Red Sky at Night Gives Me a Fright

The Northern Lights seen in eastern Colorado (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

 This past week has seen the Northern Lights visible as far south as Texas Here in southern Colorado they were photographed in the San Luis Valley, at a latitude of 37° -- pretty far south,

I live surrounded by hills and ridges, with no view of a horizon anywhere except a hint to the northwest. On Wednesday, November 12,  maybe the peak night, I walked Marco the dog after dark and saw nothing but stars. The following night, M. and I drove out to a place with a good view to the east and north, slightly interrupted by the distant lights of Pueblo -- and saw no aurora. Apparently we should have been much farther east, in say Otero or Bent counties, to get the full effect.

But that's OK. I had my "red sky at night" experience back in the Reagan Era, and it was a Cold War Baby's meltdown.

M. and I had been married a short time and were living in a converted summer cottage in Manitou Springs (740 sq. ft.!). Manitou is in a canyon as well, on the western edge of Colorado Springs. It's where the real mineral springs are flowing; the "Springs" in "Colorado Springs" is just real estate developer slop, circa 1875.

I had walked to a friend's house on Ruxton Avenue -- that is the side canyon that goes up to the Pikes Peak Cog Railway station.  I came out well after dark, and the sky to the north was red!

I knew what it meant: Soviet missiles had hit Denver, and more were coming to Colorado Springs, which has lots of military targets. They would impact in seconds. I could never get home to see M. again. 

If we were not all vaporized in the initial blast, we'd be stumbling through a nighttime hell of fire and radiation. This was the end. 

Meanwhile, my rational mind was pounding on the door with both fists: "Dude! It's OK! Those are the Northern Lights! Dude! You're not about to die!" 

After a second or two, the panic drained away. Yes, that was the Aurora borealis, and when I came home, she had been watching it too.

Down at the Colorado Spring Sun office, someone one had re-built the front-page layout to include a color (still rare then) photo of the lights in time to put it on the the presses for distribution the next morning.

I have seen many aurora photos on social media this week. No one has mentioned ICBMs or Mutual Assured Destruction. So that's an improvement.

Volcanos and the End of Our Civilization

Well, no, not quite yet.

Popocatepatl erupted last month. You probably did not hear about that in the American news media.

But that is nothing. You want lying-awake-at-night material, think about the Yellowstone caldera.

If that blows, I will post one last message saying, "Thanks for all the fish."

This about all the End of Civilization as We Know It material That I can handle at one time. I promise no more for a while.

Unless, of course. . . . Yellowstone.

How Do You "Prep" for a Solar Storm?

There would have been no more arguments about global warming, etc., after 2012 if this had happened a little differently — mainly because there would have been no electric grid, hence no Internet.

Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket.  Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.

 No more cat pictures either.

Surviving the Jamestown Flood

These blog posts by "Roger I." were written in September and October 2013, but I just now discovered them. They describe his and his wife's life in the first month after their mountain community, Jamestown, west of Boulder, was clobbered in last September's northern-Colorado flooding.

There is good stuff here on the psychology of disasters and on who makes it and who does not do so well. And humor: "Using  software engineers as pack animals is always an iffy proposition, but after some training, Nate did great."

He has kinder things to say about FEMA than did many Hurricanes Katrina and Rita survivors —  whether due to the agency learning some lessons or to the smaller scale of the disaster plus a different local culture, you can decide.

(Via Peter Grant.)

Blog Stew Spit from Nozzles

¶ In Switzerland, says BLDGBLOG, winter is sculpted "by one wizard-like figure who is really just a stoned twenty-something in a wool hat, turning different parameters on and off and spraying whole new European landscapes into existence outside."

¶ Staying with Europe for a moment, this article comes from the British newspaper The Telegraph, but it is written by an American and reveals, among other things, what teenage girls do in hunting blinds. "How one nature lover was converted to deer-hunting: Could an ethically minded carnivore be converted to the law of the gun in his pursuit of organic meat in the Mississippi Delta?"

¶ How people panic during a disaster, most of them anyway. (Via Peter "Bayou Renaissance Man" Grant.)

Blog Stew in Abandoned Houses

¶ Kind of a fairy-tale ambiance, if your idea of fairy tale runs to weasels, fog, and decay: "Forest Animals Living in Abandoned Houses." From Finland—where is the Southern Rockies version?

¶ A guide to telling what is eating your livestock.

¶ Colorado College professor Walt Hecox gets an environmental-policy award.

¶ Always topical: Survival Mom's guide to "50 Last-Minute Ways to Prepare for an Emergency." A lot of it is about water.

The Prepper Paradox

Commenting on the image of "survivalists" and FEMA's own advice for short-term survival, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds comments, "I think it’s funny that if you do what the government recommends — have several weeks of emergency supplies on hand — you’re a crazy anti-government extremist."

The fact is, "preppers" are a very diverse group. 

You won't learn that from the mainstream media, though.

As far as the mass media are concerned, America's preeminent preppers are the Alabama kidnapper Jimmy Lee Dykes; Nancy Lanza, whose son raided her gun collection before he carried out the Sandy Hook massacre; and the people who appear on the National Geographic TV show Doomsday Preppers, who might charitably be described as "colorful." Dykes "is described by neighbors as 'very paranoid,' anti-government and possibly a 'Doomsday prepper,'" the New York Daily News reported. 

YOYO

YOYO. Remember that acronym. It stands for "You're on your own." I learned it a couple of weeks ago from a woman who works with animal rescuing and sheltering during disasters such as hurricanes and forest fires.

But I had already figured it out. Even when government works, you're on your own for a time. Looking at recent disasters, I would estimate  it takes 24 hours for local government agencies to deploy when they function at peak efficiency. It takes a week or more for the feds to get rolling, and we know what lumbering beasts those agencies are.

Meanwhile, you're on your own.

You want food and water? Store some. You want electricity? Have a generator or maybe solar panels if they will work for you. (I have one solar-powered lantern, that's all.) Have alternate ways to cook, bathe, shit, etc.

And get to know your neighbors.

Jesse Walker, writer of "Stop Demonizing Preppers," writes how his "liberal and feminist" Vermont friend Ceredwyn Alexander joined the volunteer fire department because preparedness requires "learning skills and community involvement . . . not freeze-dried food and razor wire."

Not a bad idea! Want to find an organized, service-oriented, group of people who know how stuff works, who lives where, and have the radios to communicate? If you can handle the job, join the volunteer fire department. (Something like 70 percent of American firefighters are volunteers.) Most departments have some auxiliary roles beyond fire-fighting too.

I cannot speak for all departments, but I suspect that my fellow vollies here are well-armed for the zombie apocalypse as well.

Three Approaches to Disaster Planning

"Meet at the red box." Jim Shepherd at The Outdoor Wire talks about disaster preparedness around the house.

There are many, many things you could include in a comfort and recovery kit, but it's important to remember that in an emergency, the essentials are most important. One lady in Tennessee told me of telling her kids to put clothes and toiletries into their backpacks because they were going to her parents house. The tornadoes missed their home, and shortly after midnight, they returned to their own home.

There, she discovered that her son had packed video games, not clothes or toiletries. Fortunately, they weren't among the groups that lost everything except what they were wearing or carrying.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit on low-budget preparedness:

So yesterday's post on  low-budget disaster prep has produced still more email. Mostly it’s suggestions for what more people can do. That, of course, goes all the way up to a custom bomb-shelter / retreat in the mountains somewhere. But for most people, resources are limited. What are some things you can do that go beyond just keeping some extra groceries and bottled water? But not too far beyond?

And if you really want to start down that dark, scary road in your mind, here is an essay from  SurvivalBlog, "The Unrealistic Mentality of the Modern Survivalist." It begins,

I am guilty of falling into the “Wolverines!” mindset from time-to-time, that being the image of going toe-to-toe with the insidious foreign invasion force and setting up ambushes to destroy the evil occupiers or perhaps having to confront droves of hostiles, be they urban gang-bangers, local looters, or some other such group of less than savory individuals. The modern survivalist seems to be rather obsessed with the idea of a total collapse of all centralized authority to the point where society is little better than Somalia, although historical precedent doesn’t give much credibility to this theory. The idea of a “total collapse” has been covered to the point of ad nauseam but what of the idea of a “partial” or “limited” collapse?

In such a situation, he suggests, the isolated, well-stocked rural hideout beloved of many survivalists is actually a bad idea.

Somewhere down the list of my reasons for joining the volunteer fire department is something like what this writer advocates: "small yet close-knit communities [for those] who had the support and trust of their neighbors." (And such a thing can exist in urban areas too.)

Aside from my own wanting to give back something to the community, I also figured that if other sorts of bad things happen, it does not hurt to be friends with a group of people who are competent, have access to tools of many types, and who have an attitude of helpfulness and community service too.

Preparing for Disaster.

From Xavier, a post on bicycles as disaster-zone vehicles leads to another elaborate web site on disaster preparedness with Hurricane Katrina as a model scenario.

My little memoir, "Thinking like a Refugee" is here with a sidebar.

None of this is a Darfur-type experience, of course. But I still shudder at the thought of losing the house.