The sun has come out. June, which was rainy and cold, is in the past. We are blessed with clear skies and afternoon temperatures in the low eighties. The backyard pond is getting shallower and will soon disappear.
Closer to the house, the grass is finally dry enough to mow. It’s two feet tall in places. I’ll be mowing six-inch swaths until I get done with the first cutting. If I had a tiny swather and a tiny baler we could go into the hay business.
We’re not going into the hay business. I get hay fever every July, for one thing, and I’ve spent 20 years covering the fenced acre around our house in topsoil. Most of the rest of the property is gravel and sagebrush, and the landscaping project it would require is far beyond my ambitions.
In normal years, the lawn requires irrigation in July and August, and by September it’s usually dry enough to burn, irrigation or not. I keep it short and trim the lower branches of the trees around the house. A few willow bushes have grown up inside the fence, and this summer I’ll chainsaw them close to the ground. They’ll regrow for five or six years and then I’ll cut them down again, as part of our wildfire/home destruction prevention ritual.
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I regularly visit a website called Eye on the Storm, run by a couple of meteorologists named Jeff Masters and Bob Henson. Every few days they put out a new article on a developing weather situation. Last week an article focused on hailstorms and the damage they cause. The authors look closely at our country’s insurance losses for crops, solar farms, houses, and cars.
They describe this June’s hailstorm at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, which injured 70 or 80 concert-goers and sent seven of them to the hospital. They note that in the last decade, U.S. losses from the weather have added up to a quarter-trillion (with a t) dollars, 60 to 80 percent from hail. This year’s total was at $18.6 billion by early May—the latest damage figures—with most heavy hail usually coming in June.
Henson and Masters now and then drop lines like, “What wasn’t obvious in early spring was how contorted North American weather patterns would become by late May and early June.” They also report that this year’s insured losses are on a trajectory to top $30 billion.
Insurance companies are a necessary evil. They don’t necessarily command enlightened sympathy. In gambling terms, they are the house, and they expect their clients to lose, at least collectively.
But in years like this, insurance companies are losers, and their business models don’t work. They go bankrupt, or are absorbed by bigger insurance companies, or they pull out of formerly lucrative markets, or they get reluctant to pay out legitimate claims, or they raise their rates to the point where people don’t think they’re necessary, evil or not.
Right-wing social theorists occasionally promote the idea that insurance weakens communities and families, and that doing without insurance—house, car, travel, crop, flood, Social Security, Medicare, and so on—would make us all prepare better for disaster and its recovery. Houses would be built better. Drivers would be soberer. Trips would be to countries without mafias. Nobody would build on a floodplain.
Families would help out their most unfortunate members. Communities would come together to raise up their honest poor. Nobody could escape the full force of misfortune by moving into a FEMA trailer after a hurricane, or getting a new car after the old one floated out of the parking lot and into a river.
All of which convinces me that right-wing social theorists, writing in the comfort of their academic offices, are anesthetized from the pain they write about.
If this weather keeps up—by keeping up I mean continuing down the path toward meteorological chaos—uncertainty about risk will create a reluctance to insure anything. I don’t think the ideas of right-wing social theorists should influence policy, but it looks like we’ll find out what happens to the American experiment when nobody can buy insurance anymore.
Judging from the homeless encampments springing up in cities across the country, families and communities aren’t as nurturing and empathetic as the right-wing thinks they should be.
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Henson’s and Masters’ current topic is a question: Which hurricane forecast model can you trust? They list a bunch of acronyms—GFS, UKMET, HAFS, HMON, COAMPS—that represent various predictive computer models. One they like is HWRF (Hurricane Weather and Research Forecasting regional model, initialized using GFS data), which forecasts hurricane intensity 24 hours out. But 24 hours is not much time if a hurricane’s coming for your home. It’s long enough to decipher a few acronyms, pack a bag, get in the car, and drive away forever from your life before the storm.
Trust isn’t really part of the discussion with hurricanes anymore. Which acronym should you trust? None of Them.
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It will take three or four lawnmower gas-ups to get the lawn in shape. A tank lasts a long time, and I try to mow until the mower runs out of gas. Sometimes, on hot afternoons, I run out of gas before the mower does. But after a week or so, I’ll get ahead of the grass.
Lawn mowing, at this point, is a quasi-Zen activity. I know the routine well enough that I can blissfully meditate to the hum of a Briggs and Stratton engine. I try not to shove the mower into more grass than it can chew, because then I have to start it again and that takes three or four bliss-shattering pulls on the starter cord.
I rake up big clumps of wet grass on the new-mowed areas, put them in a wheelbarrow and use them for ground cover on the gravel on the other side of the fence. I spare patches of wildflowers, but mow down volunteer willows when they appear in areas I’ve designated as suburban lawn.
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Grass-growing season ends about the time the ground squirrels hibernate, usually early in August. I don’t know why ground squirrels go to bed so early, but they’re missing out on the gourmet portion of their food supply. In August and September, I watch chipmunks reach their paws from the mowed areas into unmowed grass. They’ll bend down a stalk of cured crested wheat or timothy and chew off the dried seeds. They’ll do it again, and again, until their cheeks are full. Then they disappear to wherever they hide the seeds for the winter. It’s possible they just swallow them.
Now and then, in winter, I’ll find chipmunks in mousetraps in the garage, thin and frozen, evidence that they should have worked harder to put more seeds away, or eaten enough that they gained enough fat to make it through the cold months. The ground squirrels might have figured the seasons out a little better, although come April, we see black mounds of dirt on top of the snow up and down the valley, where badgers have dug down to ground squirrel dens and eaten them in their sleep.
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This summer Julie and I plan to backpack more than we did last summer, even if we neglect the lawn. It’s been years since we took week-long trips through the Sawtooths, starting in Alpine Creek above Alturas Lake and ending up at Grandjean, where the South Fork of the Payette River leaves the north end of the range. We’d like to do it again, but we’re not sure that we’ll have the stamina to make it. A week’s worth of food is a lot to carry up and over the four or five summits that our route would traverse, even though we no longer carry wine or more than one book. Our advanced ages have made it harder for us to sleep on the ground, and harder—if more necessary—to get off the ground and out of the tent in the middle of the night.
We’ll try. But the Sawtooths aren’t so big that you can’t escape out a side canyon if you get tired or footsore.
“We don’t have to do this,” we’ll say. “I think I’m getting a blister. We can be at the far end of Redfish by five. We can be drinking margaritas at the Lodge by six. Besides, the lawn might need mowing.” We will have left a car in the wilderness parking lot behind the Lodge, and another one at Grandjean. It’s good to keep your options open.
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If humans are alive in 500 years, I doubt if they will have much faith in insurance. I doubt if they will believe that people, back before The Bottleneck, would backpack for fun instead of survival.
They for sure won’t believe that ordinary people had cars or the gasoline to power them. They won’t believe in lawnmowers, or lawns, because of a climate-forced move to universal xeriscaping.
They will remember the Internet as the time when the gods spoke directly to humans.
They won’t believe that anyone ever let chipmunks and ground squirrels and grass seeds go uneaten. They won’t believe in hay, or the animals that supposedly ate it. They will believe in medicine, at least to the extent that the local shamans and herbalists can deliver it, although they will complain about the number of ground squirrels it costs to get a demon cast out of a teenager or the amount of home-distilled rotgut it takes for an amputation or tooth removal.
They won’t believe we could take time away from chasing after chipmunks to meditate. They will believe in lethal hailstones, and lethal hurricanes, and lethal heat domes. They will believe in families helping their most unfortunate members, usually via euthanasia, but they won’t understand the myth of homeless communities. “Those people had homes,” they’ll say. “Perfectly serviceable tents. They didn’t know how good they had it, and how rich they were.”
Inequality will take the form of armed or unarmed, noble or peasant, merciless or merciful, clergy or laity, useful or not, young or old, brutal or overly kind.
They will understand the concept of advanced age, but they will think of it as 35 or 40.
These will be tough and realistic and cruel people, descended from generations of tough and realistic and cruel forebears, but they will have rare moments of laughter and relaxation. If, on a summer night, they assemble around a sacred relic—an ancient stainless steel backyard campfire, for example—and a monk from the local monastery takes this journal out of its sacred aluminum box and begins to translate by candlelight the English from its faded, crumbling pages, they will cry tears of joy and awe at what they recognize as another myth of the Old Ones.
“That’s bullshit,” they’ll say (bullshit being one of the words that has survived intact from English). “But it’s pretty good bullshit.” They’ll listen, and nod, and welcome a temporary escape into a holy, heavenly, and wonderfully imagined Utopia.