Author Archives: Mark P

Hell on possums

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Back in 1979 I decided to get a dog, so my friends who lived near Atlanta took me into town to the county animal shelter. I ended up with a dog that the card on the pen said was a dalmation named Sugar. Wrong on both counts. She looked dalmationish, but her head was shaped wrong, her ears were too long, and her spots were too faint. And there was no way I was going to have a dog named Sugar. It doesn’t pass the dog-calling test: Imagine yourself shouting the name at the top of your lungs. SUGARRRRRR!! Nope, not me. She ended up Jesse, and she was a great dog.

Now we have a dog named Zeke, of uncertain lineage. When he first showed up near our house, he “belonged” to our neighbors, but he always looked longingly at me when I took Zeus for a walk. We didn’t need another dog, and we were tired of finding homes for all the dogs that were dumped near our house. But we eventually gave in and he took up residence with us until we could find a good owner for him. He was friendly, but completely uneducated. Once when I took him with me to meet Leah for lunch, he nosed the back window of the truck open, jumped out and took off just like he knew where he was going, with no apparent intention of coming back.

Saintly

Saintly

We took him to the vet and had him vaccinated, neutered and tagged, and then we advertised for someone to adopt him. One day someone answered the ad. I told them not to let him off the leash when they got home because he would run away. They assured me they would keep him restrained. So they drove off, and Leah and I took a two-week vacation at Yellowstone. When we got back, we had a call from our vet, who had been called by someone who found Zeke roaming aimlessly. Whoever found him had called the number on the rabies tag. We took that as a sign, so Zeke became ours.

He’s 90 pounds, so he outweighs Jesse by about 35 or 40 pounds. His head is larger and his ears are shorter. I could fold Jesse’s ears over her eyes, but Zeke’s ears don’t reach that far. Jesse was black and white, and Zeke is brown and white. The only real similarity to Jesse’s physical appearance is that his spots are faint.

But they are very similar in some ways. For one, Jesse was a wanderer, kind of like Zeke. I used to take Jesse backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. She would take off up the trail and run around me in a kind of electron-like fuzzy orbit, always out of sight but always in contact. Zeke also takes off, but apparently his energy is great enough to break the bond, because sometimes he doesn’t come back right away. If you saw either one of them running around in a field of tall grass, you would immediately think “birddog”.

There is one more trait that they share. They both kill possums. Every time Jesse saw a possum she immediately ran to it and started biting it. She could not be restrained. Same with Zeke. A couple of nights ago when I took him for his last walk of the evening, he got away from me and ran into the garage. He dived under the little stoop we have at the laundry-room door, where Leah has a cat hotel, and there was a loud scuffle. It was Zeke attacking a possum. The possum went limp and I finally got Zeke out. The possum was bleeding at least a little, but he was gone the next time I looked in the garage. I don’t know whether he was mortally injured. In any event, I think he figured out that the cat beds, although comfortable, were not safe enough for possums.

It’s no surprise that we have had a lot of possums around the house. We live in the country and Leah puts our catfood for the outdoor cats. That’s an almost perfect way to attract wildlife. We have probably trapped eight or ten possums and a few raccoons. We take them down into Texas Valley and release them near a nice stream. I don’t know whether they survive, but they have a better chance there than they do at our house. At least as long as Zeke is around.

All lined up on the mountain

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There are some really nice views from up on the mountain, but not all the views are so great. The best place to see the furthest is the end of the road that goes past our house. But that also happens to be the place where the power lines cross the mountain.

Powerlines and the view from Lavender Mountain

Powerlines and the view from Lavender Mountain

This was taken in the morning, while fog was still covering the Coosa River. The fog covering the river is visible on the left just below the horizon, and to the right of the mountain behind the suspension towers. You can also see Plant Hammond and a little of its stack plume on the right, and a paper mill a little upriver, which is spewing quite a plume of steam right behind the tower.

The power lines start on the other side of the mountain in Texas Valley at the Rocky Mountain Pump Storage Facility, which is owned and operated by Georgia Power and Oglethorpe Power. The valley is unusual in that it is nearly a completely enclosed pocket with just a small outlet, and with a mountain (Rocky Mountain) located in the center. It’s so unusual that it’s easily recognizable from airliner altitude. The upper storage part of the pump-storage facility is on top of the mountain. There are two or three lakes down in the valley that also store water.

A pump-storage powerplant operates by impounding water at a relatively low elevation. During off-peak times, when the demand for power is low, electric power is used to pump water uphill to a storage impoundment at a higher elevation, in this case, on the top of Rocky Mountain. Then, when there is a higher demand for power, the water runs down through generators and ends up back in the lower reservoirs. The laws of physics mean that a pump-storage power plant is a net consumer of energy. In other words, it uses more electrical energy than it produces. It only makes economic sense because the power companies can charge more for the power it produces during peak demand times than it costs for the power it consumes during off-peak times.

Three power generation facilities are visible from just behind where I was standing to take this picture. As I mentioned, you can see Georgia Power’s Plant Hammond from this point. On a clear day you can also see Georgia Power’s Plant Bowen, which is on the Etowah River. The Etowah flows to Rome where it joins with the Oostanaula River to form the Coosa. Both of those power plants are coal-fired. Back in 2006 a report by the Environmental Integrity Project said that Plant Bowen led the country in sulfur emissions from power plants. Bowen has a huge generating capacity. It’s rated at over 3000 MW. Hammond is relatively small at only 800 MW. The Rocky Mountain facility is rated at 215 MW, which is smaller than any coal-fired plant, although quite respectable by hydroelectric standards. I guess that’s because of the greater head, or difference between the upper water level and the lower water level. Of course we have to pay to put virtually all that water up on top of Rocky Mountain, while Mother Nature puts the water behind the dams for free. Both Hammond and Bowen produce pollutants in the form of sulfur compounds and particulates, both of which are harmful in their own ways. Rocky Mountain doesn’t directly produce much of any pollutants. All of its pollutants are emitted by other power plants, probably including both Hammond and Bowen.

There’s no free ride.

Friday Felines

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OK, this is not all felines. How many critters are there here?

It's not a dormitory, guys.

It’s not a dormitory, guys.

I’m not sure exactly when this was taken, but based on who’s there, it was a while ago. And it was cold weather.

Opposite ends

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Leah said it was snowing at home on Saturday. It was not snowing where I was.

Sunbathers and a few surfers at Seal Beach

Sunbathers and a few surfers at Seal Beach

I was in Seal Beach, California. I walked the two miles from the hotel to the beach. For some reason I expected it to be deserted, but, after all, it was Saturday, 80 degrees and partly cloudy. There were lots of people out. A few were even surfing.

Surfing at Seal Beach

Surfing at Seal Beach

The surf was not really up. There was a long wait and a short ride.

I’ll have a small amount of work to do on Sunday, probably some time in the early evening. And then on Monday, work begins in earnest. If we’re lucky, it will be 10- to 12-hour days from Monday till Friday. And no visits to the beach.

Elbows out

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My mother’s memorial service was held last Sunday. The thing that struck me most strongly was that it was not really very sad. The only time I came close to crying was when they started singing A Mighty Fortress is Our God. My mother told me long ago that she wanted that song at her funeral, and it was the first song in the service. So it was a close thing for me. But for the most part it was not sad, or solemn or melancholy. The best I can come up with is fond remembrance.

There was a little quiet laughter during the service when the minister retold some stories my brother and I had told him a few days earlier. In fact, we laughed quite a few times during the last three weeks of my mother’s life. When she arrived at the emergency room, she was responsive, if a little sleepy. Soon after they admitted her, however, she went into a sleep-like state. Her eyes were closed but she talked constantly. One afternoon she was mad at my late father, who died almost exactly 13 years ago. My father could walk up to a total stranger and talk for an hour, and he often did. In my mother’s dream, or whatever it was, she was complaining because my father was talking to his friend and didn’t he know she had a headache and needed to go home?

This dream probably did not unfairly represent my father, so we laughed about that.

After a few days she woke up. Then, after the doctor told her she was going to die, she went home. She was alert at first but soon began a slow decline. One day when she was in a semi-responsive state but very clearly on a downhill trend, my brother was talking to her and encouraging her to be open to the ending of her life. He told her that our father was waiting for her. She said, “Well, I’m not ready to go. He can just wait.”

We laughed again.

I think there were three times that the hospice nurse expected her to die within a short period, a day or even a few hours. But she held on. Everyone said she was going to do things her way. She wasn’t going to leave until she was ready. She was stubborn, and she didn’t bluff. We talked by phone to her sister in Arizona, and she told us that once when they were little girls, their grandfather scolded them for something and told them that the devil was right around the corner and was going to get them. My mother looked at her sister and said, “Let’s go see him.”

She had grit, and we laughed at that.

Her ashes were taken to the cemetery before the memorial service to be interred beside my father’s ashes. The family gathered around the gravesite, there was a prayer, and then the family was to leave and let a cemetery employee put the ash container into the receptacle. I guess that act is considered too disturbing for the family to witness. So Leah and I left. After the memorial service, someone from the funeral home apologized to us. Apparently they couldn’t get the ash container to fit into the receptacle. It was just a little bit too large. I pictured my mother sticking her elbows out as the cemetery worker tried to slip her container down into the receptacle, and saying one more time, “I’m not ready to go.”

And we laughed again.