The Small Town in Each of Us

 During our trip up to the Rim to stay in the cabin in Strawberry, we drove several times the few miles down the slope into the nearby town of Pine. Pine is a small town to be sure, but given that it has a grocery store and other civic institutions, such as a Mormon Church (reflecting the early settlement of the area), it seems like a metropolis compared to the hamlet of Strawberry. Besides the restaurants where we dined, there is an ice cream parlor, and many antique stores and second-hand stores, which seem  to be he main town industry.

It so happens that our visit fell during the weekend of the Fall Festival in Pine. That's the official title--Fall Festival. The banners for the event were hung along the road as one passed on the highway that cuts through town. Mostly it appeared to be a chance for traveling merchants to set up their booths, and for the local businesses along the highway to bring in customers.

When we saw the first banner, we had a good joke about it. Just the week before, we had watched the premiere of a new movie on the Hallmark Channel in which the story centers around the rescue of a foundering event called the Fall Festival. It seemed too generic a title to be a real, but here we were in Pine, experiencing the real thing.

One of the rules of the Hallmark Channel movie is that every story must include what I call the town dance. It is not a scene typically in the third act of the story in which the hero and the heroine find themselves together at a festive public event. It need not necessarily be a town dance per se, but something equivalent to it, including a large holiday party or even a wedding. 

I had coined the term years ago during my movie-going obsession, noticing how common it was to find such a scene. There are many canonical examples. The one I like to cite from my 2008-2010 movie going years is the one on the pier in Nights in Rodanthe, mainly because I must have seen the trailer to it several dozen times during the spring of 2009.  Yet it is an old trope, and there are many examples from classic cinema, for example Christmas in Connecticut or Meet Me in St. Louis.

Invariably contemporary town dances in movies have festive lights like these:

Once during my travels I saw a town dance scene for a Hollywood movie being filmed at the old converted Union Pacific depot in Logan, Utah. I peeked inside and saw a well-known television actress on a stage in the far end of the room. During the scene, she was playing a guitar alongside a little girl. The room was decorated with these lights. I chatted with a local teenage guy who worked in the depot and he said the actress was a terror who was making everyone in the production miserable. I've since learned she has that reputation and she no longer gets much work in the industry after being a hot commodity for a couple years.

The town dance always happens to fall exactly when it is necessary for the story. What luck that the characters find themselves there at the moment! The important element of the story is that the hero and the heroine are seen and accepted by the community as couple. It is thus a dry run for the eventual wedding itself.

Sometimes the event is indeed part of an annual festival for the small town. The festival is always one with a long tradition that is beloved by the locals, and which everyone in town takes part in some form. In such a story, one of the characters is always a well-known local who has participated in the festival in the past, and who is active is preserving the tradition. 

The other character is the traveler who is often from a big city, or is returning to their hometown after being away in the world. In such a case, the festival becomes a means which the city character not only falls in love with the other character, but becomes enchanted by the town itself and decides to abandon their big city ambitions, which are false to their true nature, and to stay in the small town.

A great example of this story is Doc Hollywood, in which Michael J. Fox plays a newly minted plastic surgeon on his way to Beverly Hills to start a lucrative career. By a twist of fate, he is waylaid in a small town in South Carolina, smack in the middle of the annual Pumpkin Festival. It just so happens that the town needs a new doctor, but of course it is not a glamorous and well-paying position.

Once you learn to see the town dance or the annual festival in a story, it very much sticks out. One reason that the town dances stick out is that they are so outside of reality. Town dances, and annual festivals, really don't exist in America as they are portrayed in these movie, even in classic ones from the 1940s. There is something far too communal about the ones in the story. Everyone knows each other like a family, and are comfortable in their skin around each other. The events are too inclusive to be real. They reflect our deep yearning for a community event that doesn't exist, but which we wish exists.

It is one reason that almost all Hallmark Channel movies are about at least one of the characters finding peace in small town life. It reflects our deep dissatisfaction which modern civilization.

But as I pointed out to Ginger, the small towns that are depicted in these movies, even though they are shot in real locations, are highly stylized versions that reflect what we want small towns to look like. The main difference between the movie small towns and real ones is that all real communities in America are not only dirtier and grittier, but they are far more automobile-centric than any of the ones in movies. I remarked on this while we drove through Pine, where the Fall Festival is along a wide highway with cars parked long it. There is no way that one would mistake it for something in a movie.

The small towns in movies don't seem to need parking lots and fast food franchises. The camera angles make them look like Hollywood sets. They don't have power lines and road construction. They don't reflect the economic distress of most communities, in that unglamorous way that almost everyone in America experiences either directly or indirectly, in every little town across the country. 

The real American small town communities, the way most people in them live, are all but invisible in movies, as if they don't even exist. One of the very few exceptions I can remember is Frozen River, in which the heroine lives in a trailer and works at a dollar store trying to make ends meet. It is one of the few movies I saw during my run of theater-going, while I was traveling the country by car, in which I recognized the America I was driving through.

Again we see in this idealization a yearning for things missing from our rootless hyperconnected culture, and it always comes back to feeling a greater sense of one's grounded place in a community, and especially as part of a tradition that connects us to the past and the future. This is the type of place where we want to believe true love is possible.

Strawberry Supply Chain

Last weekend we drove up to the Rim, where we spent two nights in a cabin that Ginger rented, as a short getaway in honor of my birthday. The cabin was in the tiny hamlet of Strawberry, which is up the road from the slightest less tiny town of Pine, such that the two of them are often mentioned together.

During the summer, the Rim is a popular getaway for folks in the Valley, escaping the heat at higher altitudes. Even this time of year, when the weather cools, it is hard to get a reservation on weekends. The Strawberry Inn and its cabins were almost booked up by the time Ginger made her reservations.

It was sublime to be up among the pines. Strawberry is not on the top of the Rim, but far enough up the flank to feel that one is "on the Rim." 

Strawberry is mostly a line of businesses on either side of the road, including a few restaurants, in particular one called Mamma Jo's which serves Italian food, where we dined on our first evening, as well as an small hut that serves freshly baked savory and sweet empanadas, where we walked to get our breakfast on Saturday morning. 

We had gotten our coffee at the Windmill, which is a tiny structure that looks like its name, which serves coffee starting at six thirty in the morning. We had walked over there and gotten our morning hot drinks. We had tried to get food there, but the proprietor, speaking through the small window, told us that he nothing of foodstuffs available.

"Normally we have oatmeal," he said. "But we haven't gotten any in a while." He explained that his supplier hadn't been able to deliver certain critical supplies in weeks. Among other things, he was short on plastic lids. When I got a refill, he asked if I wouldn't mind reusing the lid.

It was my first real life encounter to a phenomenon I had been hearing about for weeks on Youtube--empty shelves and failures in the supply chain. It hadn't hit us in Scottsdale, but it had reached Strawberry.

I wondered if this whole episode about the supply chain will fade away and become a memory, or perhaps it will become something serious. I am bad about predicting the future about such things.

Of Lightning Bugs and Misfits

 When I left the table at the Bourbon Steakhouse in the Fairmont Princess, I put my staff-signed birthday card in the vest pocket of the black leather jacket I had worn. I had grabbed the jacket just as we left. It finally felt like it was autumn enough to wear it.

But the reason I had worn it was because it had belonged to my Great-Uncle Dick. He had gifted it to me last November when I visited him. It had been the last thing he had done during our visit, right as I was about to go out the door. He had directed me to the jacket in the closet by the door, asking if I wanted it. He is a much smaller man than me, but it fit perfectly.

When I took it off my coat rack yesterday to wear it out, it had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since I had gotten the message pop-up on my laptop. It was from "Laurie" and it simply said "My father died this morning."

It took me a few seconds to process who Laurie was, and then I realized it was Dick's daughter, who lives in Reno. She is my late mother's cousin. I haven't actually seen her since 1975 when Dick brought his family to visit his sister, my grandmother, at their home in Iowa. 

Last year after my visit, I interacted with Laurie. I told her I had remembered that visit. Normally I was the oldest of the kids around, but for once I saw the background filled with a teenagers jumping around and playing wildly with joy. Laurie had said she remembered the visit as well, especially as it was the first time she had ever seen lightning bugs, which are something I associate with being in my grandparent's backyard, but which I missed when when we moved to Colorado, where they are much more rare than the midwest.

I had told Laurie that I wanted to be notified with any developments with her father. She had been true to word when he went into the hospital in April, and placed on hospice watch by the doctor. But then he had recovered and went home, defying the doctor's pronouncement of doom.

Laurie told me that he had died peacefully. I figured he must have died about the time that Facebook went into its massive worldwide shutdown yesterday, so I will always have that event to mark it in the historical timeline of my memory.

Of course I am brutally sad about this, and I can barely begin to think of all that has been lost. He was the last of his family of eight siblings. He was the last person from that generation. He was the last person to know my grandparents in their prime. He was the last person to know my great-grandfather, whom he last saw in the late 1940s, even though he lived to 1974. They did not have a good relationship. But all access to memories of those people is gone know.

He was born in 1925. He served in the 15th Air Force during World War II, with the 97th Bomb Group, flying missions out of Foggia, Italy. He participated in the only allied bombing of Prague.

He went to court reporter school after the war. He went went in the late 1950s and founded his own court reporting firm in Reno. He bought property throughout Nevada. During out last meeting he told me about land he had bought. We both agreed that Gardnerville, which is just south of Reno, was a boom town. "If I were starting out again, that's where I'd buy land."

He met Marilyn Monroe when she was in Reno at the courthouse filming The Misfits, which was her last movie. He got to see her off camera, the real Norma Jean Baker, and see her turn into "Marilyn Monroe" when fans arrived. She was a completely different person, he said, the way she transformed.

That day last November, when I left him with the gifted leather jacket, I had driven up to Lake Tahoe where I had dined at his favorite steakhouse, the Eagle's Nest. That was one of the reasons I had accepted Ginger's offer at the last minute, and decided we should go to a steakhouse on my birthday.

I can barely imagine a world without all those people in it, who once filled the backyard of my grandparent's house on Hunziker Drive in Ames, that white colonial with its big backyard. My mother's cousins are still alive, and so are me and my sisters. But I am estranged from my sisters, and I barely know my mother's cousins. Perhaps I will meet them if I can get up to Reno for the memorial. I told Laurie to keep me in the loop.

Dick was the last of my family I could speak openly to about my opinions of the world. He voted for the same person I did. When I told him last November that justice would be done, and that the stolen election would rectified, he growled "good!". 

I'm so glad I got to see him that last time. For some reason I knew it would be the last time. His body was failing him, it was easy to see. He was not comfortable, to say the least, even though he held on to living independently until the end.

Among the reasons I am glad is that during our last visit, I got to tell him how much I had loved my grandparents--his older sister and her husband, who had already served in the War in Italy. 

"Really?" he said. I was almost in tears explaining. It touched him to hear it, and somehow I could see it gave me some peace, to hear such an expression of love within our family, especially since his own granddaughter had cut off contact with him over politics, something she will bitterly regret one day.

"He thought highly of you," Laurie said, after I sent a long text speaking of my grief.

It was one of the best things anyone has ever said to me.

Birthday on the Grid

 Yesterday around sunset we found ourselves in the mazelike streets surrounding the Fairmont Princess resort in north Scottsdale, looking for a place to park. Signs directed us towards the parking the Pumpkinfest, but at the entrance to the lost, we were informed the charge was seventy-two dollars, which included admission, so we drove back to the hotel entrance, where we were informed that our best option for parking for the steakhouse was to use valet parking, which would complementary if we got the ticket validated inside the restaurant. Ginger looked at the valet ticket as we went inside. It turns out the normal valet charge is a hundred dollars. Welcome to Scottsdale.

We'd been to the steakhouse before, a couple years back, for Ginger's birthday. She'd picked it out. They have wagyu beef, which is what she ordered. At the time I had gotten a normal steak. As she reminded me this time, I wouldn't let her taste my steak, as hers was so much better than mine.

As we dine early, the restaurant was almost empty and we got small table near the large plate glass windows. The waiter was friendly and offered us suggestions on cocktails and an appetizer. Since it was my birthday, I got to choose the latter. I took the waiter's suggestion to get the tuna tartare. A guy came out from the kitchen and prepared it in front of us, chopping up the other ingredients, including a quail egg, and reforming it in a triangle. It turned out to be a great choice.

In the meantime they brought out complementary duck fat fries, in three different varieties. I remembered we had gotten the same when we had come for Ginger's birthday.

We had been planning on ordering steaks, but it turns out that one of the house specialities is a Maine Lobster Pot Pie, which the waiter claimed was his favorite dish. We were supposed to be in Maine this week. The trip had been scuttled due to the ongoing health situation, and conflicts with various people.

As much as I wanted a steak, I decided to order the Lobster Pot Pie. Ginger ordered it as well, and when it was ready, they brought it out in a casserole and prepared the plate for us to share.

Ginger had told them it was my birthday when making the reservation, and they make a big deal about it, including giving me an extra desert item with a birthday candle, to augment to the white chocolate torte and the pumpkin cake that we ordered off the usual menu. 

The card was signed by all the servers in the restaurant. I would brush it off, but it was the only card I got this year, so it was nice to get one.

Over dinner I told Ginger that I had received a flood of birthday wishes.

"Really?" she said, happily.

"Yes. I got a birthday text from my dentist. I got a celebratory happy birthday email from the apartment complex management, one from [name of company I work for], two from my banks, and one from Blitz the Bearcat, the new mascot of [undergraduate institution I graduated from and which I think about as little as possible]. And oh yes, Google sent me a happy birthday pop-up notice, to go along with their ones they sent telling me its Latinx heritage month, and some kind of pagan wiccan holiday for the extended solstice."

It makes the paper card I got from the restaurant staff seem downright traditional. I like the way it felt in my fingers.

Our Lady of Victory + 450

 

Just a note that this week marks the 450th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, one of the most significant days in the history of Western Civilization.

"More than a military victory, Lepanto was a moral one. For decades, the Ottoman Turks had terrified Europe, and the victories of Suleiman the Magnificent caused Christian Europe serious concern. The defeat at Lepanto further exemplified the rapid deterioration of Ottoman might under Selim II, and Christians rejoiced at this setback for the Ottomans. The mystique of Ottoman power was tarnished significantly by this battle, and Christian Europe was heartened." (Paul K. Davis)

Wikipedia:

On 7 October 1571, the Holy League, a coalition of southern European Catholic maritime states, sailed from Messina, Sicily, and met a powerful Ottoman fleet. Knowing that the Christian forces were at a distinct material disadvantage, Pope Pius V called for all of Europe to pray the Rosary for victory, and led a rosary procession in Rome...

 The lookout on the Real sighted the Turkish van at dawn of 7 October. Don Juan of Austria called a council of war and decided to offer battle. He travelled through his fleet in a swift sailing vessel, exhorting his officers and men to do their utmost. The Sacrament was administered to all, the galley slaves were freed from their chains, and the standard of the Holy League was raised to the truck of the flagship.

Plan of the Battle (formation of the fleets just before contact)

The wind was at first against the Christians, and it was feared that the Turks would be able to make contact before a line of battle could be formed. But around noon, shortly before contact, the wind shifted to favour the Christians, enabling most of the squadrons to reach their assigned position before contact. ...In the ensuing mêlée, the ships came so close to each other as to form an almost continuous platform of hand-to-hand fighting in which both leaders were killed. The Christian galley slaves freed from the Turkish ships were supplied with arms and joined in the fighting, turning the battle in favour of the Christian side. 

After the battle Pius V instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory in order to commemorate the victory at Lepanto, which he attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Color of October

 The news has been crazy lately. I don't mean the mainstream news outlets. I don't watch them, and I have little idea what is going on with them. To me, all of that is a propaganda narrative that is of little value in learning about what is really going on.

I refer instead to the alternative news outlets. Everything seems to be on the boil, not only about the shadow political world, but about the economy. What is happening in the world economy--Chinese real estate collapse, Chinese power outages, collapse of the world supply chain, energy prices skyrocketing in Europe, the stock market teetering--has a lot of people both in the alternative world, and the ones with one foot in the mainstream, speculating about possible seismic developments in the near future. Are you prepared?

As usual, my response to such things is usually to disengage with the fervor. I have no idea what is going to happen in the near future. My guesses would be as good as random chance. 

Partly this is because I know that even within the alternative world, where there is an authentic desire among most people to know the truth of things, akin to true journalism, there is a consciousness that we are in the dark about so much. How can any of us make judgments about what is going to happen. We live with the uncertainty day by day, of whether any sense of the momentary normal will continue to carry through next week, next month, or next year

I feel a peacefulness in knowing there is nothing I can do about any of this. The world will play out with me as a mere spectator. There is no point in risking my emotional state on any of it.

Beyond the Anthropocentric Apocalypse

 In the second half of the Twentieth Century, we got used to speaking about the end of the world. Most of the discussions centered around the consequences of a world-wide nuclear war that would destroy civilization and possibly the biosphere of the Earth, rendering it uninhabitable.

Towards the end of the century, and into this one, we transitioned to discussing the end of the world due to human-caused changes in the atmosphere of the earth. After asserting that human beings were driving the Earth to a nice Ice Age, we switched to a belief that human beings were going to cause the Earth to heat up beyond a zone of temperature in which much of Earth's flora and fauna could continue to exist. Then we transitioned to believing that humans were going to disrupt the climate patterns in some unknown but chaotic fashion, both colder and hotter, rainier and drier, in a such a way as to accomplish the same dire end.

What all of these scenarios had in common is an end of the world as we know it due to human agency.  In the case of a nuclear exchange, it was not only the warlike tendencies of humanity, but man's need to understanding the fundamental laws of physics, a quest which had unleashed the golem of particle physics. Our quest for knowledge was our undoing.

In the case of Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change, the culprit was our modern society and our opulence built on resource usage.

In all these scenarios, which were both proximate and somewhat predictable, the solution to saving the world involved blaming Man himself, and correcting something in human nature. 

This makes sense from a historical point of view, as by the Twentieth Century, western civilization had transitioned away from a belief of God as the supreme intelligence in the Cosmos towards a belief in Man as being supreme. Not surprisingly, our apocalyptic scenarios transitioned from ones due to the intervention of God to ones due to the effects of human agency. 

There are other more exotic scenarios one could mention, that have been explored in science fiction, for example the arrival of deleterious extraterrestrials who someone bring about the end of human existence or civilization. In such scenarios, it is almost always the cause that humans somehow were instrumental in bringing this about, e.g. by our modern radio and television broadcasts out into the galaxy, or by our space exploration that "went too far."

Our "God-caused" end-of-the-world scenarios still existed, but they receded far away, either to the edge of time and space itself (the heat death of the universe, or the Sun going supernova), or to random, unpredictable disaster events (asteroid impact), ones that might be countered by human technology. 

But what if we were to become aware that the most significant threat to the world, that could lead to the end of the world, was both proximate and predictable (like Climate Change), but was in no way due to human agency, and furthermore could not be prevented by any human intervention?

That is, suppose we became aware of some impeding apocalyptic event, that was not due to human action, but which would happen, say, twenty to thirty years from now at most, perhaps sooner, which was probably inevitable, but which could not be stopped by any imaginable human agency?

One wonders how humanity would react under such a scenario. The anthropocentric folks who are wedded to Climate Change as being their preferred end-of-the-world scenario (and who are using it as a cudgel to force changes in human behavior they deem as necessary), would probably not want to give up their favorite future end-times scenario. They would fight against the acceptance of such a God-driven scenario about which we could do nothing.

One wonders if the awareness of such a "God-driven" apocalypse, if it emerged into public consciousness, would lead to a shift in the religious consciousness of the world. What if there was nothing we could do about it except beg God Almighty for some miraculous intervention?

The Return of the Physicist, for Maybe the First Time

Back in the year 1990, as a first year graduate student at the University of Texas, I wrote a research proposal as part of a competition sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Among the prizes for the competition were free hours one could use on one of several Cray supercomputer, the fastest machines in the world available at the time, which were located in California. With ten hours one could do a lot of number crunching for projects that require that kind of thing. 

I can't remember why I was motivated to enter the competition, or even how I heard about. I wasn't particularly interested in the computer time. Nevertheless I decided to enter it, and I wrote a short essay of several pages proposing a research program into what at the time was my favorite subject in all of physics--the spiral structure of spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way. The idea that conglomerations of tens of billions of stars in quasi-random movement could form and sustain such large-scale ordered structured seemed to me to be mind boggling.

It is not as if we don't have good theories as to why spiral galaxies have the form they do. To say it is an open question, or a mystery, is not to say we are completely in the dark. It means we don't have definite, conclusive proof of any one particular theory as to why spiral structure exists. It is one of the questions that astrophysicists continue to study, from the expanding data gathered by astronomers.

I mention this because lately I have found myself thinking deeply about the structure of spiral galaxies again, including the Milky Way. This time it is not about the star structure---the luminous spirals--but rather a more subtle spiral structure that is invisible to the naked eye, and which has emerged in recent years as a very controversial topic. It is the apparent existence of a spiral structure of plasma (charged particles) that is essential huge spiral version of the solar wind, but which pervades throughout the galaxy. 

As I mentioned, it is a very controversial topic, more so than one might think. The reason for it being controversial is very fascinating, but I am hesitant to discuss them here, beyond saying that it may have deep implications for the future of the human race.

I became aware of all this recently via Youtube, from a channel I found which discusses space weather (sunspots, solar corona mass ejections, solar storms, etc.). The person who runs it is an amateur but he does a daily review of published papers in astrophysics that is like catnip for someone like me. I have learned more from him in the last couple months than I have in many years. I am thinking of diving into his references for my talk next year in Prague (if that conference happens, and if I can even get there).

I have felt physics to be dead for many years. All of a sudden it has sprung back to life for me, and I am fascinated again by old questions. I feel I have the jump on much of the physics world in studying new and exiting things, in part because I am not bound by adherence to the dogmas that one has to use to explain certain atmospheric phenomena in regard to geomagnetism (cough, climate change, cough).

Not only do I feel interested in physics again, I feel as if I need to participate in it because I have a role to play in it. Whenever I feel this, it is a powerful feeling. 

By the way, as it happens, I won second place in the nationwide NSF competition with my galaxy essay. This was rather stunning to me, as at the time I was barely holding on in graduate school by my fingertips, and I was constantly questioning whether I even belonged in the program. Technical writing, however, is one of my strengths, so in some ways it was easy to shine.

Those ten free hours became part of leverage I used I getting my position at the Stat Mech Center. I never used them, however, as I never needed them. Probably my laptop is as powerful as those Cray Machines from thirty years ago (maybe not).

Those Cray machines in California, it should be mentioned, were, I think, the original "backbone" of something called the Internet. It was something physicists used back in the early Nineties. I remember telling my people about it. I'm not sure whatever became of it.