Tyre Land

pic.twitter.com/zpRVV0SUjb

— Daily Roman Updates (@UpdatingOnRome) June 11, 2024

When Alexander the Great reached Tyre in January 332 BC he found a rich mercantile city perched on an island a kilometer off the coast of modern Lebanon.  This is what confronted him.

 

Determined to obtain the submission of the city and deny the Persian Empire an important naval base, Alexander and his army laid siege to the city for seven months, eventually constructing a causeway across most of the gap and breaching the fortifications.  Like most sieges in ancient times where the attacker prevailed, it ended badly for the people of Tyre with those not killed sold into slavery.

Over the centuries the causeway changed the flow of ocean currents allowing sediment to collect and creating a land bridge between the island and the mainland.

Summertime

Noticed my posting from several years ago has an inoperative link.  This is Ella Fitzgerald performing Summertime at a 1968 concert in Berlin.  Magnificent.

The Day Of "Enlightened Administration" May Be Ending

A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, and organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help.  The day of the great promotor of the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over.  Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods.  It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of under consumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people.  The day of enlightened administration has come.

- Franklin Roosevelt, address to The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, September 23, 1932

FDR was expressing the view of early 20th century Progressives (1).  The world of the Founders had disappeared by the beginning of the 20th century with the emergence of Industrial America and thus their ideas about property and liberty were now outmoded.  For the United States to continue to compete as a great nation the social reforms of late 19th century Bismarckian Germany and the government-industry cooperative model of the new corporatist Italian state provided a better path forward.  It was a world where all the could be invented had already been invented; a world where the large corporations now existing would always exist; a static world in which the pie had been baked and now just needed to be sliced fairly.

The improvisation and chaos of the New Deal administrative agencies was supposedly controlled and regularized by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 which created a standardized administrative process governing the actions of administrative agencies.  In retrospect, like many well intentioned legislative actions, the APA turns out to have unintended consequences, creating, without need of a constitutional amendment, a fourth branch of government, and providing effective cover, licensing agencies to create a sophisticated tangle of procedures that baffle and frustrate anyone who has to deal with them and prove expensive and time-consuming to legally challenge. 

Since the days of the New Deal, the administrative state has metastasized, expanding its breadth, scope, and power, becoming ever more unaccountable, in ways that I think would astound even its biggest proponents in the 1930s.  In its current state, its existence is incompatible with the rights and liberties of American citizens.

Contrary to the paeans to agency expertise penned by Justice Kagan (2) in West Virginia v EPA (2022) and in the Looper Bright case decided today, the expertise in federal agencies is in the processes and procedures that empower them rather than in the substance of what they ostensibly are regulating.  Are there competent people at these agencies?  Yes, and I dealt with some of them who were quite good at their jobs.  But the best move on, leaving for more productive careers, while the bureaucracy promotes those best at protecting and growing the bureaucracy.

During the Trump administration, the Supreme Court overturned the Commerce Department's decision to add a new question regarding citizenship to the 2020 census on the grounds that it was "pretextual".  That is, the stated grounds for the decision were not the actual motivating factors.  The truth is that most administrative agency actions are "pretextual".  Today's administrative agencies are dominated not by true subject matter experts, but by ideological personnel who use their expertise in process to advance their agendas.

The Supreme Court's decisions this week in Loper Bright v Raimondo and SEC v Jarkesy , along with Garland v Cargill decided two weeks ago, are blows against the administrative state.  In the SEC case, the Court restored the right of defendants in cases involving civil penalties to have access to the judicial system and jury trials.  The Court overturned the process that allowed regulatory agencies to pursue penalty cases brought by the agency and try them in front of judges appointed by the same agency!  It restored the 7th Amendment rights of American citizens.  Cargill overturned a Trump era regulation because it erroneously classified bump stocks as creating machine guns, ruling the ATF lacked statutory authority to due so, findings that the agency had creatively stretched the definition of machine gun to include bump stocks.

Loper Bright overturned the Chevron Doctrine, stemming from a 40 year old Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that in cases of legislative language ambiguity the federal courts would defer to the interpretation of federal agencies.  The case involved fishing vessels and herring. Here's the summary from the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which represented the fishermen and to which I  contribute (NCLA also filed an amicus brief in the Jankesy case).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented a Final Rule in 2020 to force fishing companies like Relentless Inc., Huntress Inc., and Seafreeze Fleet LLC, to pay for human at-sea monitors aboard their vessels. Congress never gave the agency authority to launch such a program. This at-sea monitor mandate violates the Constitution’s Article I, and the agencies have exceeded the bounds of their statutory authority. NCLA’s clients are small businesses that commercially fish for Atlantic herring (as well as mackerel, Loligo and Illex squids, and butterfish). Paying for monitors would cost them more than $700 per day, substantially cutting into—or even exceeding—their daily fishing profits for herring. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the Final Rule, deciding that broad “necessary and appropriate” language in the Magnuson-Stevens Act (“MSA”), which governs U.S. fisheries, augmented the agency’s regulatory power. It then relied heavily on Chevron deference to uphold the agency’s ostensibly reasonable interpretation of a supposedly ambiguous federal statute.

Note that nothing in this case involved NOAA's supposed expertise in managing fisheries.  Rather it was a question of how to pay for a monitoring system.

These cases are important wins against the administrative state and for American citizens but there is still much more that needs to be done.  Good first steps, but we will see if the Court has the willingness to go further.  Both the left and right overstate the impact of these cases, particularly Loper Bright, which does not dismantle the administrative state, but merely curbs its worst excesses to a limited extent.  Administrative agencies and their supporters are relentless and will continue their attempts to undermine constitutional rights.(3)

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(1) 20th and 21st century Progressivism while sharing a philosophy of government control by bureaucracy (read My Senator for more on this), differed in many other significant ways.  The 20th century version was nationalistic, demanded assimilation into The American Way, and would have rejected multiculturalism and identity as demanded by today's progressives.

(2) Of the three Justices appointed by Democratic presidents, Kagan is by far the best.  Thought I disagree with her judicial philosophy she is very intelligent, a clear thinker, and an effective writer.  It is worth reading her dissents; the other two, not so much.  When Kagan joins a dissent from one of the other two but does not write herself it's a signal that it can be safely ignored.  For instance, in this week's opinions in City of Grants Pass v Johnson, the Court ruled that a city ordinance prohibiting overnight camping on city property by anyone, is not a violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment when applied to the homeless.  Justice Sotomayor wrote a ridiculous dissent joined by Kagan and Jackson.  Like many of her opinions, it is bereft of intellectual substance and simply a polemical policy piece.  

(3) The bureaucracy has many ways to get you.  EPA, the agency I'm most familiar with, was created in 1970 and administers several very complex statutes, requiring extensive regulatory schemes.  These regulations were often ambiguous and confusing and companies would write the agency asking it how it interpreted the application of their own regulations.  The object was not to file legal challenges but to simply allow the company's employees to operate in compliance and not be vulnerable to enforcement actions.  At its discretion, the agency would respond with a guidance letter.  However, the letter only went to the company making the inquiry and could not be located easily by other companies trying to ensure compliance with the same regulatory provision.  During the 80s and 90s, several DC based environmental lawyers became known for having the best collections of these guidance letters and if you wanted advice you had to pay for it.

During those years I had conversations with EPA attorneys in two Regional offices about this situation.  They were also frustrated because they also did not have ready access to the guidance letters, explaining that the enforcement attorneys at EPA HQ wanted to keep distribution restricted in order to maximize their ability to use enforcement discretion in the future and did not want to be bound by its interpretations.  This amounted to keeping the regulated community uncertain of how to act for the purposes of allowing the agency to arbitrarily use its power to punish.

When the Trump Administration came in, the new EPA Administrator directed that all guidance letters be made available on a searchable database, which was done over staff objections.  Within a week of President Biden taking office, the database disappeared from EPA's website.  I know that a previous EPA General Counsel issued a similar directive to his staff which simply ignored it until he left.

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp

Released in 1943, THC finally got around to viewing Colonel Blimp this week.  A splendid film!

It's also deceptive as the first, fast-paced, scene leaves one a bit befuddled about what the film is about.  And then it looks like it's going to be a satire about the British military and the last days of imperialism.  But it ends up as something more deep and profound.  It does satirize the military, but also conveys the sense of duty and responsibility of soldiers.  It is about friendship, love, and patriotism and how people respond when under strain.  

The movie was filmed in Britain in 1942 and early 1943, in the midst of the world war.  For various reasons the British military and Winston Churchill preferred it not be made but the filmmakers, director Michael Powell and screenplay writer Emeric Pressburger (who also made The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus) forged ahead.  

The movie stars Roger Livesey (as the British soldier Clive Wynn-Candy who eventually rises to Major General), Anton Walbrook as German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, and Deborah Kerr in one of her first lead roles playing three different characters.  All are indeed splendid.

The story begins in 1902 when then Lt. Livesey fights a duel in Berlin with Kretschmar-Schuldorff, leaving them both wounded and hospitalized and where they meet Kerr's first character.  We then see both soldiers during World War One and its immediate aftermath.  Finally, they are reunited in wartime England after Theo has fled Germany.

Two scenes from near the end:

Theo, a refuge in England in 1939, is being questioned by British security which needs to decide his status.  This is the latter part of a nine-minute scene.  Walbrook is so good, doing so little, but conveying so much.  You've never heard anyone say "Heil Hitler" like he does.

In this scene, General Candy was to have delivered a talk on the BBC in the aftermath of Dunkirk, but it is cancelled at the last minute.  He arrives home to find he has also been discharged from the military.  Kerr is now playing Candy's driver.  Theo speaks to him of the changed world and the need to fight differently.  Theo's message was one of the aspects of the film that gave the British military and Churchill pause.  It is also a message that resonates today - the eternal question.

The restored version of Colonel Blimp you can know see was made under the direction of Martin Scorsese, a huge fan of the film since he was a teenager.

Caring For Each Other

In a sea of white male faces in what looks like a late 19th century photo stands, in the center of the second row, a black woman.  What is going on here?  

The woman is Lucy Higgs Nichols, and the photo was taken Indiana in 1898.

Lucy Higgs, along with her very young daughter, escaped slavery in late June of 1862, traveling 30 miles before finding refuge with the 23rd Indiana Infantry Regiment near Bolivar, Tennessee.  She served with the regiment throughout the rest of the war as a nurse, cook, laundress, and forager, marching with the regiment in the Grand Review that took place in Washington DC in late May of 1865.  The 23rd saw hard fighting during the war, seeing action at Shiloh, the Vicksburg campaign, the Atlanta campaign, the March to the Sea, and on Sherman's Carolinas campaign.  Seventy two soldiers died in combat or from wounds, and 145 from disease.

The 1898 photo shows her with veterans of the 23rd, along with some veterans of the recent Spanish-American War.  They are celebrating the award of a $12 a month pension to Lucy, a pension obtained through the petitions of the regimental veterans.  Obtaining the pension became a national news story at the time.

Higgs was born into slavery in 1838.  The year after joining the 23rd, her daughter died during the Vicksburg siege and the regiment conducted her funeral.  At the invitation of the veterans, she returned with the regiment after the war to New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky.  She worked for several of the officers and continued nursing sick veterans.  When she, in turn, became ill, the soldiers would nurse Lucy.  She was a member of the local Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) post(1), participating in all regimental reunions and marching in the annual Memorial Day parade. Among the former officers Lucy worked for was General Walter Gresham who commanded the 53rd Indiana during the war.  Gresham would go on to serve as Postmaster General in the cabinet of President Chester Arthur and as Secretary of State under President Grover Cleveland.  When Gresham's daughter married, Lucy, who by that time was considered a member of the family, attended the wedding in Chicago.

After the war, Lucy married John Nichols who had lived as a freedman in Tennessee before the war.  John passed in 1910 and Lucy Higgs Nichols died in 1915.

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(1)  Though emancipation had occurred, there was still social segregation in much of the North.  However, recent research has revealed that most GAR posts admitted black veterans of the Civil War.  The shared experience of soldiering overcame the racial prejudice that existed in much of the Northern population.

Contrast Agent

I have about 2100 songs in my iTune library,  many of them organized into playlists, but I often like listening via shuffle to see what the algorithm reveals.  Recently these two songs came up in sequence, tunes about as different as can be musically and lyrically.  I enjoy them both, which is why they're in my library, but the only other thing they have in common was both were released in the early 1970s.

First up was James Brown's Down and Out in New York City.  And then came The Fountain of Salmacis from Nursery Cryme, one of the best albums from Genesis.  The former a tale of contemporary New York, the latter the retelling of an ancient Greek myth.

Numidia

The Roman province of Numidia included that portion of modern-day Algeria north of the Sahara.  Incorporated within the Roman state between 46 BC and 40 AD, the province remained Roman until the 430 when conquered by the Vandals.  A century later the Romans of Byzantium expelled the Vandal, ruling for 150 years until the Arabs arrived at the end of the 7th century.

The most recent edition of Antigone, the online magazine of the Classical World, contains an entertaining travelogue by two brothers, recent visitors to Algeria who viewed many of the Roman ruins still extant in the former province.

 

Their conclusion:

Quite simply, the Algerian people are warm, the infrastructure superb, and after Pompeii and Ostia in Italy, the Roman sites at Djémila and Timgad (“the Pompeii of Africa”) are the best in the world. The seaside remains at Tipasa aren’t far behind.

Best of all, we had these places nearly to ourselves. Walking through the sprawling, preserved Roman cities in Algeria may well be a 21^st-century traveler’s single best opportunity to imagine life in the Empire two thousand years ago.

They go on to note:

After Italy and maybe Spain, Algeria – known as Numidia in Classical antiquity – produced more Latin literature than any other region. Latin was spoken there for at least six centuries, and maybe even ten. St Augustine lived in Hippo and Apuleius came from M’Daourouch, while Fronto (who taught Marcus Aurelius), Lactantius, and Minucius Felix resided in Cirta (modern Constantine, a spectacular city of gorges and, yes, named for the Emperor). The Augustan writer Juba II ruled Mauretania from the coastal city of Caesarea (modern Cherchell), where Latin grammarian extraordinaire Priscian later grew up. Martianus Capella, Nonius Marcellus, and maybe even Suetonius were Algerians too. (By contrast, in antiquity France produced only two Latin authors – the historian Pompeius Trogus and, er, Ausonius – while England, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany produced none at all.)

For all of its ancient wonders, Algeria is not an easy place to visit:

Tourist visas are hard to come by: Mike’s took four months to process and required repeated emails, phone calls, and two in-person visits to the New York consulate to obtain. The economy runs on cash, and mostly small bills: good luck closing your wallet. No credit cards, no ATMs for foreign withdrawals, and the official exchange rate is half what traders on the hardly-concealed black market offer. (Guys with bundles of cash, proficient with their phones’ calculator apps, hang around public squares in downtown Algiers.) Even in five-star hotels, you can’t charge to the room – meals and all else have to be paid in cash each time. There’s virtually nothing in the way of tourist infrastructure, either. There’s excellent travel infrastructure – wonderful highways, good restaurants, WiFi everywhere, and upscale lodging – but for tourists specifically, nada.

I don't think I'll be making it there, so I quite enjoyed the article and photos.

 

 

The Catch

Reading about Willie Mays after his passing, I came across this account of what Vin Scully called Willie's greatest catch, and it is not what is now called The Catch - Willie's catch of Vic Wertz's 400+ foot rocket in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series.  Indeed, it is what Willie also thought was his greatest catch and it happened in Ebbets Field in a game against the Dodgers.

It took place at the Dodger's home opener on April 18, 1952.  Willie was beginning his sophomore season, and a month later he was scheduled to report for military service, missing the rest of that season and all of the '53 campaign.

The Giants jumped on starter Clem Labine, scoring five runs in the top of the 1st inning, but the Dodgers slowly chipped away and entered the bottom of the 7th trailing 6-4.  The first two batters were easy, Roy Campanella popped out and Duke Snider hit a one-hopper back to pitcher Dave Koslo.  Then things fell apart; Andy Pafko homered to deep left field on a 0-2 pitch, Gil Hodges singled, and Koslo issued a 4 pitch walk to Carl Furillo.

Bobby Morgan came to the plate, pinch hitting for Carl Erskine.  On the first pitch, the light hitting Morgan hit a long line drive to left center that looked certain to be at least a double, more likely a triple, giving the Dodgers the lead.  Here's Scully's description:

In those days the Ebbets Field warning track was gravel, and the wall concrete.  It was a sinking liner, and in my mind, it would score two runs.  But Willie runs as fast as he could and dives for it with his body parallel to the ground, fully stretched out.  He catches the ball and literally bounces off the gravel and into the base of the wall, rolling over on his back with both hands on his chest.  I'll never forget Henry Thompson, the left fielder for the Giants, walking over, bending down, and taking the ball out of Willie's glove and showing everyone he made the catch.  It was incredible.

This is the AP account of the catch, saying Mays bounced twice on the gravel.

A Society for American Baseball Research article on the catch describes other contemporaneous reactions:

Morgan ripped a liner into left-center-field and Mays began his sprint toward the wall. According to a reporter from Baltimore’s Afro-American, “[I]t was doubtful that anyone in the park, even the most optimistic of the Giant rooters, entertained a hope that (Mays) would catch it.”5

Mays “grabbed Morgan’s blast with a desperation lunge.”6 Dick Young wrote that Mays made “another one of his description-defying catches.” The second-year player “left his feet. He actually bounced, crashed into the wall on the first hop, and rolled over on his back. But he held the ball.”7 Young’s colleague at the New York Daily News, Dana Mozley, insisted “Willie Mays just had no right” to catch Morgan’s liner.8

After the game, the talk turned more to Mays’ catch than Pafko’s heroics. “The greatest catch I ever saw in my life,” [Dodger Pee Wee] Reese said. “He came with it. I know that. There’s no argument. It was in his glove when he turned over, and Thomson went over and picked it out.”10

Brooklyn Eagle sportwriter Harold Burr, in an article titled "Mays’ Catch Greatest, Dodgers, Giants Agree”, wrote “It looked as if the best Willie could do with the drive was to hold it to the double.”

Unfortunately, we have no film of the catch.  Based on Mays' later recollection and accounts of others it seems like Willie momentarily lost consciousness when he bounced into the wall.  Accounts have players of both sides running out to center field after the catch.  Willie remembered waking up and seeing Jackie Robinson and Leo Durocher (Giants' manager) standing over him, Jackie to see if he really caught the ball and Leo to make sure he was okay.

Mays stayed in the game, but struck out in his next two at bats.  In the bottom of the 8th, Jackie Robinson hit a home run to tie the game, and the Dodgers won in the 12th when Pafko hit his second round tripper.

Late in life, Willie said: “That (the catch off Morgan) was a good catch, better than the World Series catch. I believe my best catch.”

Bobby Morgan died in his hometown, Oklahoma City, on June 1, 2023, a month short of his 97th birthday.  At the time, he was one of only two surviving members of the Boys of Summer, the Dodgers' pennant winning teams of 1952 and 1953.  With his passing, and that of Carl Erskine in April of this year, they are all gone.  

During his time with the Dodgers, Bobby was a utility infielder known for his fielding, not hitting, though he had a good eye at the plate, drawing a lot of walks.  You can read about Bobby and some of the stories of his time in baseball here, here, and here.  

Willie Mays was the last living player from the Giants' pennant winning 1951 squad.

Goodbye Willie

He was the first athlete I knew by name because my dad spoke so frequently about him.  His major league debut was when I was three months old, so he's been around my entire life. Willie Mays is gone at 93.

My dad's favorite ballplayer and mine.  Willie was part of our shared lives and conversations over the years.  Dad passed ten years ago, also at the age of 93, and since then, every time I see, read, or think about Willie, I think about my father.  I knew Willie was declining but this is hard news nonetheless.

The Hogback

I didn't understand what I was driving on for the first few hundred feet.  The realization that it was a two-lane road with drop off to canyons on both sides got my adrenaline going.  The big curve at the end really threw me.  Until going back to look for any YouTube videos on that section of highway I didn't realize it had a name - The Hogback.

In Different Perspectives I mentioned Utah Highway 12 so thought I'd provide you with the visuals of The Hogback, situated between the small towns of Escalante (pop. 800) and Boulder (pop. 200).

The first video is done by drone.  The second is from a car driving from Boulder to Escalante (we were driving in the opposite direction).  Enjoy.

George Arrives At St Mary's

(Ruth, on right)

On this date in 1902, seven year old George Herman Ruth arrives at St Mary's Industrial School for Boys.  It was at St Mary's that little George would be introduced to organized baseball under the instruction of Father Matthias and it was directly from St Mary's that George would be signed and go to the Baltimore Orioles of the International League in 1914.  Later that year his contract would be purchased by the Boston Red Sox.

The child was escorted to the school by a local police officer.  Whether beat cop Harry Birmingham was asked to do a favor for a friend, George Ruth Sr, is unknown, but the boy was not in formal police custody. Unlike his parents, Birmingham would occasionally visit George at St Mary's.  According to Jane Leavy's biography of the Babe, The Big Fella, Birmingham later told his children and grandchildren:

He felt sorry for the boy, living above a bar . . .

Leavy quotes him telling a Baltimore sportswriter years later:

"I remember that Babe was a little rascal.  Although he was not a bad boy - just mischievous, and no more so than any other boys his age.  He certainly never gave the police any trouble.  But his father decided to send him to St Mary's because he just couldn't make him mind at home."

Though George's sister claimed he was sent to St Mary's because he refused to go to school, he was too young at the time to be attending school.  His homelife was chaotic.  George and his sister were the only survivors of six siblings, the other four dying a very young ages.  His parents had a fractured relationship with his father eventually suing for divorce on grounds of adultery.  His father died in a street brawl during Babe's teunure with the Red Sox.

For most of the next twelve years, St Mary's was George's home.  Everything he did was communal, sleeping, eating, school. 

St Mary's stood on a hill on what was then the rural outskirts of Baltimore.   Built by the Roman Catholic Church, the building was five stories tall.   According to Leavy, St Mary's:

. . . was unique among the religious institutions create to care for what Baltimore industrialist Alex Brown called 'the broken wreckage of industrial society', because it was funded by Baltimore City and the state of Maryland.  Founded by the archbishop as a refuge for Catholic boys who faced bias in public institutions, St Mary's became a nondenominational public charity eight years later, when it was incorporated by the city and state as a place to settle vagrant and homeless boys.

Its remit was expanded beyond the homeless and orphans in 1882 when a state statute allowed parents to commit a child they deemed beyond their control and were required to designate the school's superintendent as the child's legal guardian.  That is how George Ruth came to St Mary's.  Or perhaps not.  No court order has ever been found, and the Babe's sister remembers that her father paid tuition while George was at the school.

The Xaverian Brothers who ran the school instilled a minimal sense of discipline in George and harnessed his energy into playing baseball.  There were many Brothers who played a role in his development but it was Brother Matthias to whom Ruth gave the most credit, calling him "the greatest man I've ever known".

Throughout his life Babe Ruth helped support St Mary's, making substantial financial gifts as well as organizing and sponsoring fundraising activities.  He also helped many of his fellow inmates who befriended him during those years.  And the New York Yankees called on the Xaverians of St Mary's on several occasions to visit Babe during one of his wild periods in order to adjust his behavior.

A River Runs Through It

The Colorado River, to be precise.

Rights of American states and Mexico to the waters of the Colorado has been a contentious issue for decades.  With the U.S., the upstream states (Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah) have different interests than the downstream states (California, Arizona, and Nevada) and the downstream states are quarreling among themselves.  It's become particularly contentious because of the prolonged drought over the past two decades.

Currently, water rights for each state are determined by the 1922 Colorado River Compact.  Unfortunately, the water levels used as the basis for the allocation occurred during an unusual period of heavy rainfall from 1905 through 1917.  How unusual is described in a recent research paper by NASA scientists on the "Causes and Dynamics of the Early 20th Century North American Pluvial".

From the opening of the paper:

The 'Early 20th Century North American Pluvial' refers to a period of enhanced moisture availability across Western North America that occurred in the first two decades of the century and often delimited by 1905 to 1917. It has a peculiar and interesting history as it directly preceded the 1922 Colorado River Compact that began the legal division of Colorado River flow between states. The division was based on several years of measured flow that, because they occurred during the Pluvial, were much higher than anything that has occurred since. 

They conclude that the Pluvial was not part of the "normal" boom and drought cycle in the Southwest, rather it was an extraordinary event as they report:

To conclude, the early 20th Century pluvial was a unique event in the last 500 years of North America hydroclimate history and it is a great irony that it just so happened to precede the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Unlike the great North America droughts, which can almost entirely be understood in terms of reductions of precipitation, the Pluvial arose from a combination of wet conditions in the Southwest and cool temperatures across the continent. Also unlike the droughts it is not well simulated by a model forced by historical SSTs indicating less oceanic control over it than is typical for droughts. An important topic of research needs to be to explain the cold temperatures during 1905-17. Nonetheless western North America has steadily warmed since the Pluvial which, together with the fact that models predict much of the Southwest and Plains to dry as a consequence of how rising greenhouse gases impact the hydrological cycle, makes it exceedingly unlikely that similar moist conditions will ever return.

Different Perspectives

We recently took a five night trip to northern Arizona and southern Utah to see some sights we've not yet been to.  After staying at La Posada in Winslow, we drove to the Hopi Mesas.  From there we went through Tuba City on Navajo land, to catch U.S. 89, taking the highway through Page (where we stayed overnight) and into Utah, through the town of Kaneb, up to its junction with Utah 12 near Bryce Canyon.  This is a beautifully scenic drive but Utah 12 is even better.

Initially you go through the Red Canyon (which is REALLY red), then past Bryce Canyon National Park, which we visited, and on to the small town of Escalante, in the middle of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, where we stayed for the night at the Entrada Escalante Lodge which we highly recommend.

The next morning we drove to the even smaller town of Boulder.  On the way Utah 12 goes through some striking canyon lands where you drive with no guardrails and there's even a short stretch when the canyon is on both sides of the road.  From Boulder we drove over the 9600 foot Boulder Mountain Pass with its stunning views to the east and south.

After getting to the end of Utah 12 we went to Capitol Reef National Park, another worthwhile place to visit.  From there we headed onto Utah 95, encountering at its start a sign reading "No services next 125 miles".  They were telling the truth.  Making it through 95 we stayed in Bluff.  The next morning it was back onto the Navajo lands to the Canyon de Chelly National Monument.  We drove the north and south rim roads, and plan to return to take the guided tour into the canyon.  Here are some photos:

 About 200 Navajo still live in the canyon, without electricity or running water.  It's been the heart of the Navajo homeland since the tribe migrated from the Great Plains in the 15th and 16th centuries.  It is also the reason for a stark difference in tribal narratives that we encountered in our journey.

The Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by the Navajo lands and there is an historical tension between the tribes.  The Hopi are a Pueblo people, liked descended from the ancient peoples that long inhabited the Colorado Plateau.  The Navajo are late comers to the region, a pastoral and raiding people, whose targets included the Hopi.  You can still see this today in little things.  The Hopi follow Arizona time, while the Navajo use Mountain Time.  The day we left Winslow, we started in AZ time, while traversing the Navajo land there was an hour time difference, but then entering the Hopi lands the time switched back.  After leaving the mesas, we reentered Navajo land with an hour time change and then, upon reaching Page we went back to AZ time.

For the Navajo, Kit Carson, of whom I've written before, is considered a villain.  Carson commanded the military force which, in 1864, put an end to Navajo raiding by entering the canyon and destroying the peach orchards and corn fields so painstakingly planted and maintained by the tribe, forcing their surrender, and then escorting thousands of Navajo to a miserable reservation in eastern New Mexico.  Five years later the Navajo were allowed to return.

However, earlier on our trip we visited the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa (photos not permitted on Hopi land).  The Center displayed a very long historical timeline of the Hopi people from about 500AD to today.  The entry for the 1860s reads (I'm paraphrasing here), "Kit Carson finally stopped the Navajo from raiding us!".

Molly Tuttle

Last week saw Molly Tuttle and her band, Golden Highway. at the Musical Instruments Museum Theater, a 299 seat venue with splendid acoustics.  Molly is part of the new bluegrass thing along with Billy Strings and Sierra Hull.  A terrific show with a mixture of originals, bluegrass covers (lovely version of Shady Grove, for instance) and covers of rock, featuring She's A Rainbow by the Stones and Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit.  None of the covers were straight; all introduced original elements.  Couldn't take photos but here's a video from earlier in the tour.

Saying Goodbye

Powerful photograph of Babe Ruth standing in front of Lou Gehrig’ casket, paying his last respects to his former Yankees teammate. pic.twitter.com/o7L1QjCB2e

— Baseball’s Greatest Moments (@BBGreatMoments) April 21, 2024

 

Lou Gehrig died on June 2, 1941, after ending his consecutive game streak in May 1939.  Until recently I'd never seen this photo of Babe Ruth at the funeral, gazing at his teammate in an open casket - dead at the age of 37.  Babe would die only seven years later at 53.