SNOWSCREEN: Chapter III "Science is nice; Bombs are better"

Plus, Messing with Maps

Messing with Maps:

I like maps. I really like old maps of the Four Corners Country. I’m putting these ones here just in case y’all share the same cartographical cravings. That’s all. I’ve got nothing more to say. These are outtakes from an 1893 map of Southwestern Colorado.

I’ve put an old RR line map up here before, but what caught my eye about this one were the proposed lines between Durango and Albuquerque (the Durango-Farmington Red Apple Flyer wasn’t built until 1905) and between Mancos/Cortez and Gallup. Source: Library of Congress.

This is for those who don’t know or don’t believe the fossil fuel hot spot known as Farmington, New Mexico, and vicinity was once, well, a farming town. In fact, it’s labeled here as “The Great Fruit Belt.” Source: Library of Congress.

Note the tramway up the face of Smelter Mountain; the two smelter locations; the sandstone quarry up Horse Gulch; the brickyard near Chapman Hill; and the race track near what is now Riverview school. Also, the Junction Creek neighborhood was known as Brookside, and Main Ave. was the Electric Cable Road, because a cable street car went up and down it.

Interesting that they chose to focus on this area, leaving out the western side of the range — where most mining activity is focused these days.

I don’t usually think of the Needles as being mining country since they are so hard to access and are now inside the Weminuche Wilderness. But in 1893 there were a fair number of claims in the range. Whether they produced much is another question.

And for some more up-to-date maps:

• A great way to follow the progression of monsoon storms across the region is LightningMaps.org. Zoom in on the region you want to see and then click the “Real Time” button in the upper left-hand corner. It’s showing me that as I write this in the early morning hours, the Great Sage Plain north of Hovenweep National Monument is getting pounded by lightning. And the map also has an optional feature showing rain: It’s saying that the lightning is accompanied by fire-squelching moisture, too. Watch out for flash floods!

  

• You can then go to the AirNow Fire & Smoke Map to see if the satellites are detecting any hot spots flaring up in the wake of all the lightning and get smoke warnings. Very cool.

SNOWSCREEN: CHAPTER 3

Read the previous chapters

Malcolm Brautigan re-entered consciousness on the floor of the Dandelion Times office with Olivia Patel yelling at him to “eat Irene!” Or at least that’s what he heard. In fact, Patel, the owner of the Battleship coffee shop, was gently urging Brautigan to take a bite of the turkey sandwich he had ordered but forgotten and that Patel had kindly brought to the newspaper office, knowing that’s where he was, but not knowing he had fainted. When he regained enough brain function to determine what was happening, Malcolm gobbled the sandwich down, having eaten nothing but a banana early that morning before leaving Ted Denton’s house in Paonia. The low blood sugar, high caffeine-intake combination had simply short-circuited his physiology, Malcolm explained to the concerned onlookers, and he had passed out. He didn’t tell them he was also in a state of anxiety-induced shock, brought on both by Matt Jaramillo’s strange insistence that Malcolm write nothing for the Times, and by the overwhelming amount of new skills Brautigan would have to learn just to get the paper out the door once a week.

He was beginning to think this wasn’t such a good idea, after all.

“You okay?” Jaramillo asked, with a skeptical and—to Malcolm’s ear—an ageist tone. “You gonna be able to handle this?”

“Are you kidding? I got this, dude. I just need a minute, okay?”

“Sure thing, but I need to show you my apartment. Your apartment for the next … well … until I get back.”

Brautigan walked out of the office to the end of the hall, then turned around and walked back. He was starting to feel better, but he didn’t want to deal with the people, with any people. He walked down the old wooden stairway, marveling as he always had at the ornate little metal gadgets in each stair’s corner, intended to prevent those little dust buildups in those hard-to-reach-with-the-broom places. He never understood why all stairways didn’t have those things. But of course he knew why: It cost more to make the gadgets than it did to pay someone substandard wages to clean those corners. 

“Fucking capitalism,” he muttered. To himself, he thought.

“Amen, brother!”

The voice had come from the bottom of the stairs. Brautigan walked tentatively down and peered into the cramped headquarters of the Silverton Avalanche Forecasters, contractors for the Colorado Department of Transportation who kept folks from getting killed on the highways. There he saw a ghost, a solidly built man with closely shorn gray hair and a baseball cap that said, in embroidered lettering, “Science is nice. Bombs are better.”