People of the PCT: Honeybun and Miner

Caught me lunching by the trail at about mile 1028, climbing out of the canyon of the east fork of the Carson River. They came up the trail grinning. Honeybun had a speaker pumping a Jamaican tune out of his pack.

Honeybun, aka Griffin, and Miner
Honeybun, aka Griffin, and Miner

He gave me a fist-bump as he came up the trail. Miner said something nice about my spot under a tree. They were moving fast.

“It’s a reggae version of “Tom’s Diner!” said Honeybun, as they moved out of sight up the trail.

“Hiker Trash” at Sonora Pass: Sec J of PCT

PCT hikers who passed through Sonora Pass this summer were fortunate to have available the mobile cooking center/store/community center Sonora Pass Resupply. For $50 this 21st century company will take your package sent by mail and have it ready for you when you arrive at the startof Section J. Plus proprietor KC has whatever else you might need in the way of food etc to hike the trail.

I tried his service myself this year, and sure enough, KC (spelling?) in his nifty truck parked in the campground, by agreement with the Forest Service, deilivered me the package, no problem. (Though he chided me slightly for being a day ahead of schedule, and thus a challenge to his team’s organizational abilities.) Then he helped me send back all the extra stuff I didn’t need.

Around the back of his substantial truck, under a canopy KC set up, around a stove he provided, drinking coffee he percolated, grew a small crowd of hikers and a few non-hikers too.

Ran into my new pal Honeybun. He’s standing looking at the camera, his pal Miner is standing looking away from the camera, and KC is seated in the truck. Can’t ID the others.

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“Hiker trash,” Griffin/Honeybun called the group — including himself. And in truth, some of the denizens at the table at other times that morning were smoking, overweight, or living on the edge. Continue reading ““Hiker Trash” at Sonora Pass: Sec J of PCT”

Scenes from an explosion/investigation: the felons at Santa Clara Waste Water

As discussed in a number of recent posts here on this journalist’s site, a commercial waste water plant founded by oil companies outside of Santa Paula suffered a massive explosion and fire last November. This led to a cloud of toxic chlorine gas drifting over the county, which sent dozens of people to the hospital, some of whom have not fully recovered and may never full recover. Subsequently a nine month investigation by Ventura County District Attorney’s office led to presentation before a Grand Jury, which in August came back with a 71-count indictment. That indictment with supporting evidence was released on August 19th.

It’s shocking. Criminality seems to be part of the company modus operandi. For example:

“SCWWC corporate managers advertised job openings on Craigslist and routinely hired employees with extensive criminal backgrounds including people arrested and/or convicted of rape, forgery, theft, assault with a deadly weapon, arson, robbery, drug possession, drug use, battery on a peace officer/emergency worker, child annoyance, vandalism conspiracy, parole violations, and gang crimes.”

So says the first 300 pages of evidence released by the judge:

For example, the records say that truck driver Nick Arbuckle, who was seriously injured in the explosion of the tanker truck he had been driving at 3:30 a.m. on November 18th of last year had “his commerical and hazardous materials driver’s license suspended and he had an active felony warrant out of Los Angeles County for possession of a controlled substance and driving while under the influence of an alcoholic beverage.” 

A former employee of the plant, Evelyn Godinez, who had been laid off in February of 2015, said that the human resources department head Marlene Faltemier misled and lied to investigators, offered no safety training to employees whatsoever and added:

“Godinez admitted that many of the employees hired by the company had been arrested before. She thought the company did this because they would agree to earn less money and needed work. She said Faltemier was one of her friends and she had a drug problem before and had been arrested.”

Here’s the booking photo of Faltemier, the former General Manager, and Human Resources executive.

Marlene Faltemier
Marlene Faltemier

She faces 19 felony counts, for crimes such as causing great bodily injury by emitting an air contaminant.

The silence of the deniers: Toles

Besides being the best political cartoonist on the subject of climate and the environment, and actually funny as well, Tom Toles publishes almost as many sketches as he does full-fledged cartoons, plus he has a fiery but smart blog in the Washington Post which he often talks about, yes, climate.

As in today’s The Sound of Ice Melting:

It’s pretty quiet. Have you noticed? The vast armies of climate denial have gone quiet. It is temporary.

For the longest time, the argument was not really with the science. The science was always very straightforward. 1) Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. 2) We are adding significant carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 3) The warming is nearly inevitably going to show up somewhere. There is no rebuttal to this simple set of facts, other than to hypothesize a lot of negative feedbacks which would somehow save the day.

Yes, there were the denialist websites, packed with anomalous data and spurious interpretations, unfurled and hyped with the goal of flooding the debate zone with confusion. But mostly what we got was the low-rent strategy of saying “WHERE’S THE WARMING??” Subthemes were, on a warm winter day to smirk “If this is Global Warming, I’ll take it!” How do you argue with logic such as this? You can’t.

But now, with weather patterns coming visibly unglued, somehow the deniers mouths have become gluey. Oh, sure, they have retreated to “climate changes all the time,” but this is a terribly weak argument and they know it.

The silence you hear now is the drip drip drip of behind-the-scenes re-strategizing. They know climate action is coming now, and their problem is how to derail or postpone the bulk of it.

They will come up with something. Watch as the glacier retreats to see what it reveals.

Toles brings real edge to his work, and his love for the natural world shines through:

suicideblomberenvironment

From Ojai to The Onion: Area Man tangles with Miley Cyrus

Here’s a story I wrote worth mentioning, for the hard-to-link Ojai Quarterly about thirty-one year-old Dan Mirk, who went from starring in local school musicals in little Ojai to writing for The Onion in New York City.

So! Here you go:

In 2008, Mirk and his colleagues at Onion News Tonight – the video broadcast associated with the hugely popular website — included one of their realistic-looking fake news segments focusing on a then fresh-faced Miley Cyrus of Disney’s “Hannah Montana.” In the segment an announcer warned in a loud, serious voice that “at current usage rates, Miley Cyrus will be drained dry of entertainment value by 2013.”

The very funny fake video included an interview with an “Entertainment Scientist” explaining with complete and total certainty that “tween” entertainment stars could be drilled for entertainment value for about six years, before reaching an ‘Is She Too Wild?” stage that proclaimed the doom of her career and the end of all civilization as we know it.

And in fact, in 2013, the former teen star 2013 Miley Cyrus, who had by then dropped her wholesome Disney persona, infamously appeared at the Video Music Awards in a shiny-but-skimpy outfit while singing “Blurred Lines,” posing suggestively, and twerking vigorously in the vicinity of Justin Timberlake.

The next morning, in a segment of “Showbiz Tonight,” entertainment broadcasters mulled over the exact question that Mirk and company had posed in The Onion and asked the inevitable follow-up: Did it come true? Had in fact the entertainment resource Miley Cyrus gone wild and been drained of all value? The news broadcaster asked two entertainment experts this question with all the seriousness the fluffy show would allow. They concluded that Cyrus would survive her “twerknado.”

“We were prescient that way at times,” Mirk said, “but it was always a mix for me when it happened. It was exciting, but also sad because we were making a preposterous joke, and to see it actually come true – oh boy. We don’t really want the world to become more like The Onion, because The Onion is very dark place.”

Note that the satire came out of Mirk and his colleagues admiration for the young entertainer Cyrus, and their underlying (and well-hidden) unhappiness with the exploitation of her for the sake of cynical amusement. And isn’t that the nature of satire? To hide feeling behind a caustic realism?

Here’s Dan — an admirable and incredibly hard-working young man.

Mirk headshot 1

 

Scenes from an explosion: “Nothing to worry about — it’s just sewer water.”

After a vacuum truck blew up in the yard of Santa Paula Waste Water last November, the Santa Paula Fire Department arrived at shortly before 4:00 a.m. According to the interview with Captain Milo Bustillos, they were told “You have nothing to worry about it is just treated sewer water.”

As Bustillos and two other firemen looked around the plant, they were told “There is nothing toxic here, there is no chemicals, we are fine.” 

Bustillos did not at first notice the exploded vacuum truck in the darkness. When he saw that its back had been blown off, and realized they were standing in the soup of chemicals blasted throughout the yard, he became alarmed.

“We are in it now?” he asked. And when he was reassured again, he said “Don’t fucking lie to me, it’s not sewer water.” 

As Bustillos taped off the area, his boots caught fire. According to the interview detailed in the search warrant request:

“Bustillos called the Incident Commander and reported what happened. He tried to move the Santa Paula Fire Department truck. When the truck moved a short distance, a massive fireball erupted and engulfed the fire engine. It burned for approximately 10 seconds.”

Bustillos and the other firemen were evacuated. He felt sick and had difficulty breathing. Since then he has been taken off duty with serious lung and sinus cavity damage from the fumes. He said the doctors do not know how to treat him because they do not know what he was exposed to. He coughs often and the coughing does not provide relief. He is worried about his future health problems. He said:

“If they just would have been truthful when we got on the scene none of this would have happened.” 

 

 

The Martian Way: Section I of PCT/Sonora Pass

Nicholas Kristof for the NYTimes, who is walking the PCT with his daughter, heading south, wrote recently in a Sunday column about the joy and beauty of the trail, and extolled in particular one section of the trail I happen to have just completed, towards the end of Section I. From This Land is Your Land:

My daughter and I are hiking the full Pacific Crest Trail, 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada, in the narrow window in which she’s strong enough and I’m not yet decrepit. We’ve hiked half and hope to finish in another five or six years.

My favorite area this time was the area south of Sonora Pass, a stunning landscape of jagged peaks, snow patches and alpine lakes. We found it more intoxicating than any microbrew.

That’s all true, but Kristof mostly describes the classic Yosemite Wilderness, made of granite and pine and water, and not Sonora Pass, made metamorphic rock, arid, red, jagged, inhospitable, and million miles away from the lush canyons and smooth surfaces of ice-sculpted granite.

Here’s one of the few lives I found thriving in this wilderness of rock.

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It’s not that these flowers were so special, really, it’s that they were there at all. Continue reading “The Martian Way: Section I of PCT/Sonora Pass”

El Niño in charts: August 2015

An Atmospheric El Niño index surges into unprecedented warmth:

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsMichael Ventrice, a scientist with the Weather Channel, notes that the amplitude is most comparable to the epochal warming that went the El Niño of l982-l983. 

NOAA”s experimental precipitation outlook sees a good chance of rain in the South and Southwest.

precipprobability

And with the incredible warmth in the Pacific and eastern Pacific (along CA’s shores) comes an unprecedented three category four hurricanes churning across the equatorial ocean.   

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