My tree

In reviewing my previous posts, I realized I hadn't included the story about my tree.

I was with my grandparents when they bought their property south of town, back in the summer of 1973. They had owned some property in the area for years, and were looking for a newer and larger place in the same area.

They found a 10-acre lot of unimproved land with a gravel road running across it, right about in the middle. The road had been built to put in a microwave relay tower at the top of the hill, and consequently there was also electricity running up to the top of the hill. Anyway, they had looked at several properties that day, dragging me along (I was 6 at the time).

The place was pretty overgrown, what you'd expect from 'unimproved'. But there was an enourmous oak tree maybe 75 to 100 feet back from the road.

It was enormous then, probably 300 years old or older. Two adult men could not put their arms all the way around it. The first of the horizontal branches started about 10-12 feet up, and those were as big around as a regular tree. They were also pretty straight, making it perfect for the ultimate tree house. The branches extended out nearly all the way to the road, in a near perfect circle. Truely an impressive grand old oak.

(In fact, the only oak I've ever seen that surpasses this one is the ancient Old Senator oak, somewhere between 500 and 600 years old, in St. Augustine, FL. Theirs may be older and bigger, but mine is prettier; mine has the classic hemispherical shape, while theirs is more 'globular' and irregular. You do have to admire theirs, however, for being being a tough old tree, able to survive in a Howard Johnson's parking lot. Kinda reminds me of the Survivor Tree (which is an American Elm) here in OKC at the Murrah Building Memorial.)

I offered my grand-dad the princely sum of $26 (in that day, and for a 6-year-old) if he'd buy this particular lot and let me have that tree. He laughed, as did my grandmother and the real estate agent.

Later they decided to buy that property, and my grand-dad told me I could have that tree. We never did built the treehouse, but we did put in a succession of swings over the years. It's still there, even bigger and more massive than before. I had been concerned about it, given the massive ice storms that have struck that part of Oklahoma over the past few years, but that big old tree could support a huge load of ice, literally tons of the stuff, without strain. Anyway, it's still there, and appears to be in good condition.

Eufaula Revisited

I had an opportunity to revisit my grand-dad's place just south of the town of Eufaula some time ago, over the Memorial Day weekend and again over the July 4th weekend.

I hadn't been back there in years. The last time I was there was in the 1992-93 time frame, when I took my grandmother to visit her sister-in-law, who was living on the property at the time. It was still in pretty good condition then; everything was recognizable and relatively intact.

Well, now 18 years or so later, things have changed.

First off, my step-uncle, who had moved in to my grand-dad's house, ran the place into the ground. I never really knew him, so I'm going off what other people told me, but he apparently had a drinking problem, and sold off everything of value to finance his habit. Finally, one day the house burned down. He notified my mom with a phone call that went something along the lines of,

"Well, the house burned down. Can you make sure they send the insurance check to me?"

"Insurance? What insurance?"

And that was the end of that. In exploring the wreckage of the house, my brother noticed that certain things you'd expect to find in the debris weren't there--no TVs, no stove, not hot water heater, no washer or dryer, etc. And so the remains were just left there.

My great-aunt moved to a place in New Mexico some years ago, so her place was vacant for some time.

It was agreed that the other of my grand-dad's step-sons would be responsible for the property taxes. However, a few years ago my mother received a notice from the McIntosh County Sheriff's Department that the property was to be sold the next day at auction for non-payment of property taxes. She managed to make it in just before closing time and pay the four years of back taxes to avoid losing the property.

She found that someone had been 'squatting' in the vacant mobile home belonging to her aunt, and allowed him to stay for a very small rent (something like $150 a month) and a promise to keep up the property. Well, he wasn't very good about paying the rent, and even worse on the upkeep, and finally (and recently) he was forced to leave.

This was the condition of things when we went down there on Memorial Day.

'Someone' in the family had sold off half of the property, specifically the western, and more level, half, where my grand-dad's house had been (and where my tree still is; I suppose I should have gotten a deed for the tree, including all property within the drip line of the branches, but 6 year olds don't usually think of such things). So that side was off-limits.

The driveway leading up to my great-aunt's place was so overgrown my brothers had to use chainsaws to open it up enough for a car and a minivan to make it in. The mobile home was trashed; a lack of maintenance had led to water leaks and the floors are now so rotten you're in danger of falling through. The place was overrun with ticks; between me and my son we removed more than 30 of them once we got back. When we left, we locked the gate, though in reality the gate wasn't much of an obstacle, given the badly weathered and cracked condition of the gate and posts.

On the 4th, we went up there, outside of city limits, to shoot off some fireworks. Like most Oklahoma cities and towns, Eufaula has a ban on them for some reason. This makes little sense; Roswell, NM, a much drier and therefore fire-prone environment than found in the overwhelming majority of Oklahoma, has no such ban. On the 4th, Roswell is enveloped in a huge cloud of smoke from the vast numbers of firecrackers, rockets, fountains, screamers, poppers, mortars, and assorted other fireworks being discharged within city limits. But I digress.

We went up there, and the gate was open; the chain had been cut (though in reality all one really needed to do was to give the post a good shove and it would have fallen over). A window-unit air conditioner that had been there was now gone as well.

In another sense, however, it was absolutely amazing how 20 years of neglect will allow a property in southeastern Oklahoma to become overgrown. Nature, in that area at least, is very agressive about restoring the native vegatation to everywhere it had been cleared. I helped put in the mobile home in question, when I was 12 years old; being the shortest, I got the unenviable job of climbing underneath with a short shovel to dig trenches for the plumbing and septic lines. I also helped put in the wellhouse, and clearly remember pouring the foundation. It's on a slope so steep that the downhill corner had to be raised 36 inches to make the floor level.

It took about 20 minutes of searching to find the foundation of the old wellhouse. There were trees growning right up against the foundation, trees that are now 5 or 6 inches in diameter. The years have also worn off the inscribed initials on the corner, at least enough to where they're now illegible, though you can see something there in the concrete.

Elsewhere up and down the hill, my grand-dad's next-door neighbors, Leon Drew and his son, Leon Jr., are long gone, though someone else now lives in his house located far too close to the dirt road (if you put your house too close to a dirt road, the dust from anyone driving by floats in to your house and coats everything, which is why you want to site your house quite a bit back from the road). The house where the one kid who was in 7th grade back when I lived there, and rode the bus with me, is gone; even the regular (meaning non-mobile) home at the bottom of the hill is gone, completely overgrown and invisible. The microwave tower at the top of the hill was damaged in one of the ice storms we had a few years ago, and has since been replaced with a newer and more sturdy tower, and the nearby cliff, which had a great panoramic view of the lake below, is now so overgrown as to be inaccessible.

The spring is still there, and the blackberries have continued their spread along one of the property lines. But overall the whole place is a testament to the futility of human endeavor; that if we do not take the time and effort to maintain something, in fairly short order it will deteriorate and be reclaimed by nature.

Gasoline--Ripoff!

Something completely different here . . .

OK, I've watched gasoline prices for years. And one thing I've noticed is that the difference in price between regular unleaded, premium and super hasn't changed much.

Way back when regular unleaded was 79.9 cents per gallon, premium was 89.9 and super was 99.9. That 10 cent per gallon difference per 'step-up' translated into premium being 112.5% of regular, and super was 125% of regular. This was back in the early to mid 1990's; I don't remember exactly when.

Recently I saw where regular unleaded was going for $2.509 per gallon, premium at $2.619, and super at $2.729 per gallon. That 11 cent per gallon difference per 'step-up' means that premium is now 104.3% of regular, and super is now 108.7% of premium.

Now, this means one of three things. First, that the cost of whatever it is that they do to gasoline to make it 'premium' or 'super' hasn't gone up much over the past 15 to 20 years. I can't think of anything that hasn't gone up in that time, so I'd discard this one.

Secondly, that those who put premium or super in their cars and trucks 15 to 20 years ago were getting ripped off, in that the actual cost of making the gasoline 'premium' or 'super' wasn't as much as what they were getting charged.

Third, that today those of us who are using regular are actually subsidizing those who use premium or super, in that the cost of making those higher octane gasoline blends is in fact higher than the price difference being charged for them. In this case, the 'regular' gasoline users are getting ripped off by being made to pay for things they're not getting, in order to keep the prices for premium and super artificially lower.

Not that I expect this learned dissertation into gasoline pricing structures will do anything; it won't lead to some massive consumer revolt and make all life fair and cause the planets to align and usher in an era of global peace. No, it's just another musing about how we're getting ripped off, and what's worse, we're all used to it.

PBS's POV documentary featuring Dominion Farms

Earlier this past week I caught a documentary on PBS, part of their POV series, about development in Kenya. Basically the documentary was decrying the loss of traditional culture in Kenya through development, much of it fostered by companies and organizations outside of Kenya.

Featured prominently in the documentary was a company called Dominion Farms. The CEO of Dominion Farms is Calvin Burgess, a man from Guthrie, here in Oklahoma. I know, or knew, Mr. Burgess, though I doubt he'd remember me. My first job in aviation was at the Guthrie airport, and I towed, fueled, and prepped Mr. Burgess' airplanes as part of my duties. He owned the largest airplanes on the field at that time, a Cessna 421 and later a Piper Cheyenne turboprop, the first turbine-engined airplane based in Guthrie, as well as a WACO classic biplane. His biplane was more than a toy; it was fitted out for full IFR instrument flight in bad weather, though why someone would want to fly an open-cockpit biplane through the rain at 80 mph is beyond me. It would be nice for flying at night, if you had to, I suppose.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that as unfortunate as losing the old ways, the old culture, in Africa is, it is nevertheless necessary, at least in the ways that hinder progress. The old ways include valuing and establishing one's status in society by the number of cattle one possesses. These are herded around from pasture to pasture as the inhabitants of the region have done for millennia. Crops are grown in a similar ancient, labor-intensive, manner. In fact, if one happens to revisit American history, things are pretty much there (with a distinctive local flavor, of course) as they were here 200 years ago.

However, we realized long ago that the most efficient use of our arable land is not the classic '40 acres and a mule' style of small family farms. Part of the upheaval of the Great Depression was the consolidation of the last of the classic small family farms (most of which were already marginal by that time) into much larger family farms, fewer in number, and worked exclusively by mechanical means, rather than by farmers walking behind their animals. This not only reduced the labor cost of production, it increased production dramatically. This continued throughout the 20th century here in the U.S., with large corporate farms predominating in large parts of the country today, and nowadays a single American farmer produces enough food to feed well over a hundred people, enough of a surplus to not only feed our own people but a significant number outside our own borders.

If we, as a species, not just as Americans, or as citizens of 'donor nations', but as the human race, are ever going to solve the recurring problems of hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, it's going to require choosing one of three options. First, we can accept the necessity of changing the old order of things and implement modern agricultural methods worldwide, and accept the attendant upheavals in the social order in developing countries. The old ways are incapable of meeting the current need, much less the needs of the future. Secondly, we can drastically, and in a heartless and draconian manner, reduce the population of those developing countries to the point that they can feed themselves using their ancient and traditional methods of agriculture. This of course flies in the face of every civilized notion of proper moral conduct, and so is not an option for serious consideration. The third option is to continue to allow famines and droughts to take their toll, to continually have 'Feed The World' campaigns in the developed world for centuries to come, to continue to lose millions of our fellow men, women, and children to hunger every year, and to never solve the underlying problems that result in those famines and starvation.

There is simply no way for the people in undeveloped and relatively overpopulated regions (not necessarily individual countries, but geographic regions) that have historically been unable to feed themselves and have had to repeatedly rely on international aid to rise up out of the poverty and desperation without having to give up some of their traditional culture. What might have worked well when the population density was lower is now insufficient; it is a simple matter of mathematics and logic, nothing more. It's not the 'white man' coming in and 'recolonizing' the area, though perhaps given the history of the area (those who have seen the series may have noted that many of the locals could speak English quite well, which is an after-effect of British colonization that ended decades ago) it might seem so to local sensibilities.

It is far more logical to grow the needed food in the region (again, geographic region, not tied to political boundaries) than to ship it halfway around the world in response to a crisis. It's better to have the means of production within a few hundred miles of the need than several thousand miles away across oceans. Not only are transportation costs lower, but the response time is lower as well.

All of which does not necessarily mean the end of the local culture; we have, in a few limited (too limited, in my opinion) places preserved elements of our earlier culture (such as Colonial Williamsburg, Silver Dollar City, and the Cherokee Nation's Ancient Village, here in Oklahoma). Their old ways, that still predominate, are no less valid than our old ways, and just as worthy of being preserved. But the time has come where their old ways are standing in the way of progress, and if we are getting tired of starving children and abject poverty in so many places around the world, and if we are finally going to get serious about solving these problems and not just slapping a band-aid on them, then those old ways are going to have to go.

(As an aside, one of the things that we here in America have a problem with is with all those 'starving children' fund-raising programs. Yes, there are starving children in Africa; there are starving children in Kenya. However, Kenya, from what I've learned from the Kenyans I've met over the years, does have a fully modern side as well. There are modern cities, schools, government (a pretty good government, more or less--the same that could be said for our own; certainly we have our own problems with corruption), churches, universities, art museums--you name it. Despite what all those infomercials, commercials, articles, documentaries, and fund-raisers would have you believe, not all those countries are full of slums packed with starving children. They may have those, but they have very much more than just those slums.)