Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 5

Into the Back Country

Since some of my writing has become a bit dark lately, it is time to turn back to more pleasant things like our explorations in the canyons and deserts of southern Utah. It was a time just before it was discovered and overrun by the tourists, hikers, bikers, ATV and 4-wheelers. (Okay here I go again, so I should just stop right there). This trip was really the one that convinced us that we should buy our own 4-wheel vehicle and do our own exploration. On our way through Moab, driving to other places, we took a guided off-road tour through the extreme back country of Canyonlands National Park to some of the then, rarely seen sights of the deep canyons. Strangely, we traveled in two vans with a few other visitors, two being from England. Occasionally there was dirt road, sometimes slick rock and dried up riverbeds. It was not a road in the conventional sense, more of a thought, but that was fine by me.

Our destination was Angel Arch, 13 miles in, barely reachable and has been closed to vehicles for some time as I recently found out, much to my surprise. The area was closed for it to re-wild with plants and animals, with some success. Though you may still hike the 8.5 miles from Peekaboo Springs where there is a campground now. At the time we were there, we stopped and hiked up to an overhang in the rock where there were many pictographs and a small arch in the rock that you could climb through to the other side and down to where the road (?) and vans were to provide lunch for us. After lunch we slowly and often as not, carefully motored our way through the barely passable rocks and riverbed to the arch.

At the arch, we were astonished by its size, and we were still almost a mile away. The arch is an eroded remnant of a larger ancient rock formation that rises 450 feet above the canyon floor. The opening in the arch has a height of 135 feet and a width of 120 feet. There wasn’t enough time to make our way to the arch itself, so we had to content ourselves with the outstanding view from below. I found out later that it is the largest natural arch in Canyonlands and considered by many to be the most beautiful. Angel Arch is named because of its resemblance to an angel with folded wings. We felt lucky once again to see this scenic wonder before it was closed to vehicular traffic. On our return, the driver of our van elected to take a short cut through a flooded area and we were stuck for the rest of the afternoon and missed some other sights on the way back. All in all it was a worthwhile trip and another one in which we were fortunate to make more than 30 years ago.

(Rob is standing by the Peekaboo pictographs on our way to Angel Arch, the larger drawings appeared to be turtles? The arch itself in the glare of the hot afternoon sun. Our ride stopping at some rock formations before we became stuck.)

Musings on the Human Apocalypse to Come

Since my medical problems have forced me to slow down to build my strength back up, I have had time to muse on many things. One of the most difficult things I have tried to understand lately, is why we, as a civilization, are choosing to ignore the one thing that can bring it all down around our ears. (Oh yes, here he goes again, doesn’t he ever shut up about this?) What I am talking about once again, is climate change. That one thing that all those conservative fascists really, really hate. The conservative playbook is to deny, delay and confuse, ask us what problems are you talking about, you hippie freak. You want us to clean up the air? The oceans, the land? It is all there to be exploited, how dare you try to stop us, what the hell is wrong with you? Everlasting growth, profits forever.

And from this, there is one thing that really, really terrifies me completely. And that is, the time, in the possibly near future, when our ultra conservative fascist right wingers actually accept that the climate thing is real and slowly turning their lives into a nightmare, and more importantly, it is also starting to cost them a awful lot of money. The current political situation in Florida is showing us the way forward and the average person there is enjoying it immensely. They are feeding on the hate, bound together by awesome power of being able to tell others what they can and cannot do. They are finding people and groups that do not agree with them and making sure that they are completely marginalized and eliminated from any kind of say.

What do you think is going to happen when many lives are lost to climate events, large amounts of property destroyed, food shortages, resources diverted or reduced, restrictions and laws passed keeping them from doing whatever they want to the land, sea or air? They are going to find someone to blame. They are going to make sure that they are not kept from their God-given freedoms to continue to desecrate and degrade the climate for themselves. Bad weather? It must be because of the gays. Get rid of them. Minorities are taking up all the available resources for us to live a happy life. Lock them all up. Export all the immigrants. We can’t feed or give them jobs, we need that for ourselves. All those poor people and especially the senior citizens are sucking up most of the federal budget for their care programs which we need for our own lives and in particular, for the military to protect us. Restrict all of them, who cares if they can’t afford food or housing, it’s their own fault. Better yet, put them all in ghettoes and senior care concentration camps and let them rot, the stingy bastards. Unnecessary people all.

(If you don’t think all of the above can happen, just remember Jan. 6, 2020. That happened because of one aggrieved man. What will happen when everyone else believes they’re a victim? Photo courtesy AP/John Minchillo.)

The Lucretius Problem

It has been almost amusing to see the eastern news media completely freaking out about the suffocating smoke from forest fires in Canada that has blanketed their cities. This has been going on for several years here in the western part of the U.S. and they have paid it little attention, but let smoke cover eastern cities and it is finally an issue. This has been the one major thing about climate change; we have a very difficult time imagining and coming to terms with things that we do not experience personally. No big heat waves, what climate change? All time record snowfall, what weather abnormalities? Smoke from massive forest fires, couldn’t happen here.

2,000 years ago, a Roman poet and philosopher, Titus Lucretius Carus put the problem in terms that we can understand today. Humans have always had a mental disconnect when it comes to problems that we do not directly experience. In the world we thought we knew, what is going on here? Smoke, heat, cold, fires, drought, floods, storms? It never used to be like that, did it? Despite decades of warnings by respected scientists and climatologists, why are we still being caught by surprise from the changes in climate that causes raging fires in Canada, Massive palls of smoke, record setting rain and snow in California, Fire tornados, massive hurricanes with record rainfall totals. Just last week, super typhoon Mawar, with winds up to 150 mph, slammed into the island of Guam in the central Pacific Ocean. Move on, nothing to see here.

We need to come to terms with changes in our climate, it is going to happen, it is happening. Take the blinders off your eyes, ignoring things will only make climate change more difficult to deal with as more and more extremes continue to pile up. For the past two centuries we have been burning fossil fuels and polluting our atmosphere, the very air we breathe, with CO2 in amounts that trap heat which drives massive changes in the weather and climate. As we head into summer, how many more droughts, heat and storms will impact us around the world? In the Pacific, a new El Nino heat event is starting to impact world weather. Should we be worried? Scientists say yes, be prepared, act on it, start finding ways to reduce CO2 in our lives. Just do something, pull your head out of the sand, denial of, or ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

(In 2020, San Francisco was enveloped in heavy smoke from California wildfires turning their skies orange. New York and other eastern cities are currently suffering from a similar occurrence. Perhaps people in the East will be able to feel and understand one of the more miserable effects of climate change now. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.)

Bryce Canyon

Strictly speaking, Bryce Canyon is actually not a canyon at all, but a series of large natural amphitheaters on the eastern side of Paunsaugunt Plateau. The altitude varies from 8,000 to 9,000 feet, so it can be quite cool at night during the summer and too cold to visit in the winter. Many thousands of spires and rock formations populate the park and are called hoodoos, the reds, oranges and white colors of the rock provide spectacular views for people visiting the park. The area around Bryce was homesteaded by Mormon pioneers in the 1850’s and was named for Ebenezer Bryce. In the intricate mazes of rock and spires he was reported to have said, “It’s a helluva place to loose a cow.” 100 years ago today, U.S. President, Warren G Harding, declared Bryce Canyon a national monument to protect the scenic wonders of the area. In 1928 the monument was upgraded to National Park status.

Bryce Canyon is the place in Utah where we visit the most. Due to it’s small size and remoteness it has not become overrun like Zion or Arches National Parks. Still, it can be very crowded in the summer months. While you can see specular views from the rim of Bryce, the way to really see it, is from inside. There are many trails that plunge off the edge and down into the labyrinth of spires and passageways. Going down is easy, but coming back up is often difficult and in the heat of the summer it is always necessary to go prepared since the hikes can take several hours. Always bring plenty of water and snacks for energy and don’t forget your camera. After hiking the canyon we also learned to take small plastic raincoats. In the late summer, almost daily thunderstorms can build up and bring brief showers.

One trip, not too long ago, we decided to take a helicopter flight over the canyon in order to see it in a different way. We are now older and reluctant to go walking down into the canyon, but for others, more adventurous, there are horses that can take you on a tour to the bottom. These days, our favorite way to visit is to attend the excellent Shakespearian Festival in Cedar City and then drive over the mountains to Bryce for a day or two. The rock which is exposed in the area of the park is part of the Grand Staircase and runs from Bryce Canyon to Grand Canyon National Park and provides for a large number of natural wonders in southern Utah and Northern Arizona. We have spent 40 years exploring this are and still have many other part of it to visit.

(In our younger days we hiked all over Bryce, Lynne and Rob are standing in the bottom of a narrow passageway. Trees have grown up through the canyons reaching for the sunlight. Looking up as well as views from the rim are specular any time of the day.)

The Call of the Canyons

In November, 1985, we were returning from a trip to a science fiction convention in Tucson, Arizona. We had a couple of extra days, so when we reached Page, Arizona, we decided to spend the night and take a side trip the next day. That trip would be to Rainbow Bridge National Monument, and the only way to get there was by boat. At that time Lake Powell, that vast reservoir of water stuck behind the Glen Canyon Dam, afforded an easy, direct route to our destination. The body of water had topped out at its’ highest elevation two years before with dire consciences, when the spillways of the dam had come close to failure. In the fall of 1985, after a couple of years of good rain and snowfall, the reservoir was still within 6 feet of its’ maximum capacity.

The trip was enchanting, the deep reds and oranges of the towering cliffs overlooking the blue water which reflected the mix of colors was amazing. As we slowly boated down narrow side canyons, the towering walls would open up into sun-dazzling vistas of higher cliffs. The easy hike to the massive overhang of Rainbow Bridge was merely frosting on the cake. After we got home, we were determined to do more exploration of the deep canyon country, which was, at the time, still fairly pristine and not overrun with motorized tourists, hikers, bikers and ATV’s. I began to read up on the areas we wished to visit and much to my chagrin, I found out that the water we had traveled on at Lake Powell had submerged most of the real astonishing natural wonders of the Glen Canyon area under hundreds of feet of water.

I began to read writers of western nature literature like Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Everett Ruess, Marc Reisner and many others. We also bought a 4-wheel drive SUV to get further into the back country and found ourselves on many roads of dubious quality. I am very much surprised that we didn’t get stuck sometimes, far from civilization, (and there were no cell phones then). We stayed in good motels in nearby towns, I couldn’t really expect Lynne and Rob to go completely native. We had many adventures and saw some of the rarely seen sights of the back of the beyond areas. I hope we can go back to some of the areas we missed in our younger days, avoiding at all costs, travel during the tourist season. The real secret is, that those areas are still amazing and much more comfortable in the late fall and early spring before becoming overrun by hordes of people in the very hot summer months.

(The narrow waterways always seemed to open up on dazzling vistas during our boat trip. It was almost too easy to take amazing photos that day.)

The Floods of ’83

40 years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, temperatures rose suddenly up to 90 degrees. It had been a very wet, cool spring and large amounts of snow had acclimated in the nearby mountains above Salt Lake City. The sudden warmth released a cascade of snow melt and all the normally placid creeks and rivers that fed into the city were overwhelmed. The flow in City Creek, near the upper part of the city, increased 6-fold, becoming a raging torrent. The only thing that could be done was to redirect the massive flow into and down State Street, one of the major arteries that led directly up to the state capital. That Memorial Day Sunday, a call went out to all the major religious groups and other organizations to gather along State Street and fill sandbags to keep the water out of homes and businesses. It worked, but Salt Lake City was divided in two while the impromptu river flowed freely down that main thoroughfare.

My wife, Lynne, who was 5 months pregnant with our son, Rob, worked right on the upper part of State Street at the Hansen Planetarium as the assistant director. She had to park in a mall parking lot across the street and walked over a makeshift temporary wooden bridge for pedestrian traffic to get to her job, now on the bank of a river. This continued for nearly three weeks and then for another period of cleanup and reconstruction. Other cities were also impacted all along the range of the Wasatch Mountains where most of the population of the state resides. Considerable damage occurred on streets, bridges, waterways and housing all along the mountains as the water rushed into the valley.

The level of the Great Salt Lake rose more then 5 feet that year, a record since measurements had been kept. The lake continued to rise in the mid-1980s, threatening the Lucin Cutoff railroad fill, Interstate highways, mineral recovery industries and sewage-treatment plants along the lake. Huge pumps were built to pull some of the lake’s excess waters into the Great Salt Lake Desert to the west. Completed in less than a year, at a cost of nearly $60 million, the pumps began operation in April, 1987. At that time, a drought began, causing the lake level to naturally fall. The pumps were mothballed in 1989 and haven’t been used since. In southern Utah, Lake Powell filled to capacity and in July, 1983, the spillway of the dam was activated. The heavy flow caused cavitation in the tunnel and the spillway began to fail. Emergency measures narrowly averted a total failure of the dam. In the 40 years since, the reservoir has fallen to historical low levels and is now at 33% of capacity.

The record snowfall in the mountains of Utah have behaved this year with gradual melting and normal temperatures. After the floods of 1983, considerable work was done to mitigate any future events with new reservoirs and larger capacity culverts and river channels feeding into populated areas. Minor flooding has occurred this year in some areas, but nothing close to the ’83 floods. The record precipitation this year has temporarily put an end to severe drought here in Utah and saved the Great Salt Lake and Lake Powell from drying out completely. It remains to be seen if drought conditions will return, but, as for now, we have received a year and a half of grace from whatever the future holds for us.

(Pedestrians cross the State Street river in 1983 on wooden bridges mere inches above the water, image courtesy the Salt Lake Tribune).

Dino Stuff

Speaking of Dinosaurs, and due to circumstances not entirely under my control, I found that I have a bit more spare time then I thought I would. So, I have spent a little of this time working on my revised Dino cartoon strip. You may recall that I started drawing these more than 30 years ago, and recently decided to bring them up to date with color and new material. I have completed the character illustrations and added several new ones for more variety. Back in 1990, I did 50 strips to test out the ability to generate enough engaging material to carry any viewers interest. I have started plugging in my new characters into my old strip ideas and it is beginning to look just fine.

For a new proposed book, I will however, need a lot more cartoons, perhaps 250 in all. With the 50 originals, that leaves me with only 200 new strips to come up with in the next six months, nothing to it, maybe, perhaps. A very long time ago I had the opportunity to do a daily cartoon strip in a Salt Lake newspaper. It lasted for less then a year, but I learned a very great deal about cartooning. The main thing is the story, your little 3 or 4 panel space on the page with dozens of other strips on it has to have some consistent story line, gags, puns or other humorous hook to keep your readers interested. With 6 panels a week, that used up a lot of material, so you better get into a situation where you can produce ideas on a continual basis or you will be eaten alive by your own creation.

I am not doing a daily strip now, but I will have to get into a mindset that can produce a lot of ideas for a modest sized book. A cartoon strip is a ravenous beast that must be fed, (and these are dinosaurs we are talking about). To feed the beast you must ingest a lot of material, read, watch, write, think and draw, sketching out ideas is one of the best things to do. Know your subject, I have studied up on dinosaurs recently, read all the most recent books on them, what kind of lives and habits they are thought to have led. I have also given them human qualities, and that opens up a lot of possibilities for humorous interactions.

(Here is the opening cartoon description of some of the main characters and a few of the first cartoons. It is nice to be able to see where we are going finally.)

1.7 Billion T-Rexes

Two years ago, there was a study by scientists who estimated how many T-Rexes had ever existed, that is, 2.5 billion. I wrote a blog on that amazing number and thanked my lucky stars that we had not existed during that long ago era. However, recently, those same scientists revised that number based on new data about dinosaur growth and reproduction and many other factors. They lowered the estimate of how many of the beasts lived downward by some 800 million animals. Now that is a relief and probably some comfort to all the other dinosaurs of the time. But still, I am reminded of the well-known verse by Jack Prelutsky in his wonderful book of poems about dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus Was A Beast.
Tyrannosaurus was a beast, that had no friends to say the least.
It ruled the ancient out of doors, and slaughtered other dinosaurs.

So how do we know any of this about the famed carnivore? Actually, there have been only about 50 specimens of various quality and completeness ever found of T-Rex. The first specimens were excavated by the famous paleontologist Barnum Brown for the American Museum of Natural History. These were found in Montana and Wyoming at the beginning of the twentieth century, T-Rex fossils have only been found in North America. The largest and most complete fossil Rex was called Sue. Discovered and excavated in South Dakota in 1990, Sue was 90% complete with 250 bones of the approximately 360 thought be in a T-Rex. Dinosaur bones have growth rings, much like trees do, and Sue was estimated to be about 28 years old when she died. She reached maturity at age 19 after gaining more then 4 pounds a day during an adolescent growth spurt. She was estimated to be 40 feet long when alive and could have weighed from 8 to 12 tons.

T-Rexes lived at the very end of the Cetaceous Period, about 66-68 million years ago. They died out with the rest of the dinosaurs when a large 7-mile wide asteroid smashed into the earth. This caused an event known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction, (K-T event). It resulted in the death of approximately 80 percent of all animal species. Other events may have contributed to the dinosaurs demise such as a very large eruption of lava in India and resulting carbon dioxide emissions creating a huge greenhouse effect. This, along with tectonic plate movements caused further climate change that was unfavorable to the dinosaurs and could have brought them closer to extinction. The asteroid may have merely been the last straw.

(Below, I am touching up the paint on a model of a juvenile T-Rex for an exhibit at Treehouse Children’s Museum in 2015. Even at this smaller size, it would have been a very lethal creature.)

The Martian Chronicles

When I finally got to junior high school, I found that they had a fairly large and well stocked library. We had books at home, but I had long gotten through all of them by this time. I loved to read, and here I was in heaven. The library held adventure, classic mysteries, history and best of all, science fiction. I had heard of it and was excited to sample its offerings. Since this was the early sixties, there was not a whole lot of SF published except for the most popular authors. I quickly settled on what I would eventually call the A, B, C’s of science fiction writers, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke.

Issac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry and an extremely prolific writer, his works included many short stories and novels, some placed in his Galactic Empire series. He proposed the 3 laws of robotics, and wrote many of his most popular works in a series of novels about the development and history of robot interactions with humans. His award-winning Foundation series, details no less then the monumental decline and fall of a galaxy-wide empire. (The recent series adaption of it has very little to do with the actual books. So read them instead of watching the show.)

Ray Bradbury is one of the most celebrated writers of the last century, working in fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and general fiction. His novel, Fahrenheit 451, is often placed next to George Orwell’s, 1984 as one of the great dystopian novels of humanity’s near future. His many collections of short stories enthralled me as a young teenager, but my favorite was The Martian Chronicles, which were a number of short stories written over time and placed together with short narratives to bridge the rest and create a new whole.

Arthur C. Clarke was an English science fiction writer who was best known for his screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a short story of his. The movie is regarded as one of the most influential films of our times. He was a great proponent of human space travel and predicted telecommunication satellites. His many short stories and novels often deal with humans exploring the far reaches of space and incredible aliens in far civilizations. His mind boggling, The City and the Stars, follows humanity a billion years into the future, living in the last city on a dying Earth.

Recently, my medical recovery has given me time to revisit some much loved books I read during my youth. Bradbury was my favorite, because of his ability to put incredible atmosphere, description, character and motion in a very few lines. He had amazing lyrical power in his words and everything he wrote fascinated me. The imagery greatly inspired me as a budding artist and I wanted to explore those worlds with my painting. This has driven my life-long interest in written science fiction as a counterpart to my art. Rereading The Martian Chronicles recently, I am still left breathless with his poetic words. And now, as an older reader I can see deeper into this work that I missed as a naive youngster. It is all there, plain as day, the sordid human condition that is with us more then ever now. The militarism, overweening science and technology, genocide, racial oppression and exploitation, the rampant censorship and conformity reaching out to suffocate free thought, creativity and freedom. Bradbury wrote about all of this in 1950, a true visionary, as the best science fiction writers are.

After more then 40 years working as an artist I decided to try writing about those images I have carried around with me all my life. And the one writer that I most wanted to emulate was Ray Bradbury. There is one section especially in my first novel that draws directly from the master. But it is only a brief part of a wider effort that is still far short of what it could be, as shown from those amazing stories. Definitely, I remain a work in progress.

(This is a small, rough illustration of a mars landing for a larger work that I never got around to painting. We are getting closer to reaching this fabled planet in our minds and someday soon with our technological advances.)

Room 3101

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

One person dies every 34 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease.

About 697,000 people in the United States died from heart disease in 2020—that’s 1 in every 5 deaths.

Heart disease cost the United States about $229 billion each year from 2017 to 2018. This includes the cost of health care services, medicines, and lost productivity due to death.  Source: CDC

Last Thursday morning at the grocery store, I started hurting in the upper chest and shoulders. I passed it off as muscle pain from my bush trimming the day before where I had been reaching up and down to cut the branches. That afternoon at home it got worse, expanding painfully up into my neck. Something was very wrong. I got my son, who happened to be home, to drive me down to the local health clinic. There, they hooked me up to a EKG machine and immediately called for an ambulance, I was having a heart attack.

A quick ride to the hospital on the other side of town ensued with the ambulance weaving in and out of the late afternoon traffic. I am rather glad I couldn’t see better in the back of the truck. When we reached the hospital I was hauled out and brought directly to an operating room and quickly prepared for surgery. An incision in my right leg where it meets the groin was used to push a stent up into my right coronary artery which opened a clogged vein restoring blood flow. Before I knew it, I was being wheeled into hospital room 3101. Less than two hours had passed from the ambulance to the recovery room, the system had worked as it was supposed to, I was alive and actually quite well.

Why wasn’t I better prepared for the possibility of this situation? I have been diabetic for 20 years and I knew that it doubled the chance of heart problems, especially in people like me who are older and overweight. And more importantly, why didn’t I recognize the painful warning signals quicker? Further delay could have damaged my heart much worse then a simple clogged artery. Wishful thinking on my part could have been fatal, and didn’t I have years before any problems might occur? Unhappily, I now have a year-long recovery process with medication and physical therapies. I have already changed my diet an begun lifestyle adjustments. Will it be enough? We will look at it again in another year.

(The human/medical technology interface, scan codes and all, somewhat painful and still invasive.)