Short Hike in the Mohave Desert

I've driven over this 200 mile section of I-40 between Barstow and Needles, California a dozen times over the past few months (half of them asleep in the back), but when I've been awake I've admired a particular notch the road passes through for it's easy access to a couple of nearby peaks.
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While driving through yesterday, I had plenty of time on my clock so I stopped for an hour and bagged one of the peaks.

A few weeks ago, on this same stretch of road I spent an hour stopped on the highway watching a truck trailer burn from about a half mile back. Fortunately the driver disconnected the tractor before it got too bad.

Looks like carrots to me. Apparently one of the back brakes was dragging and got so hot it lit the tire on fire, which caught the entire tractor on fire.

I was part of the problem

I just carried 22 tons of bottled water, more than 30,000 pint bottles, from a suburb of Fort Worth to a Walmart distribution center in Arkansas.

Civilization has finally reached the point at which clean, disease free water is available from ANY tap in America when suddenly everyone is convinced water bought in a bottle from sources unknown, at 1,000 times the cost, is better.

WTF?

I don't want to think about where those 30,000 bottles will end up.

Tornados and Hurricanes

I'm in Laredo again. And this time I'm spending my 34 hour reset here so I decided, now on my eighth visit, perhaps it's time to actually see the town rather than just hibernating at the England facility. It's 104 degrees out "but it's a dry heat" (actually it's a 34% humidity level so it's a bit sticky), but I rode the bike the nine miles to downtown and went through a half gallon of water doing it. Had I not spent last summer in similar temperatures in South Carolina, I know I wouldn't be able to handle this.

I've now found a television and am watching the news about the tornado in Joplin Missouri. I've been through Joplin a half dozen times over the past few months. Apparently the Flying J truckstop I've fueled at there was destroyed.

Over the last week while driving down from Virginia, I passed through five tornado paths, one an exit on the highway in Alabama that looked just like the photos I'm seeing now of Joplin. Trees stripped of foliage and many snapped in half 30 feet above the ground. A few trees, big ones, strewn about with their root balls intact. And buildings unrecognizable piles of rubble. The other tornado sites were just bare spots in the forest with a few highway signs left as twisted chunks of metal. Pretty frightening.

I also spent a night in Crystal Beach, Texas. This barrier island town, across the Houston bay from Galveston, was completely destroyed by hurricane Ike a few years ago. Completely. More than twenty feet of water washed over the island wiping out 3500 homes and killing more than 100 people.

Today all the new buildings are required to be 22 feet above sea level which means most of them have been built upon nearly twenty foot tall stilts.

Mennonites drive tractors

I picked up a load of 22 tons of chilled (not frozen) turkey for which I waited about four hours. I awoke from the nap I was taking while waiting only to discover that the trailer I was waiting for was now sitting next to my truck, but that everyone had gone home - at 5:04 pm! This turkey place was in the middle of the Shenandoah valley in Virginia. Beautiful country that looks as if you could grow anything.

The entire valley is above about 1300 feet elevation so it was considerably cooler than the previous day I'd spent near the coast in Norfolk.

Driving south out of the valley the highway climbed up to 2200 feet near Christiansburg VA to top off in a high plateau which I had no idea existed. Driving south through Tennessee I was struck by the scents. First, very floral in northern Tennessee. When I lived in South Carolina last summer I noticed a continuous spicy smell from the forest. Driving through southern Tennessee and northern Alabama I smelled something similar, but just a bit different.

I also saw some of the devastation from the Tornadoes from a few weeks ago. Five different locations, one of which was an entire town at an exit on the highway. Every tree within a half mile had been completely stripped of leaves and many of the remaining trunks had been cut in half. What had been a forest was now a wasteland. I even saw a few trees with two-foot wide trunks pulled completely out of the ground with their root balls and all, just strewn across a field. The dual 60 foot tall towers previously holding the sign for a Petro truck stop was stripped of it's sign and both towers were bent at a 30 degree angle. The Petro station itself was crushed. Frightening. Unfortunately no good photos.

So, as I was pulling out of the turkey place in Virginia, somehow the security guy (who had a definite New York accent) and I got to talking about the local Mennonite farmers. He told me that every night the local roads are crowded with Mennonite farmers driving their tractors (not horses and buggies) between their various plots of farm land. Apparently the Mennonites in the Shenendoah Valley are called "horse and buggy old order Mennonites" who have justified the use of tractors for farming, but no other modern convenience. On my drive into the turkey plant I passed someone in a horse and buggy.

Which got me thinking that Mennonites might be a really good source of information on low-energy/low-carbon ways of living. Their carbon footprints, other than their tractors, must be near zero because they're still living in essentially the same conditions everyone lived within in pre-petroleum days. I bet they have a bunch of good information on how to live comfortably in such a low-energy consumption way of life.

Fulton, New York

Last week I delivered 16 tons of frozen Mexican broccoli to a Birdseye frozen food packaging plant in this small town near the shores of lake Ontario. "Fulton" is the name of two towns in New York (good trivia question) so I googled the name before leaving Ohio to ensure I was going to the right one. What I discovered is that this Birdseye plant will be closed by the end of 2011, un-employing 300 people in this town of less than 10,000. The official reason is that it is "unprofitable" to keep this plant operating. I'm sure the real reason is probably closer to "it's more profitable" to close it and relocate those services elsewhere. Wisconsin in this case - a state without unions. Were Birdseye a B-Corp, this would not be happening.

I spoke to a couple of the people at the plant about what their plans were for keeping the plant open. With the "local foods" movement, and being only 300 miles from two of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (Boston and NYC), and being possibly the only frozen foods processing plant in the US if not the world powered entirely by renewable energy (they get their power from Niagara), and being in the middle of the New York agricultural region - one of the most productive in the country for fruit and vegetables - I thought surely someone has come up with a business plan that would keep the place open. Hell, I already came up with a name for the new company - The Fulton Fresh Frozen Fruit (and vegetables) Cooperative (F4VC), and envisioned a classic 1800s logo to go with it... Alas, no one could tell me of any such plans. Boy is it tempting for me to get in the middle of a turn-around like that. What a ton of fun that would be.

Fulton is named after the inventor of the Steamship - Robert Fulton - who was also a member of the Erie Canal commission. It was also the original home of Nestle chocolate. As I wandered around the town I couldn't help but notice the incredible natural resource (in addition to those mentioned above) that Fulton has - flowing water. The town is split by the Oswego river which flows into Lake Ontario about ten miles downstream and is also part of the Erie Canal system (hence the Fulton connection).

I've never seen locks up close. Very cool. And I was able to walk all along the edge of the locks - no restrictions.

On both sides of the river were small electrical generation plants powered by the river. I couldn't tell if they were still operating or not.

The day I was there it had been raining for more than two weeks off and on and the river was a raging torrent of Colorado river proportions (well, close).

This town got me thinking that when gasoline/diesel gets REALLY expensive, towns like this which had been founded in pre-petroleum days will be prime real-estate. Besides being on a major highway near large population centers, it is also on a major waterway able to reduce the cost of transporting goods by a factor of ten (compared to ground transport) down to NYC or out to the rest of the world via the St. Lawrence. AND, this town could generate it's own power from the river. If I were going to invest in real-estate for the long-term, I'd choose old mill towns like Fulton.

Some hope for the future

Two pieces of good news came through my inbox this week. First a small protest concerning the commencement speaker for Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts caught my attention. A colleague of mine in the Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) field is a professor at WPI. He runs an ongoing student project devoted to designing, building and testing AWE systems. So it was particularly nice to hear that students at WPI are awake to what is going on. I love this line - "We will not give the Exxon CEO the honor of giving us his well wishes for our futures when he is largely responsible for undermining them.". Wow. They get it.

I'll get hyperlinks in shortly. In the meanwhile click below for the article which is an excellent commencement speech, even for those of us not graduating. http://www.google.com/gwt/x?source=mig&hl=en&gl=us&u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F~r%2Fyes%2Fmost-recent-articles%2F~3%2FJcPZP5ZsYGs%2Fpeak-oil-a-chance-to-change-the-world

Additionally, a young man has sued the US government over inaction on stopping climate change.

http://www.countercurrents.org/loorz070511.htm

I'm heartened to discover that at least some of the next generation understands what has happened and that it can't continue. I only hope a majority of us older folks will agree and force action without the need for a catastrophe - unfortunately the only effective change catalyst in America (Pearl Harbor, 9/11, etc.).

An exercise in fear control

So I'm sitting in the parking lot of a meat packing plant in west Texas. I drove by the cattle holding pens a few miles down the road which I was going to take a photo of on my way back, but the sun has now set. (UPDATE: I spent 22 hours waiting for the load and on my way out the following day got that photo.) The first photo shows the size of this feedlot. The dark areas are cows.

The second photo is a blow-up of a small section of the lot.

Click on either photo to blow it up big.
That part of the American food distribution system doesn't look (or smell) too pretty. Interestingly, just across the street from the crowded bare dirt and manure pens, a couple dozen apparent escapees (I saw no fences on that side of the road) were happily grazing in a lush irrigated field of alfalfa. Quit a contrast.

This is the part of the job that kinda sucks. No, it completely sucks. We drivers get a company name, an address, and a pickup time or range of pickup times. In this case I was to drop my empty trailer and pickup a fully loaded trailer sometime between 6 and midnight. I arrived just after six. Usually the "drop and hook" is the best kind of run to have because the wait times are minimized. Just drop and hook and run. Occasionally there's a delay, as I'm experiencing now.

Since this load of beef is going into Mexico, apparently an additional FDA Export inspection must occur. Consequently, my trailer is lost somewhere in the system, under the control of the FDA, who is providing no ETA. Unfortunately, I won't collect any "detention pay" (after years of "detention" being a negative it's funny to find it a positive) until after 2am. (UPDATE: I earned $160 sitting there for 22 hours. I still struggle to no longer judge my self-worth by the size of my paycheck.)

So here I sit in the parking lot literally 30 feet from a very busy railroad freight line - a 50+ car train every 30 minutes or so. The first time one went by, I was lying in the bunk and got the same feeling I get when standing too close to the edge of a high drop - tingling in the feet and jelly legs.
Even though I KNEW I wasn't going to die, my body was telling me otherwise. I hope I don't have to stay here all night. (UPDATE: I DID have to stay there all night but with earplugs in, it wasn't nearly that bad and I actually had a very good night of sleep.)

34 hours in Albuquerque

Somehow I got lucky enough to spend my latest 34 hour reset, on the Cinqo de Mayo holiday weekend, in this very Mexican-American city. I biked all around the town and ended up in the "Old Town" which apparently follows the same street plan as many of these Spanish Mission towns. I had to ask myself where I was. Thought for a moment that I might be in Los Cruces which looks exactly like this place. In the center of the old town square is a bandstand which was being used for an impromptu dance session by a few young men. Great fun to watch.

Later that evening the bandstand was hosting a number of more traditional style Mexican musicians.

In-between I wandered the old adobe buildings, had lunch on an outdoor patio, met one of the brewers at a local micro-brewery, and saw a television actor who I used to watch on "six feet under", just wandering the old town like me. The weather was perfect - low 80s, dry as a bone, and a little breezy. Not a cloud in the sky, as I realized I haven't seen a cloud since leaving Nevada a week ago.

Another good 34 hour reset. I'm off to west Texas today to pick up 16 tons of frozen turkey.

Solo on the road

Last week I completed my 'upgrade' and was assigned a truck to drive solo. From a quality of life point of view, this is a much better way to 'run'. The Department of Transportation limits our driving hours to no more than eleven, separated by ten hours of off-duty time. Since I don't usually sleep ten hours, that leaves me two or three hours of time to do something inbetween driving stretches.

Also, we have fourteen hour stretches to complete those eleven hours of driving, meaning we could have as much as three hours a day of additional off-duty time while waiting for loads or unloads, or breaks during long driving stretches. What this all boils down to is at least a few hours every twenty four that are my own, not England's.

Lots of drivers never leave their trucks and have set up their cabs with all sorts of entertainment devices - DVD players and flat screens, satellite TV dishes and receivers, X-boxes, etc. Consequently you'll see truck stops and highway rest stops populated by cabs glowing from the light of LCDs until late in the night.

I can't imagine a more pathetic existence. As long as I'm driving around the US, I'm going to experience the US. To that end, I now have a folding bicycle on-board. A friend loaned me this bike for about a month as a test, but I'm already sold.

Over the last few days I've used the bike everyday the temperature was above 28 degrees (it was a cold morning in Battle Mountain, Nevada). In Santa Nella Village, CA. In Paso Robles, CA. In Needles, CA. And now in the City of Industry, CA from where I'm writing this in a Starbucks two miles from my delivery point while I'm waiting for my scheduled unload time to arrive. I now find myself trying to schedule my sleep spots in towns where there might be something worth biking to visit. Add in some golf clubs and I'm all set.

Photos to come later.