the submissions have been coming fast and furious, leaving an embarrassment of riches in terms of literary efforts. The rules dictate that there must be no magic or deus ex machina ( which is what the term Space Bats refers to) that would save generations in the future from the consequences of our mistakes. Characters in the stories must deal each in his or her own way with what the world we left them can or cannot provide.

Last December the Archdruid once again issued his space bats challenge, this time asking for stories which don’t obsess over the process of collapse or cling to the cultural myth about the onward march of ‘progress’ which allegedly will lead us to our destiny somewhere out in the stars. Instead he wants stories that show neither progress nor collapse but simply life as it is likely to be; just people going about their lives under the constraints of the legacy we have left them, building homes, having families, quarrelling with their neighbors, etc.

I had already been in the process of writing a story when John laid out his latest guidelines and began tweaking it accordingly. The future world the new story is set in is basically the same future I portrayed in my original submission to the last Space Bats contest. I borrowed elements from the first story and reworked them, hopefully creating a more dynamic tale as the first was in the form of a letter being written to a friend. After I had the new story pretty much fleshed out, I found myself writing a second tale that’s a spinoff though the events in An Even Trade actually take place prior to the events of The Doctor Who Went Over the Mountain.

One element I created and was dying to put into the original story but couldn’t find a place for is Saint Appleseed. How an eccentric pioneer nurseryman, a practitioner of Swedenborgian , later a familiar American folktale figure, becomes transformed into a Santeria Saint is something I leave to the imaginations of my readers. Over the years there have been many American folktale characters; Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, John Henry; some fictitious, others real people with myths accreted to them. They often reflect something about their times. Davy Crockett embodied the efforts of settlers to ‘tame’ the wilderness that they saw. Another, the character Mike Fink, was a brawling, boasting river man who, as a product of the Ohio and Mississippi steamboat commerce of the nineteenth century, flourished briefly but as times changed eventually became largely forgotten except by folklorists. Others like George Washington, our first President, are better known to modern readers. As a significant historical figure Washington attracted any number of apocryphal stories such as the chopping of the cherry tree and tossing a dollar coin across the Potomac. Oddly enough Abraham Lincoln doesn’t seem to have attracted the kind of improbable stories one sees attached to Washington or Crockett. The tales attached to him are more mundane, even homespun. Time may well be a factor here. Leo Tolstoy wrote a moving assessment of the President’s character and gave an account of how Lincoln’s reputation had arrived at a remote location in the Caucasus Mountains and was already undergoing a mythologizing by the local people.

Much of the older tales are outgrowths of the European cultures that set root here over the past four centuries. The growing Latino population has brought their own folklore. La Llorona or El Chupacabra are legends both of ancient and recent origins working their way into American culture. Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Native Americans all have their own tales which have been added to the mix.

Many of the colorful figures we are familiar with, will probably vanish into the past as current cultures wither away or fragment to be replaced by new ones. Others will persist perhaps in a form no one today would recognize. Some of our beloved tales may endure into the future, others likely won’t. Commercial success is no guarantee of durability. The Lord Of The Rings is too large and complex a tale to enter into the pantheon of North American folklore. Harry Potter in spite of his current popularity will certainly be forgotten. But I do think future story tellers will entertain their audiences with the magical tale of how a young girl and her little dog were swept into a mysterious land over the rainbow by a tornado, where they had adventures, made friends with strange beings and battled a wicked witch. Dorothy resonates with us as Harry does not.

Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison, while not folkloric characters for Americans today may well become so in the future as people look back in nostalgia at times they perceive as somehow more noble or inventive than their own. As people struggle with environmental degradation, John Muir, the naturalist and advocate of preserving wilderness, might become a legendary character with a suite of folktales for listeners’ use to guide their own efforts in preserving what’s left. Johnny Appleseed may get refurbished as an agricultural figure representing a more sustainable way of farming. Paul Bunyan, a relatively modern folklore figure, may be reworked into a preserver of woodlands rather than a chopper of them.

On a darker note, figures such as Satan and the AntiChrist may get commingled with more recent evildoers such as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot by future oral tale tellers becoming transformed into frightening beings people use to represent the darker side of themselves. Corporations might become bogeyman fabrications for threatening obstreperous children with to make them mind. Tales of nuclear weapons and their use will become tales of dreadful sorcery gone badly wrong.

Writers can speculate and write tales about what stories people of the future will consider important parts of their culture. Any future folklore will reflect the times and current concerns, as folklore has always done. The characters populating such tales will likely be famous people whose lives are recalled and embroidered on (Think King Arthur who started out as a minor warlord). They may be people we are familiar with, or people not yet born (depending on how far in the future your tale is set). Since there’s just no telling what stories and characters people will cling to in order to give their lives meaning and order as the downhill slide of current civilization speeds up, the only limiting factor is your imagination.

Putting The Fix In

The Northern Pass Project is still trying to steamroll its way through New Hampshire and now the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing have become a little more overt. Last month Les Otten, the Maine developer trying to revive the Great White Elephant of the North known as the Balsams Resort accepted a ‘no strings attached’ $2 million dollar ‘investment’ from Eversource to help fund his project. Now (no big surprise) Mr. Otten is in favor of the Northern Pass project. Shocker, huh? We probably shouldn’t be too surprised, though. Eversource and their Hydro-Quebec corporate associates haven’t been noted for their consideration of the feelings of locals when it comes to projects that (in their minds anyway) have the potential for big bucks (for them, not us) so greasing local palms is just business as usual for them.

Still, you have to shake your head in amazement at the strong arm tactics used recently on the North Country Chamber of Commerce. Of course Mr Otten denies that he threatened to back out if members didn’t cave in to the demands of himself and his ‘supporters’. Instead he insists that Northern Pass opponents ‘hijacked’ the board and were responsible for the Commerce’s stance. Judging from the comments sections on the news stories, nobody really buys this.

The depressed economy of the north country with the loss of the paper mills makes people desperate to improve the job situation for the area and as a result be vulnerable to these sorts of tactics. But anyone who thinks that the Balsams, a relic of an earlier era, can somehow be magically revived and bring back the good times, is living in a dream world. The shaky economy, dwindling cheap oil supplies, and the spectre of global economic contraction lurking in the wings ensures that this project of Mr. Otten’s will in all likelihood never be finished or once built be a money pit that will relentlessly devour any funds poured into it and wind up getting abandoned to bankruptcy leaving locals worse off than they were before. The scandal that has just broken over the the EB-5 VISA Program in Vermont should provide readers a bitter cautionary tale.

It’s much the same for Northern Pass. Eversource stubbornly insists it’s not economical to bury the lines, which would eliminate much of the opposition to the project. This is an odd argument if HydroQuebec is the profitable entity it presents itself as being. But maybe it wouldn’t be so odd if you could manage to look behind the curtain. Like the Wizard, there is likely a good deal of humbug involved. Northern Pass is not the economic salvation its advocates insist it is. Either above or below ground it is vulnerable. As power companies everywhere are enamored of high tech connectivity, the power lines will be part of a national grid that has already shown itself disturbingly accessible to international hacking. Why anyone would want to build something that any Iranian or Chinese cyberthug could and probably will at some point trash is beyond me. Oh, and by the way, does anyone know what a Carrington Event is?

People don’t like to think about how fragile most if not all of the high technology we are so dependent on actually is. Instead they forge ahead, building projects that are resource intensive, prodigiously expensive, increasingly complex and hard to maintain, with seemingly little thought given to what might happen when a bump in the road comes along. The Disney movie Mousehunt has a scene where the two dimwitted house owners try to catch a pesky mouse by setting up a room full of traps only to discover they have ‘painted’ themselves into a corner with predictable results. In real life the consequences of ‘painting’ ourselves into a technological corner might not be so hilarious.

HydroQuebec no doubt is addressing security and adding redundancy to protect against disaster but none of this will come cheap. Are we really protected if the backup systems are themselves composed of vulnerable high tech? How sustainable is it really if there is a perpetual struggle to guard against grid collapse and hack attacks?

Instead of wasting money constructing ever larger and more complex versions of an already difficult to maintain power generation system, we need to look at decentralizing and downsizing power demands, simplifying our lifestyles. Let’s pull the plug on a lot of gizmos that, quite frankly, we don’t need in order to have comfortable lives. As long as we struggle to hang onto an unsustainable way of life, Mr Otten and allies will be able to arm twist their way into pushing through the money pit called Northern Pass.

Spring Equinox 2016

Well, spring officially arrived at Sunday March 20 at 4:30 Universal Coordinated Time or 12:30 AM EDT for you locals. We modern humans insist on having a definite official signpost to clue us in to the change of the seasons hence the above date and time for the moment when day and night become equal lengths (apparently we can’t be bothered with looking out the window).

In reality the transition from winter to spring is rather amorphous with balmy warm days switching over to chilly late winter conditions teasing us with the promise of pleasant weather then firmly reminding us we’re not quite there yet. Sap begins flowing in the trees during warm days and receding when the night temperatures fall below freezing, a process that makes for good maple sugaring when these temperature fluctuations occur. Birds begin migrating and early spring flowers like crocuses and snowdrops begin poking out of the ground.

The recent record El Nino has made for a very weird winter here in northern New Hampshire. Temperatures were well above normal multiple times this past winter, pretty much annihilating the snow pack we usually have up here. Any snow that did fall was less than 6 inches (at least where I live) and quickly wilted away under rains that followed. While we may yet get an early spring surprise snow storm dumping a respectable amount of snow on us, it definitely won’t last. The ski areas are hurting and I have not seen any snow mobiles this winter even though the town hopefully graded the snow paths they usually zoom around on. The warm temperatures only made the snow trails vanish under rain.

While many animals have benefited from the low snow fall, such as deer, moose and turkeys, there are animals that depend on heavy snow cover and suffer when there is a lack of it. One of them is a small mammal called a vole , a small rodent similar to mice and often confused with them or with moles which are small insectivores, not rodents, adapted for burrowing underground. Voles do tunnel but do not have the specialized digging feet that moles have. Voles average between three to five inches in length and have very short life spans, usually less than a year, reproducing frequently to replenish their numbers. During the winter they depend on a good snow pack, so they can safely tunnel through it, hidden from predators. Dependent as they are for snow cover, this winter has likely been a disaster for them. Without snow to hide them, they are vulnerable to hungry owls, foxes, cats and other animals looking for a quick bite of protein

Last February I looked out an upstairs window after rain showers had eaten away at the meager snow and spotted the tunnels that a vole had dug.

The meandering structure was clearly visible and seemed to lead to a circular area, visible at the left in the upper half of the picture. Curious I went out to look more closely at it.

Judging from the bird seed scattered about the edges, this was a storage area for the vole. A grey squirrel was cheerfully helping himself to the bonanza when I came out with my camera. Since it was almost all sunflower seed, I knew the vole had been scavenging fallen seed from my birdfeeder and carefully storing it in a chamber he had dug out in the snow where he could feast in safety. Alas, the unseasonable warmth undid all his hard work.

While one can feel some sympathy for the voles, those of us who are gardeners can only sigh in relief. Voles can be very destructive of plants, bulbs and root crops such as potatoes. A neighbor who lived many years ago down the street had a cat who was a terrific mouser (and voler apparently). She didn’t realize how good he was until after he had passed on to Kitty Heaven. Suddenly she began to find her garden potatoes getting gnawed on by the little varmints. Like mice, these troublesome rodents can make the life of a gardener difficult as we try to plant crocus bulbs or seed potatoes. The market as usual offers a vast array of rodent removers that, judging from the reviews, are more effective in separating you from your money than getting rid of the little beasts. As usual the old fashioned methods are the best.

Leap Day

Every four years an extra day gets tacked onto the end of February giving it 29 instead of 28 days. This is to keep the calendar we follow synchronized with the astronomical year. The astronomical year is roughly 365.2425 days long and creating a calendar that follows it as closely as possible has always been a challenge in that Mother Nature refuses to provide anything in neat manageable chunks.

The Gregorian calendar,which is the one most nations use, is a refinement of the older Julian calendar which itself was a reform of yet an earlier calendar. It applies a convoluted formula in order to determine when to apply the needed extra day to ensure the calendar remains accurate. The fact that the Earth’s rotation is very gradually slowing down due to the tidal effects of the Moon. Given the short human lifespan, this slowing down is not something that should greatly concern us as it only matters to the keepers of atomic clocks who like to measure things in milliseconds.

If you were born on February 29th, technically your birthday would be celebrated only every four years, though in reality Leap dayers celebrate their birthdays either February 28th or March 1st. This doesn’t cause any legal issues as apparently this quirk of the calendar has never caused any issues that might attract the attention of law makers. Probably just as well.

There is a tradition of women being able to propose to men on this day, a custom that seems to have originated in the nineteenth century despite claims for a much earlier origin. If the man refuses the proposal, he is apparently obliged to give her money or buy a dress. If a member of the upper class, he has to buy her 12 pairs of gloves, presumably so she can cover her hands to hide the fact she was refused. This last one baffles me as it seems to work under the assumption that people will be too dumb to realize that her failure to show off the ring is a sure fire tip off no marriage is in the works.

There’s really no reason why a woman can’t propose to a man other than cultural convention. The BBC has provided an article showing various women who proposed to the men (or in one case a woman) in their lives. It’s a very quirky and sweet article.

So – Happy February 29th!