Mary, Mary - Quite Contrary

When I find myself in times of trouble,

Mother Mary comes to me.

 

With that opening line, Paul McCartney includes his own mother, and the virgin mother of God, in his dream of Letting the Beatles Be.  It is a convenient and coincidental construction that I share because there are so many women of consequence in my life named Mary.  Being Irish Catholic does not help but I chalk it up to quantum convergence and entanglement where are all one energy and there are no coincidences.  Things happen for reason because we all share the same time and space, gravity and light and we affect each other significantly in ways we cannot know.  Like when you dream or think about an old friend and then run into them on the street the next day.  Déjà vu, kismet or happenstance?   I think not.

First there is my younger sister Mary K who despite a love/hate sibling rivalry when we were young, has become my greatest partner and confidant, mentor and supporter.  We are hatched from the same egg or cut from the same stone and we understand each other intrinsically.  There is nothing like sister to keep you honest, respectful and reverent to all women.

The next Mary bug did not hit me until high school despite all my grammar teachers being called Sister Mary Winifred or Fillippa with veins in their eyes and hair on their teeth. All the gals in grammar school were named Patty; light and breezy, strong and sexy, silent and sultry as only Irish Catholic girls could be at 13. 

High school began with Mary E. as my best friend without benefits.  Shy but sassy, she has always bridged the gap between sister and companion.  Soon came Mary A. who was my first true love.  Long and lean and quite savvy in between, she was a soulmate but we prematurely broke up because we didn’t think we were good enough for each other and too young for commitment. We still keep in touch.

So, I left childish ways behind for college at Our Lady of the Lakes, with the golden virgin Mary presiding over campus chastity like a beacon from heaven. There I found Mary B. who was a classic, brainy, blue eyed, buxom-blonde-beauty who loved all my handsome friends, but not me.  That was OK because we spent endless hours conversing and cavorting around campus and she lives around the block still and I get to see her weekly.  That kind of continuity is hard to find and harder to hold but the connection is unrelenting.  I like her hubby and wife loves her, she is a good egg. 

        In between there was; Mary Be, the Deans darling daughter who I took for coffee but not for granted and Mary Br who was the most interesting school sex symbol I ever chased, unsuccessfully, I might add, but who I still dream about today.  Then there were the lesser; Mary Bg who was a middle-class model at work with tight tee-shirts and crossed eyes, Mary Bh who unfortunately was the hoops star’s girlfriend, and Mary W. who was a mere psycho-physical fascination.  All reduced to stereotypical shorthand by my poor self-awareness and esteem, imagery and memory.

        Finally, I broke loose of the parochial bonds of nomenclature and discovered the world of Arlenes and Donnas, Pegs and Tracey Maries, among a random scattering of influential and intriguing Mary Vs and Bs thrown in tween just for fun.  What is in a name, but a freaky fascination and foundational firmness.  Was I attracted to this name or did it blur my individuality, anchoring or limiting me?   It is nothing I can shake or forget but it has served me well, allowing my Garden to Grow and Let it Be.

Don’t be a Hot Dog

It was a classic early 60’s, New York Little League game with the parents screaming at the Ump and coaches and the kids jagging around in the field, talking trash to the batter, ‘batter, batter, swing batter’. 

 

The field was wedged between the small woods behind my house and the new Waldbaum’s shopping center, old Schwarting Elementary School and the dilapidated basketball courts.  Noisey suburban parkways encircled the area and the constant hum was palatable and we could smell and taste the sea, not five miles away.  The batter swings and slices a high pop-up to the first base foul territory. 

        Last year we picked a great coach and went 2-22 and had a great time.  This year we were 22-2 and hated it because the new coach was a dick and he just wanted to win.  His son Gary was the star pitcher and not a bad guy, and the catcher was a back-stop kid named Bobby Baccarella who would let nothing get behind him and had a bazooka to Second base.  The outfield was an afterthought with midget miscreants that didn’t care, but we had an all-star infield. 

We had Albert Stein on Third; a short, dark, funny Jewish kid with a rocket arm and a chip on his shoulder.  Little Kenny White was at Short; he was a Palooka kid who could catch any ground ball and throw strikes to First, like a mini-Bud Harrelson.  His dad purportedly pulled the overloaded breaker-switch for Con Edison in 1963 that put Manhattan in a black out and saved the eastern seaboard.  Gabe Martinez was at Second and was a Mexican who looked Asian with a cherub, baby face and a wry smile but was so naturally athletic and likable that all the girls loved him.  I even had an inexplicable boy crush on him.

I was on First, with my specialized, lobster, first baseman’s mitt, long hair and white shoes, just like Joe Namath - who had a fur coat and Joe Pepitone - who had a hair dryer in his locker.  I couldn’t hit or field, maybe because I couldn’t see and wouldn’t wear glasses, but I could catch anything thrown at me, by watching who threw it and how It was thrown.  I drifted into foul territory after the pop fly, sweeping the crowd aside with my waving arms and deep baritone, 10-year-old voice – ‘I got it.’ 

I wound up near my dad who had come to his first, and las, Little League game ever, and he moved out of my way, slightly.  He was as confident as I was since we would play catch with a ball 2-3 days a week after he came home from work and had a cocktail.  He knew I could catch anything if I kept my eye on it, moved my feet and didn’t try to short arm it to look cool.  He hated that.

The foul ball drifted high in the midafternoon wind, obscured slightly by the urban  haze and the clouds.  ‘Man, that guy must have hit that ball a ton to go so high,’ I thought in my ADD, dyslexic - spectrum brain.  ‘I wonder if Patty O’Rouke is at this game’?  She was keen on Gabe but I was keen on her.’  ‘She wore her uniform dresses way up high at school and free form outfits even higher at church on Sunday’. 

 

‘That Gabe was so cool; he taught me to play hockey last winter and made me a stick out of a metal pipe and lent me some skates’. ‘Gabe taught me that an assist was better than a goal’.   ‘Joey Giordano was there that subzero day and brought cigarettes and a gun his Wise Guy brother lent him, but he could not skate and he thankfully left early.’  ‘We didn’t want to have that much fun.’  ‘We stayed till dark and dragged our frozen assess home in time for dinner and to watch the Jets win the Super Bowl’.  ‘Looking back, that was fun.’  ‘Wow, here is a 747 lined up to land at the newly named JFK airport!’  ‘I wonder if I have math homework tonight or if they will let me watch those new hippy shows, The Monkeys and Laugh-In.’

‘Focus’ I told myself, ‘be in the moment’.  Dad had taught me that the ball would be accelerating down a non-intuitive, ‘32 feet per second – per second, the change of the change calculus,’ whatever that means, but it would be fast.  I backed up but then had to run in, across someone’s blanket with beers, a dog and a baby on it.  Everybody was yelling, including my team and the other team.  It was slow motion pandemonium.  Gabe, Gary and Bobby came over to back me up and Bobby had his catcher’s mitt upside down to poach the catch but Gabe gave him the ‘back off’ look and he held his ground. The Ump joined the melee to make the call, and just for the fun of it.  Finally, the ball came down and hit my mitt just above my head, where I couldn’t see it.  It bounced out and hit the ground.  The crowed moaned in disbelief.  I was mortified.  My eyes welled with tears as I assumed my position on the field and Gabe patted me on the back.  My dad looked at me and said with a wink, ‘don’t be a hot dog, Junior’. 

Years later I was in a high school wrestling match.  I was wrestling Varsity as a Freshman because I weighed 98 pounds after dieting and dehydrating myself into a coma.  The team was all older guys and I would get pinned regularly, but they didn’t expect much and were generally sympathetic.  My dad showed up for once and sat in the front row.  Being an old football player he didn’t know much about this wrestling stuff but since I weighed 98 pounds, I didn’t play football or hoops and I sill sucked at baseball.  It was my way in.

When it was my turn, Dad gave me the thumbs up and I went and shook hands with the bad ass guy from The City across from me.  I was exhausted by the time the guy finished shaking my hand a hundred different ways.  I could hear this guy’s big father deep voice booming in the back ‘grab the left nut Jerome.’  The guy on our team that went before me had his eyeball ripped out and left the gym bleeding and howling.  I prepared to guard my left nut, at all cost. 

We started dancing around and wrestling and this guy was manic, fast and strong.  ‘Pace yourself dude’ I thought, ‘it’s a long match’.  I paced myself but after the first two minutes we went completely anerobic, sucking for breath.  The second two minutes our muscles worked to exhaustive failure and we started to flop around like a tuna fish, clutching, grabbing and stalling big time.  The third period was a blur as I slowly lost my sight, competitive spirit for self and team, and will to live.  I was hammered, knackered, kaput.  But slowly, seemingly out of nowhere, came an inner strength and miraculous second wind.  I could breath and I got stronger.  My vision and will to win returned.  I was an athlete, in his prime, going for the victory.

‘It’s probably from all the killer practices we had each day from 6-9 pm’, I told myself, ‘after the JV basketball practice and study hall, in the back gym, wearing rubber sweats and sweatshirts, with wind sprints and neck bridges, spin drills and the dreaded up-and-downs’.    After that was the cold-shower-wet winter rides home in the back of a friends pickup, listening to American Pie, and home in time to do my mandatory three hours of homework and get some shut eye and do it again a 6am’.  ‘I’m thirteen, I’m supposed to gain weight and not lose it and get 10 hours of sleep for my growing mind.’  Nope, this was the culture of wrestling I chose to endure, to be a contender. Since there was no diving, skiing or hockey team yet’.   ‘Bring it’ I thought gamely as I began to dominate the match for the first time.

The crowd energized, as I did, or maybe we just became aware.  I looked to see if my gal Sally Snowshoes was in the stands but the faces were just an expectant blur.  ‘Man, I can’t wait to get an ice cream float after the match with the boys, sleep on the bus and finish my homework tonight so I can go to the Giants game tomorrow unencumbered’.  ‘Focus.’  My opponent was fading and my coach was yelling for me to DO IT.  DO WHAT, I thought, until I realized that was our code word for the secret, killer Half Nelson move. 

So, I DID IT and rolled the guy over until he stopped resisting.  I thought about checking on him since last week I slammed a guy on the mat and he went limp and I told the Ref.  We stopped and he got help and came back with a vengeance to pin me, with me looking up at the roof lights and the banners and hearing the crowd groan.  My coach was furious and told me next time to pin him first and then tell the Ref.  So, I did.  I checked my left nut and rolled this guy over and 1-2-3 BOOM - pinned.  I jumped up and raised my hands in the air, as is the custom.  We shook hands and the Ref raised my am in victory and my coach and teammate came out to shake my hand and tassel my hair.  Returning to the bench with a big grin on my face, I passed my Dad, who smiling slyly said to me, ‘don’t be a hot dog, son.’ 

Finally, in the one college Lacrosse game my Dad attended, I was running down the left midfield wing with the ball thinking typically about girls and work, homework and spring break.  ‘The Golden Dome on the Admin building and Cross on the Cathedral was shining over our training field.  On separate days, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan visited our practice filed while running for President’.  ‘Win one for the Gipper’ Ron said ironically.  ‘I shouldn’t be playing Lacrosse, since Engineering was hard, and I had a job, a girlfriend, a dog, a car, a mini fridge full of beer and a hole in my heart that made me uninsurable, but I was going for it.  It was just a club sport at that time and pretty casual but we had to go to Chicago or Florida usually to find another club to play’.  Now they play for the national championship yearly and recruit most of their stars out of my prep-school.  I like to think I was a trend setter but it was just happenstance.  Quantum coincidence.

When the opposing defender slammed me for not looking up, I crashed to the ground but saw our center streaking for the cage.  He was a tall guy so I mystically threw it high to him, with my last effort.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him reach high for the pass and simultaneously get folded in two by the big burley crease defenseman, but not before deflecting the ball into the net, high – stick side.  We all celebrated each other and he wheezed, ‘don’t ever do that again’ as we headed to the bench.  As we trotted victoriously past my Dad, he murmured to me with a wry smile, ‘don’t be a hot dog, Matthew’.  Which was nice.

 

The Apple and the Tree

Both my parents worked so they never had much time or interest in our organized games, and it was kind of our own, independent kid thing.  All they ever said was, ‘be home at 6 for dinner.’  Parents didn’t helicopter-hover over their kids back then and let them fail, get in trouble and make mistakes like Dr Spock advised them to do.  One time though, the parents and coaches were riding the young Ump, who was a good friend of mine at school, so badly that all the kids walked off the field and went home.  So did the Ump.  My dad didn’t like that crap.  So, he seldom showed, not because he didn’t like me or care, but it was not his world and he would rather have a beer and mow the lawn.

Dad had an aversion to haughty hubris since, when he was a kid, he didn’t get into our exclusive, private prep-school where his friends went.  They eventually became wise guy, Wall Street men that womanized, drank too much and sent themselves to early graves.  He went to the local public school that kept him grounded and humble.  They won the football championship and his best friend kissed his ass in the middle of Long Beach Boulevard when Dad surprisingly graduated, as payment for a long-term bet.  He tried to marry his sweetheart but was sent to Korea, instead of jail, for a misunderstanding with the cops.  She didn’t wait for him.  But my mom did and encouraged him to move from faming-carpenter to Building Inspector to a proud and successful Superintendent of Water Works in a small, rich, north shore town.  I followed him into hydrology and hydraulics.

He didn’t criticize meanly or maliciously at all but realized early-on that I was a wise guy, smart ass, show off and a hot dog.  My favorite sports were skiing and diving, showy sports where you keep your legs together, squeeze your ass, and style counts.  He was a simple, honest, hardworking man where; what-you-see-is-what- you-get and deprecating humor ruled the roost in our family home.  He knew that his job was to keep me humble, grounded and prevent my head from getting too big.  ‘Be more, appear less’ was the motto.  ‘You are neither as good nor as bad as you think you are’.  Things like that.  Some of it took and some of it didn’t.  I like to think that he was proud of me, loved me as a son and liked me as a person.  What else is there?

For every fancy trophy school I attended he would warn that I would fail out and go to the local occupational high school or the community college.  I showed him.  When I was trying out for the football team he asked what position I was going for.  I said wide receiver since I could catch anything.  He told me I was a gumshoe with small hands and I weighed 98 pounds so that wouldn’t work.  I was devastated until he said that I was a smart kid and knew the game, so I should play QB.  I got cut in the first round.

I passed these lessons to my stepson who played football for me vicariously and hockey for himself innately.  He is natural, confident but humble.  He passes before being hit, skates behind every charging defenseman and makes everyone on the ice a better player.  He reluctantly followed some of my advice and his own passion into aviation and married a woman who makes him want to be a better man. 

Recently, I found Dad’s Hydraulics Handbook and realized that we had an aptitude, acumen and a love for fluids and hydrology in common in our family.   My stepson even named his dog Hydro.  Dad’s text was a short and simple old book that he paid $1.94 for in the ‘50s.  I looked at my old hydro textbook and it was calculus based and complicated version that cost me $8.40 in the ‘70s.  When I found our stepsons hydraulics book, it was all about jets and aviation and cost him $105.00    I guess the apple does not fall far from the tree but the lessons get harder and more expensive. 

Perhaps personality traits vary sinusoidally and skip a generation, and some don’t.  It is nice that we have multi-generational influence to keep us connected and balanced and tall shoulders to stand on for beer vision and perspective.  In an alternative universe, I catch that Little League foul ball and Dad says ‘good job’ but I become a completely different person in a different world.  We are all affected by each other, if we are humble enough to listen and learn.  Be like Dad.  Don’t be a hot dog.

When Enough is Enough

When we last left our apocalyptic water tale of doom and gloom, we concluded that there was enough water out there and it just depended on us to use it wisely.  Well, I found out that is not exactly true.  I had the opportunity to speak recently with the first legates of Utah water, the Clyde family, who said ‘maybe not’.  Steve is the preeminent water lawyer in the state, walking in the formidable footsteps of his father Steve Sr. and mentoring his own hipster son Jonathan as the next generation of lawful water excellence.  They have their own Law Firm called Clyde – Snow, founded in 1949 that plays well with The Church, The State, The Feds, and the private sector. 

        Steve’s prodigal brother Tom is a Woodland gentleman-rancher and columnist who founded, writes and stars in The Park City Follies.  He is a wicked Telemark skier and water aficionado, like most skiers and ranchers.  He is also a lawyer by profession, and not a bad one at that, who was the Park City Attorney for several of our formative years.  They are solid, smart people, who are serious, righteous dudes, with a sense of humor.  They are usually the smartest guys in the room, as long as Chris Robinson or John Haney are absent. 

The dirty little secret of water lawyers is that they all quietly wanted to be engineers or hydrologist. Tragically, they could not get thru the brain numbing, calculus calisthenics that enable engineering thinking and they did not look good in flannel shirts.  They do have a surprisingly good sense of the engineering concepts and numbers, and can even convert from CFS to ac-ft/day in their heads (multiply by 2)[i]. 

The Clydes reminded me recently that even though The State of Utah gets/got 60 million ac-ft of precipitation in a year (2 trillion gallons) we receive only 3-5 million ac-ft we can use after evapotranspiration and infiltration.  The Great Salt Lake needs 8 million ac-ft (250 billion gallons or enough to fill Flaming Gorge).  That would mean that in order to save the Great Salt Lake, we would have to use no water at all, for anything, agriculture, golf courses, lawns and all, in the state of Utah, for two years.  There simply is not enough water.  The same bleak numbers apply to the Colorado River, which now gets 10% of the water it was originally dedicated to deliver.  Eureka!

This latest 20-year exponentially compounding drought and our current 6-month, record smashing heat wave are more of a symptom of the real sickness that is climate change.  It is because Utah uses more water per capita than any state and we put too much carbon in the air.  So, the real answer is to grow less grass for cows and golf courses, stop burning stuff and voting for people who say silly things like ‘drill baby drill’.    For now, it is a question of political will and communal discipline to create a pivotal culture change for the long-term public welfare. 

Sure, we could cut down all the frivolous forests and pave the Cottonwood Canyons to increase our water supply but what kind of dystopian world would that be.  There may be nuclear powered desalinization plants, to augment The River, or saltwater pumps from the ocean, to augment The Lake, in our future.  That is when the price of water gets high enough to justify the fair economics of spending trillions on these solutions. We need to fit into the world and the climate more than forcing it to fit us.  Dominion over all means restraint and responsibility not repression or domination.  Beneficial Use of our water resources is for the common good of the majority.  Salt Lake dust storms and the dry Colorado River is not beneficial use for the public welfare and we must emphasize that concept, not ignore it.  Since supply is decreasing we need to demand less. 

The Clydes remind me that we are in this together, all for one and one for all.  We need leaders like we had when we started numbering World Wars and Depressions, 9-11, January 6 and Covid -19.  Leaders with the charisma, backbone and foresight to meet the seminal challenge of our generation; climate change, which is coming to fulfillment before our very eyes.   It is about time we start listening attentively to the scientists, engineers, meteorologists, hydrologists, economists, and all the experts, even if they are lawyers.  We need people who can communicate and lead the masses using a slide rule and the rule of law, the Socratic and Scientific methods.  Like the Clyde family.

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[i] CFS or cubic feet per second is a flow rate of 450 GPM and the size of a basketball weighing 64 pounds.  An acre foot is 326,000 gallons, a volume enough for 2-4 families per year that can cover a football field in one foot of water and weighs 2.5 million pounds.   The Colorado River usually flows 20-100,000 CFS, enough for 40 million people and the Great Salt Lake usually holds 8-million-acre feet of water – enough to suppress toxic dust and even induce seismicity of the Wasatch Fault.  Water is heavy, powerful and valuable. 

 

 

 

Matthew Lindon, P.E.

Snyderville Utah

 

Waterandwhatever.blogspot.com

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT - THE WINTER THAT WASN’T

OK, let’s address the elephant in the room.  Is this, the winter of our discontent, about weather or climate?  Weather is about yesterday and next week.  Climate is about the last millennium and next decade.  The climate is changing, quickly.  Quicker than we predicted.  Exponentially.  Is this anecdotal or Armageddon?

This, winter-that-wasn’t, has been a catastrophe for skiers and the local industry, even for Vail and Alterra, who are somewhat insulated from climate by selling season ski passes in the summer.  Is this an anomaly or is this the way it is going to be?  Will the ski town economy remain vibrant or be replaced with other recreation, lifestyles, or at worst, toxic dust clouds from The Great Salt Lake and The Colorado Plateau?  Can we fix this or should we move?  

Park City has been getting hotter and dryer for years, at a rate of 1 - 3 inches (linearly vs exponential trend) of less snow per year since 1990.   The 2025 Water Year, ending October 1, was the driest in 85 years in Park City, since the dust bowl of the dirty thirties, with only 13 inches of precipitation, or 60% of average, with nothing all summer. Then we had 7 inches of rain by New Years so the Calendar Year looks average and we forgot about the 20-year drought.  This weather and thought pattern has been predicted by Brian McInerney of the NWS for the last 30 years, and the Save our Snow people, as indicative of our new Rain Hydrology.

The last five months in a row were an unbelievable 10 degrees warmer than average, with some days almost 30 - 40 degrees above normal.  We were breaking daily temperature records by 5 - 10 degrees and had the unprecedented warmest winter ever by 2.5 degrees.  We are losing as much as a month on either end of the ski season.  This is anecdotally evident to us all, for even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.  

Average Park City temperatures are up 3 - 5 degrees over 125 years and Summer morning low average temperatures are up 5 - 10 degrees over the past 50 years. Normal weather changes are being compounded by Climate Change and are exponential now and not linear as historically predicted. This pattern was modeled by Dr. Simon Wang of USU 20 years ago with the weakening and vacillating of the polar vortex - jet stream, due to the poles heating much faster than the equator. Now the west gets the winter high pressure and the east gets the low, the cold and the storms  We knew this was coming.

Peak runoff to The Great Salt Lake is usually in May, not June or July anymore, and in April this year.  The total runoff volume has been diminished by 1-2 acre-feet per square mile per year - for 100 years.  That's enough water for a million people and a great big lake.  Statewide snowpack is less than 50% of average this year and The Lake should expect less than 30% of average runoff.  It should hit its historical low next fall and could see ecosystem collapse within 5 years.  That is not to mention the increased toxic, lake bed, dust clouds in the Wasatch that kill people, last for weeks, reach Park City, exacerbate early runoff and diminish the historical lake effect snows.  

The Lake collapse was predicted 30 years ago, using early Ai, by Dr. Upman Lall of the UoU.   We did not listen and we pumped extra runoff water, from the ample 83-84 snowpack, to the West Desert to evaporate.  We would love that water back now for the unintended consequences of Climate Change.  The Lake is only 11,000 years old, reached the record low in the 1960's, and has never dried up.  There are 150 terminal lakes in the world experiencing collapse.  None have been saved. 

Meanwhile The State Legislature was praying and fasting for another big runoff year like 2023 to save us, and proposing authority and funding for more water use development.  They voted to remove the legal protection of the natural streams, Public Welfare benefits for The Lake, to avoid lawsuits and make development approval easier.  Trump has offered to fix The Lake but then it would have to be called The Great Trump Lake and that would just be weird. 

The State could buy the 8-million-acre feet  (the size of Flaming Gorge reservoir) needed to recover the lake from farmers and other users, at a cost of 2-3 billion dollars, but they have not yet allocated a tenth of that amount for the problem.  They would like to drain The North Arm to The South Arm to cover up the dust but some of The People, and all of the The Birds live up north.  The State has turned to private sector philanthrope for a solution and the Romney family has given them 100 million dollars but we need deeper pockets for this one. 

We can blame the cows and alfalfa farmers but this also on us, with our thirsty lawns, green golf courses and exponential population growth.  I believe that the only way to save The Lake is to have The Church step up and help.  They have ':' the money, water, authority, dominion, overpopulation, and the most to gain from saving our little Vatican City II from ruin.  It would be like the seagulls eating the crickets to save Zion. 

The Colorado River, likewise, is expecting less than 30% the average annual runoff volume while Lakes Powell and Mead are only 25% full.  The River was originally allocated for 17-million-acre feet (MAF) in the Colorado Compact of 1922, and now only flows 5 MAF.  This year we will be lucky to get 2 MAF and something has to give.  Lake Powell is looking at Minimum Power pool this year, where they can't make electricity and we have to burn more carbon to replace the lost power, compounding the problem yet again.  Dead Pool could be in 3-5 years, where we lose control of the outflow to the Grand Canyon and downstream Compact deliveries. 

Western Governors met in DC with the Feds and their lawyers to renegotiate The Compact and devise a plan for cuts by the end of the year, since their state representatives punted and just blame Arizona.  The Compact was originally created to avoid the Feds and lawyers.  How's that working out?  This is The Tragedy of the Commons mixed with Russian Roulette and Game Theory, where the only way to win is to cheat.  What we really need is some Quantum Entanglement, synchronized cooperation, to battle our basic human survival nature of greed and fear.   Meanwhile we continue to privatize water profits and ethics while socializing the cost and morality.

The Supreme Court doesn't want water law cases, and forget The Congress so we could give this problem to The President.  Legal or not, he could just take over the Colorado basin and stop people from growing hay, cotton or rice and we could all be great again.   Grow cotton in Alabama and rice in Viet Nam. California could desalinate seawater and Arizona could stop pumping their share into the ground.  Colorado could stop stealing its headwaters, and Utah could stop cooling Ai-Bitcoin data centers in the high desert (put them in  Alaska).  As far as Wyoming,  New Mexico, Las Vegas, Mexico, the Native Americans, the fish, the river, the riparian habitat, the littoral environment and the public trust, well, no one seems to care. 

Lets face it, the issues with The Lake and The River are symptoms of the larger sickness of Climate Change, which is here today and accelerating at unimaginable rates.  It is simply too hot and dry these days to do everything for everybody.  Solutions to both The Lake and The River range from creating free and fair markets for water so we all pay the true price, cost, value and worth of this commodity, while maintaining the self-evident, inalienable right of minimum human water needs.   This would encourage adjustment of the Prior Appropriation doctrine of ‘first in time, first in right’, ‘use it or lose it’ for more equitable and economic water distribution.  

We would finally be incentivized to address climate change and alternative energy instead of subsidizing oil wars and burning more carbon.  We might even grow less hay, lawns and golf courses, and turn off the tap while we shave and brush our teeth, if the price is right.  We might want to Vote Green; to save the planet and make money doing it at the same time.  We need recognize our water, lakes, rivers and most other natural resources, for the best beneficial use by all.  There is enough water out there, we just need to choose wisely how to use it. 

EXESTENTIAL VACUUMING

 

 

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Paul Simon

 

I was just 17, and you know what I mean; an indestructible non-descript, hippy-sporto-weirdo, with good friends, a car, a gal, good grades, and nothing to worry about except where the next party would be.  I hadn’t had it so good since the day before they taught me to tie my own shoes (left over right, right over left), cross the street alone (look both ways – twice), or go to kindergarten (skipping thru duck – duck - goose) - opening up a new world of responsibility and mystery.  I had settled into an easy coexistence within the all-male, tie wearing, prep school I endured, full of overachieving Catholic, New York Irish and Italian Wise Guys, where humor ruled and nobody took themselves too seriously. 

Sitting in a sleepy, sunny, afternoon Religion - Philosophy class that had, here-to-fore, been composed of warnings of the dangers of hard liquor, refer madness and masturbation, Brother Gravitas gave us a book. by a Jewish guy named Victor Frankel, called Mans Search for Meaning.  It was about Vic surviving Hitlers concentration camps by finding the smallest reasons to live there and translating it to a life of meaning and worth.  Fair enough we thought, good for you.  But that only led to a discussion on Existentialism where life itself had no real meaning and it was up to us to fill the Existential Vacuum with things like family, friends and Jesus.  Seriously. I’m at the top of my game and you have to teach us this depressing dribble, now? I looked at the omnipresent crucifix and cursed my fate.  

My next class was on Classical Music where the squirrely teacher, Mr. Cassata - Stone revived my spirits by playing Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' real loud on 11, on his killer quadrophonic stereo, exalting my human spirit.  English followed where the imposing Sister Harmonica Uptalk taught us to find the Christ figure in Beowulf and Moby Dick and then memorize a plethora of pretentiously haughty vocabulary words nobody ever uses.  It was good practice for the SATs, so we could get into good schools we couldn’t afford but our supercilious parents would be proud to advertise on the back of their cars.    We all just just wanted to go to the bacchanalian, party schools. After that I shuffled off to Calculus where Mr. Huey Newton talked about change and the change in the change.  Why cant things stay the same we wondered, what’s wrong with now, living in the present. 

Finally in my ninth period Physics class Ms. Casavas - Mellon taught us the concept of Entropy where everything in the universe tends to move to a state of randomness and disorder.  Christ, I thought, they are ganging up on us and now they have gone too far.  My adolescent naïveté was shattered in one irresponsible afternoon.  We could have learned about Socrates and the Unit Circle, or an infinite weight on a frictionless plane, but they chose to smash our juvenile complacency and expectations for a crushingly oblivious, manic and mindless future.  Thanks for nothing.  At wrestling practice coach Rotundy told us all to loose more weight but not to get our hopes up for the upcoming tournament, and that only one person in our weight group will finish with a victory.  What does that make the rest of us, losers?  Second rate

For the icing on the cake, we followed this up with a film by the Ohio State Troopers, for Brother Ormondo’s Drivers Ed, of drunk drivers crashing their cars and screaming in pain at the side of the road.  Steven Hemorrhaging was quietly sitting next to me in the back of the carpeted room when he fell to the floor and started convulsing and doing the horizontal bop, tuna flop.  I slid down next to him as he foamed at the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head and I held him quietly.  As soon as it started, it stopped, and he sat up straight and slinked surreptitiously into his seat.  'Don’t tell anyone' he said, 'they wont give me a license'.  I wasn’t sure I wanted a license at that point.

Finally, before our first spring break in Florida, in Coach Dugolunchski’s Health Class, they showed us graphic films of women having babies; complete with crowning heads and afterbirth on toast.  'Holy crap', we thought, and it put us off women for about 17 minutes.  What’s next – no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy.  Our world was shattered and the only thing to do now was to get a lousy summer job for $2 an hour, apply to a trophy college and leave home forever.  Then get a job, house, kid and dog and become somnambulist sycophant, succubus succulent with a good vocabulary and a bad aittude.  My God, what have they done.

But I am happy to say that I am in a permanent state of arrested development from the day before this entangling enlightenment; where I choose to live in the present and simplify with moderation but not mediocrity.  I try not to change who I am intrinsically, or become random or disorderly, over-procreate or crash my car too much, chase conspicuous consumption or excessive self-entertainment, but find meaning in nature and the little things, the people we love and the places we live and visit.  I let life’s meaning come to me, every day.   I don’t ever wear a tie or even tie my own shoes anymore. 

Rojo the Navajo Boy

Rojo, The Navajo Boy, pulled himself up the last exposed overhanging section of his climb up the Navajo Beehive, a rock formation he personally named after its shape and location.  He loved it for the views of The Big Red River, 1500 feet below, and of the rock desert that stretched out in every direction, with shear, iron varnished cliff walls and spooky hoodoos, windy arches and massive bridges, over dry stream channels that raged only a few times a year with chocolate red mud and debris.  A warm breeze blew from the south sun and he curious raven he named Caw hovered overhead inquisitively while Rojo’s partner Woody appeared from the easier climbing route to the north.

“How did you get up here Wood-man” he asked the happy, smart and athletic mutt, who could route find, chimney and scale vertical faces better than most of the Human Beings.  His intelligence was evidence as he surveyed and experimented with different options, planning and selecting the best multi-pitch lines almost every time.  He was smart enough for most human climbers to follow, but even he could not keep up with Rojo who climbed instinctively, smoothly and silently, like the big cats. 

Rojo pulled some pine nuts out of the pocket his mother had sewn in his deer leather loin cloth.  He shared a few with Woody as he laid on his back on the rounded peak formation and looked straight up at the cerulean sky.  He thought, hopefully, that the rainy season might be coming early.  It didn’t really come much anymore, hardly ever big, and not at all the last couple years.  He saw a Woody cloud, a puffy beaver cloud and a long lean fish cloud and one lenticular shape that he did not recognize but thought of the stories of alien visitors from the stars he had heard from the elders.  He wished he had some water to quench his salty thirst but there was less of that available now and none he could take on a climb.

Barely 16 suns and 2 moons old, he was no longer a boy, and not quite a man.  He was in his prime, feeling the random natural beauty and strength of youth in his body that seemed to grow stronger every day.  He wore a long black braid down his back that he had never cut and he had deep set, black eyes that often squinted blindly in the midday sun, but never missed a thing.  His senses were taught, tense and always aware and alert.  His world was simple and safe; his only responsibility was doing everything that his mother and father asked of him.  Today was easy, hauling rocks for a small addition to their cliff dwelling his dad was building.  After helping for a while his dad signed for him to ‘go, run and explore’.  So he did.  Mom frowned but signed ‘careful’ as he left. 

As he lay there on top of the Beehive rock overlooking The River, full of verdant glens and coves at the bottom of steep red walls, lined with natural colors but without the missing layer of the rock story, he thought about his future.  He would become a man soon, in secret, religious, smoking-sweat ceremonies in the tribal Kiva, and would have to help more in the hunting, farming, building and protection of the village.  He would become a warrior and find a wife, start a family and build his own dwelling space.  He would stay close to the tribe even though the choices were now limited in his small village on the cliff.  He would be responsible for the feeding and care of his family and protection of the tribe against warring bands that inhabit or nefariously pass thru the canyon, taking who and what they wanted and often leaving the vanquished dead or destitute.  Perhaps he would become a great father or leader, a Shaman or a Chief, planning the well-being and destiny of the entire tribe or fighting heroically in great battles with hostile neighbors. 

The future weighed heavy on young Rojo so he just rolled over on his stomach to take a nap in the mid-summer sun with Woody stretched out besides him.  He awoke, seemingly a short time later, from a fitful dream where he was running from his enemy in quick-sand to a place he had never been before.  It seemed now that he was in a different place with a different sun in a different location in the sky.  Things looked hazy to him in his groggy state so he jumped up instinctively and defensively and scanned The River and the horizon in every direction.  The world seemed smaller, more familiar to him now and not as mysterious and majestic.  

He caught a glint on the far horizon and perhaps a puff of smoke that seemed strange to him since it came from an uninhabited slickrock canyon and there had been no lightening.  He remembered his father’s story, where he saw a line of round tent covered boxes on big wheels, being pulled by strange giant elk with no antlers and driven by white people in funny clothes with thick beards and heavy metal walking sticks on their laps. They had stopped at The River edge below the great cliff with a hole in it.  They seemed perplexed by the cliff and The River.

Rojo headed home immediately.  He needed to tell his father, he would know what to do.  He had heard stories from the elders about funny tall white men on The River a few years ago, led by a one arm man in a chair in a fat flat canoe, who floated by, half naked and sunburnt, emaciated and hairy.  Warriors had watched them float from the bushes and heard their noisy camp down river and they spoke a language no one knew.  He remembered his grandfather’s story of the white holy men on horses called Fathers, with no children, who had crossed the same wide spot in The River they called The Crossing, several generations ago.  The Shaman had said it was a sign of change and disruption from the gods and an omen of visiting tribes or families with different colors and customs, needs and values.  The visitors had been forgotten, until today, when they lit a fire in Forgotten Canyon.

Rojo and Woody scrambled in a control slide down the Beehive, over a large exposed slickrock and down a slot canyon to the Wah Weep creek where they lived.  He ran effortlessly and continuously stopping only at a small spring, where he and Woody previously drank from the water flowing from the rock, dripping down green mosey tentacles, that had recently run dry.  He was barely sweating when he entered the village of the Shade Seekers tribe despite the hot and dry mid-day sun.  The Village consisted of several stream side, connected caves and masonry upper cliff dwellings that faced the midday sun, warming in the direct low winter direct sunlight but shady and cool in the growing season from the rock overhang and the recess.  The bottom lands were covered with corn and bean crops they watered with diversions from the creek, when it flowed.  There were racks with meat, fish and skins drying in the sun and rock shelves of pottery curing in the open air. There were also piles of waste and refuse, burial grounds and a small field for games and ceremony.  

At the end of a minor side canyon there was a small spring that was fenced off from all the domesticated dogs and chickens they had collected.  He ran past the spring and spied his young second cousine Rojean, gathering spring water in decorated pots, but he did not acknowledge her shining eyes and with their usual secret greeting.  They were old, best friends, maybe more.  His chest fluttered at the sight of her but Rojo quickly climbed the chiseled steps in the rocks towards his home and finally up the hemp ladder to their dwelling where he met his father.

As he breathlessly told of his discovery, the other men of the village gathered round and the women, children and dogs quickly followed.  They respectfully let him speak his piece and tell his story, without interruption, and when he finished, they questioned him on the details, locations, timing and veracity of his tale.  They did not doubt him, but this was serious, and they wanted to be sure.  The men immediately gathered together with the Chief and the Shaman and went down to the Kiva to smoke, think and discuss this happening.  Rojo went to follow but his father stopped him with a firm hand to his chest.  ‘Not yet’ is all he signed. 

The women went slowly back to tending the children and their summer chores of grinding corn, tanning leather, sewing, beading, weaving and making pottery while chatting excitedly in fearful, hushed tones.   Rojo stood there alone, not knowing where to go and what to do.  He didn’t know where he belonged. He was not a man or a boy, a woman or a girl.  He was confused, ashamed and angry.  So he struck out alone, to deal with this situation on his own, like a man, with his dog Woody.  He took his strongest rain stick, a stone knife his dad had given to him last summer and a sling shot he had made with rounded desert marbles he had gathered, and headed for The River... .

Wicked Fast Change

     We have reached another inflection point for modern man, a turning point that will be beyond our comprehension or imagination.  Change has always happened in population, politics, culture, computing and climate.  Change was originally slow and plodding, almost linear, for the longest of times.  Eons.  Slow population change, for example, caught up with modern medicine, hygiene and science, and then exploded.  The world population in 1800 was 1 billion, until then it had  doubled about every 10,000 years, but then reached 2 billion in 1900 and 8 billion in 2000.  The population of the United States went from 5 million to 75 million to 300 million in that time frame and the population of Utah went from roughly 30,000 to 300,000 to 3 million over that same period.  These are the intrinsic integers, the changes or Delta, that drive the essence of everything we do.  Necessity is the mother. 

    In the 1970’s Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock indicating that culture change was accelerating exponentially, taking us from the industrial to the information age and beyond, and it was causing stress and disorientation.  My grandfather, for example, was born when there were no cars or airplanes, computers or other galaxies besides our own.  He died after splitting atoms won the war, men walked on the moon and now there are billions of galaxies and alternative quantum universes. Hippies replaced the Flappers and Zoot Suits, skirts got short and hair got longer, peace, love and rock and roll replaced wars, depressions and revolutions.  Malls replaced Main Street and Wall Street replaced Route 66.  Sinatra replaced Rudy Valley and the Beatles replaced Elvis.  The Dead replaced Disco and Taylor Swift replaced Grunge.  Now we have Snoop Dogg doing the Olympics with Martha Stewart, ex-convicts mixing greed with weed.  Politics, they say, follows culture. God help us. 

    The biggest worry in 1900 was that city’s would be 10 feet deep in horse manure by now.  Our biggest worry now is that we won’t have enough electricity to power, or water to cool, our Ai and Bitcoin data centers.  After staring at campfires and the stars for eons, singing, dancing and telling stories, we learned to sit in front of the wireless radio, listening to live national broadcasts on a stand-up radio.  Now we can watch any movie ever made at any time we want on huge, cheap LED TVs.  Jimmy Carter was the fist President born in a hospital and Chuck Yeager was the first man to go faster than sound.  Now presidents are manufactured, not born, and we can go Mach 10.  The 1964 World’s Fair in NYC showed television telephones, self-driving cars and instant micro-wave meals, in their Future-Rama pavilion.  It was the age of the Jetsons.  The future was so bright we had to wear shades.  Then we invented the PC and laptops, Internet and Email, Google and Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, bringing all that computer power to the masses.  Our culture followed with our obsession of the Web, communication, searches, shopping and social media.  Technology provided solutions but compounded our problems with unintended consequences, so the changes became exponential. 

    Now with the advent of General Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing we are preparing for change that is faster than linear, geometric or exponential.  We have introduced a change faster change than Factorial and even Tetration where the change of the change is accelerating exponentially.  Remember from school that Linear change is (Y=mX+b) or 2,3,4,5,6,7, while Exponential is (n^X) or 2, 4, 8, 16, 32.  Four Factorial  (n!) is a multiplicative sequence of  4x3x2=24.    Factorial series progression is 2, 6, 24, 120, 720 and 10 factorial is already 3,628,800, getting real big real fast. Tetration succession is iterated exponents of exponents and is 2, 4, 16, 65536, 2^19,728.  Super big, wicked fast.    

    These are the speeds and the capabilities that we will be able to compute with Ai and future Quantum Computers doing everything, all at once, mimicking with algorithms our metaphysical collective energy and interconnected unconsciousness, space-time fabric, DejaVu, kismet, coincidences, life, love and God.  This will be done using photons instead of electrons with no interference, friction, heat, energy or cooling water needs, instantaneously going faster than the speed of light.  Millions-billions-trillions times faster than we have today and almost as fast, and as good, as the human brain.  Hold on to your shorts.

    We will need this computing power to keep up with a population of over 10 billion people, and complex world where all knowledge, history coding and calculations are available to everyone instantaneous.  Imagine; computers coordinating all our personal transport drones in three-dimensional space, freeing up the roads for walking, bikes, gardens and parks.  Or cellular implants and USB ports in your head to connect you to Ai and the world for communication, calculation, data and downloadable memory.  This is not the deconstructionist dream of John and Yoko's imagination, it is the future.

    In the same light there has been an exponential rise in the global temperatures, over 1 degree F^*  a century at first, sneaking up on us since the industrial revolution but really taking off since he 70s.  Drill baby dill.  Now we are close to rising 1 degree a decade, in certain places, during certain seasons, and we are still caught up in denial and inaction.  What is alarming is not the natural cyclical change in weather but the compounding rate of change in the change of the climate, which is unprecedented over the past million years and the last 30 years.  Natural disasters have increased in both frequency and ferocity. The years 2023, 2024, and 2025 now rank as the three highest on record for the number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States.  Globally, the number of climate-related disasters has tripled over the last 30. Pay me now or pay me later.

This is the existential change our generation has to face, threatening our individual agency and collective sustainability.   They say that economics also follows culture but we have mostly denied this change because it is inconvenient, especially now.   If we ignore it, knowing it is happening, we will be The Worst Generation guilty of Gross Negligence.  Can this be solved with people, politics, culture or computers?  There is already miserable mass migration and rampant repulsive re-immigration spurred by this change.  The fight for food and water, living space and clean air will lead to conflict and wars between the haves and the have-nots.  The have-nots will shoulder most of the burden of change, as usual.  Water and weather flow towards money.  The haves will gain from it as we privatize profits and socialize climate costs again, as we do in wars, disasters and in fair or free-for-all-trade.  Certain places will become unlivable and maybe our entire planet will become a sweltering hell hole.  The rich and the famous are already looking for ways out on Space X or NASA missions.  

    The question is if we can react and respond with resilience and results for re-enchantment and re-evolution or will we continue to kick the can down the road until it melts.  They say that a change is as good as a rest but we don’t have time to rest.  Change is not resting, its accelerating.  Wicked fast.

Matthew Lindon, PE.  Hydrologist.

Park City, Utah

Waterandwhatever.blogspot.com