Katydids are singing. Summer has passed its height. The hottest heat wave of summer, like the coldest freeze of winter, often comes after the solstice and this week is expected to be the hottest week of summer...
Kingsport, the small city to which I could still walk if the side of it facing me hadn't become a slum, is bracing for brutal heat. Life-threatening heat. Don't walk or work outdoors if you can possibly avoid it, people are being told. Stay inside air-conditioned buildings. Drink lots of water. Check on older people daily.
At the Cat Sanctuary, the worst heat wave of summer might cause me to shut down the computers and take a siesta, or, if the temperature stays above 90 degrees longer than I can sleep, clear out the spring branch. This is a fun job, with which help from any or all of The Nephews may add to the fun but will not be necessary.
In Kingsport local warming could easily push the temperature above 100 degrees. By focussing on whether people do or don't believe in global warming and ignoring the causes of local warming, in theory Kingsport could, as some places in Africa did in the 1930s and 1940s, see officially documented temperatures in the 120s and 130s Fahrenheit--officially measured in the shade, not near pavement--push up to privately observed temperatures of 140 Fahrenheit in crowded paved areas. Oldtimers who remembered a 140-degree day used to be told that the official temperature had peaked at 131 degrees in 1931 and say, "But we were not at the weather station. We were not in the shade."
(Buy large cups of ice chips, replacing as necessary. Forget about formal dinner-party etiquette. Eat that ice. Let individual chips melt in your mouth, on your head, and down your shirt. In the US eating or playing with ice is thought to indicate cravings for physical sensations, i.e. more and kinkier sex, when it's done at normal temperatures in the 70s and 80s. At temperatures above 100 it indicates a will to live and is perfectly polite and proper. Applying ice chips to friends and pets indicates a preference that they also survive, and is also polite and proper, and is done by diplomats in Washington when they stray out of air-conditioned buildings. The proper places to apply ice are the top of the head, the back of the neck, the wrists, and any skin that has actually been burned. What is impolite, at temperatures above 100, is putting other people to the trouble of treating you for heat exhaustion in a hospital, when you could have stayed cool by using ice as nature intended.)
It's instructive, though annoying, to Google heat records in Africa. Some localities did set new ones last summer and may set new ones this summer, though that would be records for the highest temperature on a specific day. No recent temperature has broken the 131-degrees-Fahrenheit-in-the-shade record from 1931...yet some people want very much to focus on last summer's relatively mild 124 degrees in the shade in Algeria, because it fits into the "global warming" narrative. "Human-induced climate change!" they squawk hopefully, like parrots who want crackers. It is human-induced but it is NOT global. Global warming is a theoretical possibility that would be difficult to verify and would have to be consistently verified over more years than Al Gore has lived, or can live. What northern Africa had survived before and is surviving now is human-induced local climate changes. We can and should try to avoid contributing to global warming, but what threatens us personally this week is local.
There are remedies. Kingsporters should be in a mood to think about them, this week. They include dispersing people away from densely populated areas, reducing pavement and motor travel, maintaining more green trees and green space between houses. Buildings with floor space higher than 20 feet above the ground should be used as storage barns, not home or work spaces for human beings.
"Walkable communities" form naturally when zoning regulations are not written to favor motorists over ordinary people. With no interference from "planners" or governments, people naturally like to build houses at the corners of farms where they can see neighbors' houses, at least if they go out and look, and put markets, schools, churches, and shopping zones in space that feels central to a few dozen households. That's how a walkable community comes to exist. What "planners" need to do is get out of the way and let walkable communities rebuild themselves in small towns and suburbs.
"Smart cities" are an abomination. The human body was not built to live in cities. Cities have always been breeding grounds for diseases and wars. Intelligently planned cities are, like Washington, planned to be nobody's permanent home, to lack representation in a democratic government because the people spending time in the city are supposed to be the representatives of their own small towns and farm communities. That does not rule out monitoring traffic or policing public gatherings, but it does mean that cities are where people stay temporarily to do jobs, coming in as representatives of other places and returning to those places when the jobs are done. Washington was meant to be a ghost town at this time of year. The homeless bums should have hitchhiked out of there last week.
Your Members of Congress should be touring the leafier, shadier, cooler parts of their districts now. If they're not, remind them that this is their duty. You don't need them to be damaging their brains in the city's heat. You need them to be connecting with their rural voter base, and this is the time of year when they're meant to do that.
There always have been and always will be summer heat waves. The foolhardy and the very unfortunate have always died during summer heat waves by spending too much time out in the sun. Humankind has always survived by resting from heavy labor, dispersing ourselves in shady places, dipping ourselves in water to maintain normal body temperatures, fanning ourselves, and pitying the fools who go out in the midday sun.
Anyway, traditionally in these United States the big bad heat wave of late July, sometimes into early August, is when schools are closed but stores start advertising back-to-school sales. Shrewd merchants know that people like this reminder that the heat wave lasts only a week or two, that it will soon be over and people will go back to their regular jobs or studies.
So I was near a television set at some time last week, and it was blaring about a new division of the University of Maryland, called the University of Maryland's Global Campus, open to anyone who has a computer in the United States or any allied country.
Hmm. In Virginia we think of the University of Maryland as a bit of an intellectual lightweight. Virginia students traditionally start school earlier (in the term during which the child's sixth birthday falls, rather than seventh) and are expected to absorb more information in each year. But wottha--I'm an adult, anyway. I'd have the advantage of forty years of self-education over any normal undergraduate anywhere. I've always thought a BS, or even MS, would be a nice addition to my trade school certificates. And I remembered having learned, through research for a writing job about ten years ago, that many online programs are available free of charge to people over sixty. Hey...I may actually be over sixty now, or some time in the next few academic years, in real life. Old enough to Zoom in from a community college computer center and be the "Go Granny Go" student who keeps the kids on their cute little toes, anyway.
Grandma Bonnie Peters didn't go to college until she qualified for free tuition as a senior citizen, so community college courses were just right for her. Everyone enjoyed the idea of her going to college enough that it provided some natural, sustainable economic stimulation for the community. Her children went to a few classes with her. The school sent out a minibus to bring her and some other students onto campus for classes and take them back home. People treated her to lunch, and she treated them back. She bought books and art supplies. She took painting for her arts requirement, and actually had her work shown in a gallery where she sold some paintings and got some commissions. Well, she had her talents and I have mine, but in any case she had a lot of fun. So did the classmates and teachers who remembered her thirty years later.
Meh. I remember trying to run this web site from the community college's computer center. Excellent computers. Delightful people. And what a time I had getting there and back again. The worst weather is of course the worst time to rely on a car pool. Some days I had a reliable ride back but not a reliable ride to campus, so I'd walk a few miles out the highway before someone going the right way stopped.
Often people in Gate City would say "I can take you to Duffield," which I learned was not a good idea. People I knew from Gate City or Big Stone Gap did not stop at any of the truck stops in Duffield every day. The thing about finding a ride in Duffield is that anyone who doesn't know you personally naturally assumes you've just been released from jail and are interested in doing something that might get you back in there. Nobody believes an adult trying to join a car pool outside the county jail is really interested in doing legitimate academic work at a college eighteen miles up the road. So you might as well start walking, and whether you walk toward Gate City or toward Big Stone Gap, you're likely to lose the day's supply of time and energy on the road, and quite possibly be harassed or insulted, before you get to either town. The misery of having to turn down offers from the jailbirds and the wrong sort of truckers outweighed the rare prospect of being able to join a car pool with friends. From Gate City it looked as if it would be easy to join a car pool going to the college from Duffield, but in practice I remember that actually happening--twice, both times involving one retired couple. Usually if my feet touched the ground in Duffield the day was lost.
And, having done those two years at the overpriced church college, I didn't have a lot of community college courses left to take, unless we count the trade school programs taught there. I have thought seriously about taking the electrician's assistant course. If my Significant Other hadn't become ill when he did, if we'd gone on renovating and reselling abandoned houses, we might have been able to write it off as job training on his business taxes. Of course the classes meet on winter nights when the school never did offer bus service. Of course I no longer have a more experienced partner in home improvement, though as men my age are being laid off and "retiring' I'd like to meet one--if there were men my age who didn't already have families or obvious reasons why nobody will ever marry them.
Oh, the days, and the nights, of commuting to and from the college. The missed car pools! The road harassment! Tourists walking around the towns of Duffield and Clinchport are welcomed, but anyone walking along the highway near Duffield is presumed to be a jailbird at whom some people throw garbage; I was hit squarely on the back of the head with a half-full Big Gulp cup, once. I walked twenty miles when the temperature stood at twenty degrees Fahrenheit, once, in falling snow, in comfortable but uninsulated canvas shoes. I walked twenty-two miles in the rain, another night.
A Lee County policeman once informed me that, whatever the law said, he reckoned walking on the part of the highway that runs through Lee County at night was evidence of insanity, and he would arrest me and keep me at the Lee County jail until someone from Gate City came to take me home in a car, if I walked through Lee County again. Seriously. I might not be chargeable with any offense but that officer was not going to let me walk in peace. And I hate to say it but he does have a point. The part of the highway that runs through Lee County was built to discourage foot traffic. There are places where your options are walking in a full speed traffic lane, or literally hand-over-hand along the guard rail along a bridge, and motorists coming down the hill toward the bridge tend to pick up speed, too; I never felt exactly safe on the outside of the guard rail, having seen speeding vehicles slam into those rails. I did walk home from the college again, though...because Lee County does not put policemen on the highway very late at night, and if I walked all the way from Big Stone Gap, by the time I reached Lee County the local police had gone home to bed. And the late-night truckers and worse types of people on the road knew this, and drove accordingly.
A Wise County fireman reckoned that my walking home from the college at night was dangerous enough to justify deployment of emergency vehicles, and even threatened to complain to Delegate Kilgore about it. The last thing I want to do is be used by the opposition party to complain about Delegate Kilgore's voice of frugality in the State budgeting process.
And the really galling thing was that I had sponsors who were willing to pay anyone taking evening classes, or even regular afternoon classes, for adding me to a regular, reliable car pool. I even had one sponsor who had a divorced twenty-something daughter living at home, taking community college courses, who told daughter and me in no uncertain terms, "My daughter WILL bring you home after her evening class on Mondays." Daughter was a nice kid, as her generation go. She did take me home after one or two classes. Along the way she explained that she thought of long drives as her "me time" when she liked to smoke cigarettes, blast rock music out the windows, and brood about her life. Also her course did not require her to show up for more than the two evening classes, and after those two evenings she never did. I advertised. Didn't students want to earn gas and meal money? Well, it seemed, they didn't. The community college doesn't put that much financial pressure on them. Apparently they preferred to drive alone and be free to make side trips of their own when they felt like it.
Meanwhile, what had happened to the college bus service? A horrible fascist ("public-private partnership") operation had eaten it up. According to their web site, "Mountain Empire Older Citizens" now runs "Mountain Empire Transit," which provides transportation for anyone in any part of Scott, Lee, or Wise Counties, for fees that completely submarined the local taxi services in which so many housewives, young people, and retirees used to earn their pocket money. I believe in public transportation so I really tried to support that DISservice, in the past. I just can't. For one thing they want to offer "need-based" transportation, for which they can beg rich sponsors for more actual money,. rather than ordinary fee-based transportation like an ordinary city bus service. They don't want to say "We have a bus that stops at point A at eight o'clock and reaches campus at nine, and a bus that stops on the campus at four o'clock and reaches point A again at five." Oh no, that's not the way their system works. They want to ask lots of questions about who you are and what-all you "need" and how they can "take care of you" by meeting you at your door, even though in practice they have exactly one bus that runs from Scott County to Wise County, anyway, and it's a real milk run that takes more than two hours to bounce around back roads and collect a lot of mental patients who work at some sort of make-work program in Duffield, and they don't like or have room for normal adults on that bus. A person riding that bus to the college would be unable to attend most of the classes taught, would not get a very long work session in the computer lab either, and would spend more time being annoyed by mental patients on the bus than getting any kind of useful work done.
And the employees gossip about paying passengers; you might be familiar with city buses and be prepared to pay your fare, sit down, and read, knit, or look out the window, but the bus drivers are prepared to ask lots of questions about you so they can, among other things, be sure you know which other passengers are going in for dialysis or for addiction counselling, and which are mental patients, and who's "gay," and on and on...They don't like people who don't chatter and gossip with them, either. I had one frustrated extrovert deliberately drive past my stop so that I had to get off the bus at a place where the road had no shoulder at all, where I had to scramble down over rocks. I complained to the office about that one and got, "And what would the driver's race have to do with this?" I said, "Well, I'm comparing his job performance with Greyhound drivers and DC Metrobus drivers." The office idiot said, "We are not Greyhound or Metro, and we never will be." This is all too true. That would-be-nanny company's shabby excuse for a driver would never have got behind the wheel of a Metrobus. Probably most of the drivers they employ wouldn't.
So regular use of the community college is just not a sustainable plan for me, or for any non-driver from Gate City. Until we can cut out the festering sore of "public-private partnership" and have a sustainable mix of tax-funded (school bus) and for-profit (taxicab) transportation, Scott County has access to a community college only for those who choose to drive thirty miles each way in their own private cars.
Zooming into online classes, however, might still have possibilities.
Well...what kind of classes would I want, anyway? Writing would be a logical choice for a writer, but does the MFA degree really teach writers more than writing for publication does? I feel about it the way C.S. Lewis did. (I have a samizdat copy of his portion of the Oxford literature course.) People who ought to be writers want to read as many of the books on the Oxford reading list as they can get, and I do, and I have done, but they need a college course on those books only if they're young writers who want to build a network for a teaching career. I'm not young and the world has plenty of young people who want to teach English in public and private schools.
A recent poll found that a slight majority of today's adults feel that online video games ought to be taught as a college course. Meh. I don't think I'm visual enough to do well in that sort of course and, in any case, I'm too old to use video games to learn how to fly a fighter plane.
I am a Christian and I'd like to write Christian books. For that certification as a Bible teacher might help my career. Liberty University is practically local and I might be able to Zoom from a local Baptist church. But, again, do I really need a degree for writing? It's not an option I want to close off completely but there's another option that feels more radical and more fun.
I saw the idea first in an ad for a writing fellowship program in Canada: Take biology courses, teach a freshman biology class, and publish a book about something related to ecology, sustainability--something Green. I know there's a lot of Poison Green in the Canadian school system these days, probably even at McGill, although McGill offered some of the most attractive fellowships and I have a lot of respect for my husband's school. Nevertheless.
I would like to learn more about biomass, about ways to keep those sewers local people thought they wanted so much from polluting our lovely aquifers and all those rivers south of us from which so much of Tennessee gets their drinking water.
I would like to have enough formal education in entomology that my being asked to write articles about the Hemileucas, or about nicer insects I'd rather look at, wouldn't feel so much like a bad joke about the quality of Wikipedia or the Internet generally.
"The world needs more entomologists," one college I Googled said, "particularly in Africa." We've seen in the Butterfly of the Week posts here how many African and Asian butterflies remain to be documented. Insects with more pressing economic significance need to be studied, too. I am not the one who needs to be doing those studies. Africa and Asia need no more Anglo-American "saviors" coming in to tell the people how to live with their wildlife. African and Asian people need to be studying their own ecology, down to the insects and the algae. I could help them write their theses and publish their studies, but that would be more editing than research.
I'd be interested in biology generally. Though I'm not a great gardener--the secret of what success my garden enjoys is its emphasis on hardy native species--I actually like plants more than insects. I like cute little woodland creatures, too, as can be seen from my one-way instant bonding with Jimmy Skunk (I was afraid he'd been poisoned last winter, but he's still alive!) and Dawn Possum.
I'm probably too old to be hired as a park ranger but I'd like to be a more informed and informative writer about this land that I love.
So...The University of Kansas offers free mini-courses in entomology for everybody, probably aimed at people with a sixth grade education. Beyond that? As regular readers remember, I have a lot of respect for Purdue, enough that I chatted with them first. Purdue has no free senior courses and recommends none; they have online courses for about $500 per credit-hour, $250 for veterans--I'm not one.
The University of Florida has an impressive entomology program, with the butterfly museum from which this web site's got several photos. If only their biology department did not include Kevin Folta. I don't think I'd ever be able to work with him. I'm not sure I'd want to work with people who did. All scientists make mistakes. Usually there's no shame in it, but usually scientists' mistakes are not based in hate and contempt for the people who have been physically harmed by those mistakes. Anyway Florida's web site didn't advertise free senior courses.
The University of Maryland has an undergraduate biology program with graduate studies in entomology and does advertise free senior courses...but I think they require residence in Maryland. In the absence of a trusted Nephew to run the Cat Sanctuary, I couldn't really reside in Maryland any more.
I'm still checking other universities' online programs. I might not go back to virtual school this fall, anyway, but it's a thing I'd like to do.
