Every fall thousands of kokanee salmon spawn in the rocky shallows of Idaho’s Lake Coeur d’Alene, and every fall hundreds of bald eagles descend to devour them. One frigid, blustery day in early January, Elise and I drove out to catch the tail end of the months-long feast. The eagle flock had been smaller this year than in the recent past, and departed early; by the time we arrived, only four or five still lingered at Higgins Point. The raptors hovered in the stiff gusts like kites and perched miserably in the shuddering ponderosas, so fluffed against the cold they could have passed for birbs.
The kokanee run had long since wrapped up, too, though, unlike the migratory eagles, the salmon would not be departing Lake Coeur d’Alene at journey’s end. Hundreds of spawned-out carcasses lay at the wrack line, decrepit bodies so densely piled that, upon first blush, they were indistinguishable from the cobble.The fish weren’t lying on the beach; they were the beach. Our dog, Kit, tried to roll in the sludge, displaying her species’ unerring instinct for doing the most disgusting possible thing in any given moment.
We dragged Kit away and followed a trail uphill, into the cover of the pines. The salmon seemed to follow. Even hundreds of feet from the lake, their corpses littered the forest floor, staring blindly at us from pecked-out sockets. Needle teeth lined their jaws, which had been transfigured by the spawn into hooked, leering kypes. Some kokanee had chunks missing from their ragged backs; some were only heads.They were most concentrated, I noticed, at the base of the eagles’ perch trees. Quite obviously, they’d been dropped.
Gordon and Judy with their granddaughter Kinsinta Surber in 2018. Photo by Justin Maxon, http://www.justinmaxon.com/
I’ve already written for LWON once about the power outages that swept California this fall. Soon after I posted that piece, however, I heard from a family that lost power in the midst of a medical crisis, and wanted to share their story.
I met this family in 2018, while reporting a story for the Washington Post. My goal for the story was to illustrate how a quiet change to California’s health care policy left two brothers-in-law – Gordon Surber and Mark Hailey — in vastly different worlds in terms of healthcare.
Gordon and Mark were neighbors on the Hoopa Valley
Reservation in rural Humboldt County, California. Both men had chronic
obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) a terminal lung condition that slowly
whittles away lung capacity. Because of a recent law covering palliative care for
a subset of people with MediCal, California’s Medicaid program, Mark was able
to get palliative care– a suite of services including specialized pain control
and visits from a nurse, chaplain and social worker.
Gordon, who died in November 2019, could not get palliative care covered by his Medicare policy or private insurance. Without palliative care, his wife Judy was left to care for Gordon, three grandkids and her mother largely unsupported, although the company that provides Mark’s care, ResolutionCare, stepped in to provide many services for free.
When the Washington
Post story went to print, in December 2018, Gordon was in and out of the emergency
room, each trip requiring an hour and a half-long drive each way through a
windy mountain pass. It seemed unlikely he’d live much longer, but he made it
through nearly another year, helping Judy take care of their three grandkids.
By fall of 2019, Gordon’s lung capacity had diminished to the point that he needed a continuous supply of oxygen. When PG&E shut the power off in October, there were no spare tanks in the house, Judy says. The home machine that delivered oxygen had to be plugged into an outlet, but it kept turning off when connected to their small generator. Someone brought a bigger generator, but that machine burnt out, Judy says. Ultimately they had to use his brother-in-law’s machine, as Mark’s health has improved since he started palliative care.
I called a company that supplies oxygen in Humboldt County, Broadway Medical, to ask how they handled the outages. The first outage came with only a few hours of warning, they told me. Although the company says none of its several thousand customers had emergencies, it also lost its internet connection when the power went out, including access to its electronic records. Unable to conduct business as usual, they sent most of their staff home.
During an outage, Broadway can still transfer oxygen from large canisters to smaller, more portable ones, and deliver them by truck, they told me. Their own supply is limited, however, by that of a separate facility that converts liquid oxygen into concentrated air. That facility can only make it so far on a generator, and when it runs out, Broadway can’t fill tanks. Things can start to go bad with in a day or two, the company’s operations manager told me: “If you go beyond 24 hours, that’s when you start to see real problems.”
Although she knows Gordon was living on borrowed time during
his last weeks, Judy thinks the outages made things worse. He was so stressed by
the prospect of running out of oxygen that he kept turning down the dial on the
tanks whenever she left the room, she says. Every time his blood oxygen levels dropped
too low he lost a bit of function, she says: at one point he had a seizure,
then he couldn’t speak or swallow. “Every time something like that happened he
never got back to how he was before,” she says.
Although my story for the Post was focused on health policy, I always wanted to write more about Judy, who has carried such a heavy caregiving burden — taking care of Gordon, her mother, and grandkids — while simultanously working as a medical grant writer for the Hoopa tribe and pursuing her own creative work.* It seems monstrously unfair that the outages struck during her final months with Gordon, her partner of more than 40 years. “Some people never have what we had, never know that unconditional, soul mate, best-friend type of love,” she wrote after he died. “I’ll love him forever, miss him every day and treasure what we had until the day that I join him.”
*One of the things that Judy and I connected over, early on, is that she also is a writer. She has published a novel, Reservation High, and is now working on her second book.
That’s a somewhat newer mission patch from the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite outfit which is clearly still at the top of its game.
The amateur NRO watchers are still watching. I follow some of them on Twitter. Lately they’ve also been watching: the Starlink satellites, the launch of international asteroid probes, pretty pictures taken by weather and earth-observing satellites, North Korean missile launches — anything that may or may not go into some kind of orbit and can be seen. These watchers are related to other watchers of OSINT (open source intelligence) (meaning, unclassified images taken by satellites) (of stuff like missile strikes, nuclear facilities, and missile launch sites) (in countries not necessarily our friends). The former watchers tend to be looking up, the latter tend to be looking down. Not sure why I enjoy this so much. This first ran April 26, 2012, and the comments were interesting.
At 4:12 p.m., Pacific time, on April 3, 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office – the 50-year old spy satellite agency whose existence the government didn’t admit until 1992 – launched a “payload,” a classified radar satellite, NROL-25. The launch was webcast live but the NRO didn’t want to reveal sensitive information about the satellite’s eventual orbit, so it cut off the webcast after three minutes. Five hours later, a Canadian member of a loose group of amateur trackers watched the classified satellite pass overhead; then other trackers from Sweden, Russia, Scotland, and another Canadian watched it too. They calculated its orbit. The tracker from the Netherlands was clouded out and didn’t see it until April 5, but he photographed, then filmed it. The whole thing is up on the internet.
I hardly know which question to start with. Let’s begin with the questions I’m not going to ask: what the NRO is up to, and what target that classified radar satellite is looking at, and why the target requires using radar and not regular optical imaging. The answers I’d get would be neither exact nor satisfying. I know this because I’ve spent time asking such questions and I swear, the people who answer them have taken lessons in stringing common English words into sentences that range from non-responsive to gibberish. This pisses me off unbearably and I used to think I’d rather they just told me they weren’t going to answer. But then I ran into some classified guy at a party and asked politely, “And what do you do?” and he said, “I can’t tell you,” and I wanted to yell, “Well for chrissakes then make something up, I was just being polite!” The point is, classification is a mighty hard on friendly conversation with your fellow man.
No, the point is, I may have needed to get that off my chest but we’ve strayed from the subject: those amateur trackers. They’re international – in addition to the countries above, they come from the U.S., England, South Africa, Australia, France, Germany – number around 15 to 25, and are mostly retired. They operate out of their back yards using binoculars, stop watches, cameras, and math. They’re not looking randomly around the sky, they’re looking for specific objects: the International Space Station and the space shuttle carrying crews travelling to the station, satellites with decaying orbits, and mainly, classified satellites. They hear about a launch – NRO announces launches which are full of conspicuous fire and thunder and not exactly secret – spot the satellite, communicate positions and trajectories to their colleagues, and calculate the orbit that the NRO doesn’t want them to calculate.
Orbits tell them something about the satellite itself. A sun-synchronous orbit — that follows the sun’s path — is probably an optical satellite taking pictures, says Allen Thomson, a former intelligence analyst, of the same locations with the same sunlight and shadows. A Molniya orbit sits over one location; Thomson says it’s probably a signals intelligence satellite. The April 3 satellite’s orbit was retrograde – the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation – so it’s probably radar (for reasons I faintly understand and can’t begin to explain but having to do with the earth turning away from the satelllite, thereby enhancing the Doppler shift and ultimately the resolution of whatever the satellite is looking at).
Not that any of this is secret, though the tracker from the Netherlands says that they don’t publish everything they’ve seen. The NRO reportedlydoesn’t like the trackers but the trackers aren’t telling the bad guys anything the bad guys don’t already know. Thomson says the bad guys can probably afford equipment better than stuff that trackers can order from Amazon. The tracker from the Netherlands says, “If 15 retired hobbyists with simple equipment can do this, then rogue nations certainly can. They really don’t need us.”
The trackers are space nerds, they like looking at space-type things that are supposed to be secret. Tracking is their definition of fun. Some of them were at one time employed as government trackers, many have been tracking since the first decade of the space age. They feel as though they’re recording a hidden history – the Netherlands tracker is an archeologist and thinks of his hobby as space archeology.
The trackers also don’t much like secrecy — I heard about them because the Federation of American Scientists‘ secrecy-hating Steven Aftergood put it in his Secrecy News – and like to point out that the UN Outer Space Treaty asks countries to disclose the whereabouts of their satellites. The Netherlands tracker adds that the trackers have seen satellites going out of control within a few weeks of launch, and the US government won’t mention it until a year later when the thing becomes a public menace. They’re currently watching an out-of-control 1.5 ton Japanese spy satellite, he says, that’s coming down mid-2012.
I’m always impressed by amateurs doing for free and pleasure the things that professionals are paid to do. I’m also impressed that stuff this close to being classified is all over the internet – a person could make a career of following the links of these links. I’m not sure whether this internet ubiquity is a testament to our country’s relative openness, or the internet’s ability to find dusty corners, or the irresistibility of secrets.
Meanwhile, the NRO is in the middle of a series of launches with an “unprecedented operational tempo” – oh yeah? and what’s that unprecedented tempo all about? Good luck finding out. And I wouldn’t google “NRO” and “patches” either — these are the fairly normal-looking ones.
Happy New Year, for what a year is worth given the light of Betelgeuse fading from the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Thanks to Ann for pointing that out last week, and that it may have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and no longer exists.
Beginning of January, heart of winter, is a good time to think about time, figure out where we are in the scheme of things. I stand on a boulder sticking up from snow in the yard and spot where the sun’s been setting on its post-solstice turnaround, creeping day by day northward, proof the clock is still ticking.
We each find a sense of time for ourselves: light comes low under south-facing eaves, alarm goes off in the morning announcing the stirring.
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up a sinuous dry canyon, guarded by two guys with broadswords. The hopping university town of Fort Collins, then just a smallish scatter of purple squares along a tidy grid of streets. And there’s Boulder in 1957, my hometown, where I’m visiting my family for the turn of the New Year.
We press the map folds flat with our fingers and lean closer. The city then was a tiny yolk at the core of its current footprint, pressed hard against the mountains. The mesa where my parents live formed its eastward boundary, a new neighborhood then, not yet swallowed and sprawled miles beyond with malls and business parks and subdivisions and natural gas wells, the fingers of the city and its neighbors creeping outward over the plains, grasping each other to form an amoeba of light and noise that pulses with traffic along a vasculature of roads. A place forever swallowing itself. Becoming new and new again, without becoming better.
Every time I come back, I grumble about how much things have
changed since I was a kid. For all my sharp words, though, there’s something
unchanging here. It rises in me when I see the rolling ponderosa-covered waves
of the foothills breaking on the snowy, treeless slopes of the high Rockies to
the west, when I see the plains reaching boundlessly east, haloed pink at the
days’ two turns, from and towards darkness.
If you stand around an airport bathroom a little longer than necessary, you may witness a few steps toward the fall of human civilization. Because nobody, and I mean nobody, washes their hands well enough to kill off the funk we humans pick up and carry around.
I did this experiment on a recent trip. At the Albuquerque Airport I watched 8 different women as they exited a toilet stall and headed for the sinks. One of them simply fixed her hair in the mirror and left. Three others gestured at a wash–running their hands under the faucet for about a second before flicking away the water; two of those grabbed a towel from the thankfully automatic roll, the other used her sweatshirt to dry off. Four ladies actually used a squirt of soap, but the longest “scrub” was about five seconds long, and only two of the women actually rubbed the soap over their whole hands, not just the palm sides. Continue reading →
If you were to think about it, where would you think the first eyewitness account of one of the Wright brothers’ flights would have appeared in print?
I’d guess the New York Times, maybe. A local newspaper in North Carolina or Ohio. Perhaps a venerable old science magazine like Scientific American.
Well, I would be wrong, because it actually appeared in a magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. In the January 1, 1905 issue, alongside articles like “Queens Mating More Than Once” and “How to Wash Out Kerosene Cans,” founder Amos Root wrote a very enthusiastic account of one of the brothers’ Ohio flights.
It has been brought to my attention that I know very little
about tornadoes. There are only two things that I know about them, in fact.
They are a corkscrew of wind, and they helped Dorothy get to Oz. But do they
start from the bottom or from the top? Can they travel over a mountain? What
about a mountain that’s more like a cliff? That is, could a tornado go up the Dawn Wall? And aren’t they one of the
few natural disasters that California doesn’t have?
Well, I have learned the answer to the last question: no. (Or,
I think it’s no. There are too many negatives in that question.) What I mean to
say is, we had a tornado warning last week, and I realized I had absolutely no
idea what to do about it.
