Thursday, May 19, 2011

Alius Ver



Alius Ver


I stood for a few minutes late this afternoon staring out a western-facing doorway here at work into a bright setting sun. The door is all glass so I could feel the radiant heat as it beat against my skin. As I stood there half-hypnotized by the unaccustomed sight, I gave a silent thank you to whatever powers that be for this unexpected gift. It felt wonderful!


It has been a cold and wet spring in this portion of northern Ohio I call home. The occurrences of sunshine the past several months have been few and the handful of times when the sun actually did appear only served to remind us all of what a normal spring used to look like. Gray skies, rain, thunder and more rain have been our lot since the last of winter's dirty snow has melted. People say it's climate change and I guess that's as good an excuse as any. Up until recently I seem to recall they called it global warming. At least until the recent long and severe winters started piling up. Haven't heard much from our old pal Al Gore on global warming the last couple of years, have we? Kind of hard to keep beating the drum on global warming when wearing a parka and mukluks.


So the catchphrase now is climate change.


They say it's our fault, too. Too many cars. Too many belching cattle. Or is it flatulent cattle? And lots more active volcanoes. Or tsunamis? And don't you remember when they were “tidal waves”? And then again I've heard it's just too many people. Or not enough trees. Or too many golf courses. Or... Or... Or...


I guess science has gradually moved into the climate change camp, too, even as the loyal opposition still maintains it's just a natural cycle.


I used to subscribe to one of those theories. I'm now leaning the other way. I'll let you guess as to which one.


In any event, the winters recently seem to be longer, colder and heavy with more snow than usual followed by long, gray, wet springs. At least the last few have seemed that way. And at least that's the situation around here. I suppose there are other places that are too dry, too hot and miserable in other ways. I seem to recall reading about them.


But what can you do? I don't own any flatulent cattle. I haven't built any golf courses or cut down any trees. I may contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer by my own flatulence from time to time, but I don't think that's a large contribution. At least macroclimactically speaking. In the offend-the-guy-sitting-next-to-you way of looking at it, yes, I'm probably one of the “bad” guys. But I'm going to blame the bean and Brussels sprout farmer. He's the one giving me the ammunition!


But, be honest about the weather. Hasn't it always been that way? I remember damn cold, snowy winters. And wet, rainy springs. And hot dry summers. We didn't blame them on anything exotic like we do now days. We just bundled up heavier (or lighter), turned up the furnace a bit (or the fan/air conditioner), made sure all the umbrellas still worked and went on with life.


And speaking about unusual weather reminds me of some memorable instances from the past.


When I was a young boy of three or four, maybe around 1950, and my parents rented a farmhouse for our residence. They didn't have much money and I suppose the place was quite economical How much fun it was in those days as a kid to run through the fields with my dog in the summertime and catch field mice. And how horribly bad the winter was that year; how the snow drifts were way over my head and how dad had to get up in the middle of each night to go to the cellar and stoke the coal furnace. Every night. And how I caught pneumonia that year, spent a week in the hospital and almost died except for a new “wonder” drug called penicillin.


In 1969 when I was in the Air Force and stationed in Panama and how I read about my hometown and local area in the South American edition of the Miami Tribune. On the fourth of July that year a monstrous thunderstorm stood over the area for hours and hours and dumped literally tons of water everywhere. Three police officers from the area were drowned as they tried to rescue people from the swiftly-flowing flooded areas around town. And that same day how my cousin and her husband were rendered homeless as their mobile home was ripped from it's foundation and smashed into the raging river that flowed around it that used to be a gentle creek. She walked the banks of that creek in the following weeks trying to find remnants of her belongings and of her life. She found very little.


On January 26 of 1978 the storm of the century blew into our area burying cars, blowing out power lines and killing 51 Ohioans. My wife and I were living in a mobile home at the time. We abandoned it and moved in with my father in his brick house. We would remain there for almost a week. The storm was so bad they still refer to it as the “White Hurricane” as the winds whipped over 80 miles per hour and the barometer reached record lows. My brother rode his snowmobile through the middle of town to get supplies for those of us stranded at dad's house.


On April 3 and 4 of 1974 I remember the tornado superoutbreak. 315 people were killed across the United States and the Ohio town of Xenia was devastated. About half the buildings of the town of 27,000 were damaged and 300 destroyed. It killed 32 people in that area. I remember it extremely well as paper fell from the sky in my hometown over 150 miles away that had been swept up from there.


When I think back on these terrible weather events I find that our long winters and wet, cool springs are a good trade off. I guess I'll take them over the catastrophes of the past.


So another damp spring slowly creeps into Ohio spreading its watery cheer and shy glimpses of sunshine. And I say welcome, my friend.


It sure beats shoveling snow.







Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Point of Confluence



Point of Confluence


As some of you may remember reading about in previous blogs, my wife and I have been pursuing a hobby the last few years called geocaching. The official definition of geocaching is: “Geocaching is a real-world outdoor treasure hunting game. Players try to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, using GPS-enabled devices and then share their experiences online.” Each of the six-hundred-and-some geocaches that we've found have had a name along with a latitude and a longitude to enable us to find it using our GPS devices. Last year we found one in a small town about 15 miles north of where we live. It's title was “A Point of Confluence”. It was a rather mundane and unremarkable geocache in the middle of a field. It's “claim to fame”, I suppose, was that it was located at a particular point on the earth's surface defined as North Latitude 41 degrees 00 minutes 00 seconds, West Longitude 82 degrees 00 minutes 00 seconds. If you look at a globe of the earth you can see those lines of latitude and longitude drawn on it. The latitudes are the ones that go east and west and don't touch. The longitudes are the ones that go north and south and touch at the poles.


As I stood at the location of that particular geocache I visualized in my mind the two heavy black lines on a map of the Earth's surface converging at that spot. The North 41 degree latitude line swinging in from the east and rolling out to the west eventually crossing the wide Pacific Ocean, Japan, North Korea, China, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal before crossing the Atlantic and again meeting at my point of confluence. I also visualized the West 82 degree of longitude line running north from my location across Canada and the center of Hudson Bay, on through the icy wastes of the Arctic to the North Pole where it became the East 92 degree line diving south through Mongolia, China, Thailand and countless miles of the Pacific before meeting at the South Pole in Antarctica and racing again north on the West 82 degree line nipping the west coast of South America, Panama, Cuba, Florida and back up to my cache site. As I stood on that erstwhile “magical” spot I could feel the connection to those far-flung and exotic places by the magical lines that connected us.


Of course I could have performed the same mental exercise using any latitude and longitude, but this spot was on an important one! At least to the mapmakers and cartographers. It was interesting looking at my GPS and seeing all those zeros. All those minutes and seconds added up that all came out even at zero.


I guess there wasn't any really practical use to know that the field behind a certain McDonald's restaurant was a Major point of confluence. Perhaps only as an odd coincidence in our hobby.


But it got me to thinking... and eventually led to this blog.


I guess, if you wanted to, you could compare your life to a line of latitude or longitude and the important events that occur in that life could be defined as points of confluence. Some would be minor ones with odd numbers of minutes and seconds. New cars. Vacations. Holidays. Promotions. Others could be majors where the numbers have lots of zeros. Births of children. Deaths of loved ones. Job changes. Relocations. A lot of these points could be imagined as visible as they come sweeping in at you as you move along your line. Others would seem to sneak up on you and arrive at unexpected times.


I've got what could be construed as a major point of confluence bearing down on me at the moment, one that's been threatening to arrive for some time and now is upon me and a number of people who are “riding the line” with me. It's a point that holds promise and concern, happiness and sorrow, uncertainty and resolution. But most of all it holds change, and change is always the wild card of life.


To be more precise and to quit speaking in metaphors, my immediate supervisor is retiring at the end of the month.


I've been in my present job for almost a decade now and my currant supervisor hired me. I was trained primarily by him and I perform my duties as he wishes them to be performed. I've grown fond of him as we are akin in age and akin in a lot of our life experiences. He's been a mentor to me and a confidant, a boss and a friend in equal measure. And over the years he's placed his stamp on the department that he heads. We all know how things work, we all know what he expects and we've all grown accustomed to the “way things are done” under his leadership.


The department is as much defined by him as it is echoed by us.


And now that's going to change.


Now we're going to be, as they might say, marching to a different drummer.


Our present supervisor's replacement is well known to all of us. He's liked, he's eminently capable and we all expect that he'll be able to handle his new duties capably. His skill set is a bit different than that of our present leader, but not so much so as to cause great concern.


But it will be different around here. There will be changes. There will be differences both obvious and covert.


And to top things off, to put another layer of icing on the cake, our new supervisor's boss has just left for greener pastures and we have a new supervisor in that position also.


I expect a bit of a roller coaster ride for the next few months.


And the points of confluence on our jolly ol' line of latitude (or longitude) just keep rollin' on by.