Fires, Floods, Hurricanes and Earthquakes

Above: I mounted sprinklers on poles to wet down the house.

Camp Connell, CA - One of the benefits, depending how you view it, of having lived in numerous sections of the country is that we have had some experience with most of the natural disasters that can afflict mankind.
I've been pondering this recently as we keep the windows closed on our un-air conditioned home in the mountains to avoid as much smoke as possible. We live in the middle of the Sierra Nevada forests.
California, as you probably know, has had over 1,300 wildfires so far this summer, and the fire season normally doesn't even begin until August. Today the smokey haze is milder, and we will probably venture out for a walk.
Of those fires, most sparked by dry lightening in June, over 300 are still burning. The closest to us today is about 100 miles north near the town of, Paradise, best known as the retirement home for famed test pilot Chuck Yeager. As of Tuesday, no fires are burning anywhere near us. We just get the smoke which spreads all over the north state.
We are in no immediate danger, but we stay alert.
Maybe because I was raised in hurricane country on the Gulf Coast, earthquakes scare me the most. You can't predict them, and the damage - if you are in the wrong spot - can be catastrophic. We've only experienced one or two of any significance since moving to California almost 30 years ago. But it was an interesting experience, watching the plate glass windows in my newsroom ripple like vertical waves. Then I realized the concrete floor was also rolling up and down. By the time I was scared, it was all over, and the only damage at my home was water sloshing out of the hot tub.
We lived through one flood while in the Mid-West. We lived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, between Cincinatti and Pittsburg. An ice dam backed up the rivers which then backed up into town, but did little damage. Long-time residents were used to it, and marked the big floods on the wall of the old hotel downtown.
Both Pat and I grew up with hurricanes. We were raised on the Gulf Coast, and she even experienced a typhoon in Okinawa during her high school years. One of my earliest
memories is my mother, a nurse, going to Gulfport with the Red Cross response team. And one of my early assignments as a reporter for the Miami Herald was to cover the aftermath of a big hurricane that hit Louisianna and Mississippi in 1965.
And then during our recent two-year stint in Florida, we had back-to-back hurricanes and had to evacuate.
That's the only good thing about hurricanes, if there is anything good: you normally have plenty of warning to get out of the way. I'll not try to convince anyone from New Orleans, however, but we have always been lucky.
Fires are a different thing, and are beginning to compete with earthquakes as the scariest disaster we may encounter.
The biggest problem is the lack of good local specific information. Firefighters in the state do a great job fighting fires, quickly and efficiently, but the administration has a tendency to bureaucratic press releases that discuss "resources applied" and money spent. They rarely tell us in a timely manner where the closest fires are and if we should be concerned.
Once you understand the local system for fighting fires, you can apply that information.
Anytime we hear a fire truck on the highway (there's only one highway) or a small plane or helicopter overhead, we are on alert.
Firefighters in the wilderness utilize small spotter planes to identify and categorize fires, and then direct other aircraft in as quickly as possible. The surest sign of a fire dangerously near is a helicopter with a water bucket flying over the house, or an old DC 3 tanker flying low and slow overhead.
We had about a dozen fires with 50 miles of us within the past three weeks. All were spotted quickly, and put out.
I usually jump on the Internet and check two local web sites, our only source of local news. If it looks questionable, I'll drive down to the general store, where they always know what is going on, or maybe up the road to the National Forest office. Sometimes they know.
Meanwhile, we do what we can to make the house safe. We rake up debris near the house, cut back tree limbs to avoid a path for the fire into the tree tops, and I have even cut down about 25 trees in the past three years to thin the area around the house.
And, as the attached photos show poorly, I even experiment with mounting sprinklers on poles to wet down the house. It worked, but needs improvement.
But we don't kid ourselves. We live in the woods, and if there is a forest fire nearby we are leaving -- laptop and family photos in hand -- and finding a safer place.
That's the price we pay for living on the edge of the wilderness. It's worth it.







The sprinkler experiment, and the closeness of big trees...

Memorial Day - Lt. Mark Enari

Camp Connell, Ca -- Memorial Day reminds me of Mark Enari, a big, kinda goofy looking guy I met in 1963.
We were both in the Army stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Mark was a new second lieutenant, a graduate of the Officer Candidate School, having served one tour overseas as an enlisted man in Germany.
He really liked the Army. Germany was fun for him. The way he described it, as the company clerk (he could type well) he had unlimited access to weekend passes and was able to make extra money lending cash to his buddies. So he had plenty of spending money, and lots of weekend pass opportunities to see Europe.
He excelled in the Army and was promoted and sent to Officer Candidate School as a reward.
He loved the physical action, worked very hard, and delighted in his first commissioned officer assignment: he was a tactical officer at the same school he graduated from. That meant he was the instructor, mentor, and bad-ass for the young officer candidates who followed him. Think meaner than a Marine drill sergeant.
He laughingly told us about finding a flaw in a spit-polished floor, and making the sloppy candidate stay up half the night re-polishing the floor with a toothbrush and wax.
We ate a lot of fried chicken together at the Infantryman's Bar, worked very long days and weeks, and many nights, drank a lot of beers, and chased the few women available on a post with 35,000 men.
I was a second lieutenant, an ROTC product, initially assigned to the headquarters staff at the Infantry School. We lived next door to each other in the BOQ.
Because the base was crowded, we got permission to move off base into civilian housing, a house of our own, which became something of a party site. Lt. Rich Granger, another OCS Tac Officer, was the third roommate. In a way we had little in common. In the Army, though, we had lots in common. We all worked hard, and partied hard.
Once, under the influence of a few beers, Mark demonstrated some new hand-to-hand combat move, and accidentally kicked the entry door of our house out into the front yard. He was highly entertaining, happy to grab you in a headlock and throw you over his shoulder.
He was Airborne, Ranger, and a regular Army kind of guy.
He was also an unquestioning patriot. I always wondered if it had anything to do with his birth in Estonia, a country plagued by Germany during WW 2, and taken over by Communist later. His parents fled to the U.S. and he was proud of his new country. He grew up in Southern California.
He was volunteered to go to Vietnam in 1965 but was turned down as "too junior" to be an advisor.
The last time I saw Mark was in May, 1965, when I completed my stateside tour with the 1st Battalion, 29th Infantry, and drove south to Florida to take a job with the Miami Herald. Mark and Rich encouraged me -- over beers -- to take the Florida job, though my memory of the farewell party is a little cloudy. They held the solid theory that the state had beaches, and beaches had young women in bathing suits. They were right. I married one in the summer of 1966.
The Army finally accepted Mark's persistent volunteering, and he was 24 when he died in Vietnam in December, 1966. He was one of the first members of his division to be killed in combat. He was a hero.
At the time I was newly wed newspaper reporter, working as a reporter covering the manned space program. We never met each other's wives.
The details of his Vietnam experience are below. His name is on memorials in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, California, and out in space on a memorial plaque launched by NASA.
His name also was placed on Camp Enari, a spot many members of the Fourth Infantry Division remember with mixed feelings.
(The last time I saw Rich he was a captain, just back from a second combat tour in Vietnam, and wondering if the Army was really what he wanted to do. I am hopeful he survived.)

I think of Mark, who didn't, and the others like him, every Memorial Day.

**********************

1LT Mark Enari

First Lieutenant Mark Enari served as a platoon leader in Company A, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division.

The 4th Infantry Division had arrived in western II Corps in 1966. It was their mission to seek out North Vietnamese divisions that had infiltrated across the Cambodian border.

Enari routinely led his platoon on "search and destroy" missions, a term given to operations that would seek out heavily entrenched enemy units and assault their fortified positions.

On December 2, 1966, Enari led his platoon in an assault on one of these positions concealed in an area of dense trees. As the platoon advanced, heavy automatic weapons fire erupted from bunkers hidden at the base of the tree line. As the battle raged, Enari was continually subjected to intense enemy fire while commanding the operation.

In the heat of the fire fight, five soldiers were wounded and pinned down in an open area by machine gun fire. Realizing that his men would die without cover and medical attention, Mark Enari stormed the machine gun nest with a furious barrage of fire.

During his single-handed assault, the lieutenant was struck by both sniper and machine gun rounds but continued his attack in defense of the wounded.

The young officer pushed forward until succumbing to his wounds; he finally slumped to the ground. As a result of his action, the five men were saved. Lieutenant Enari was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for valor.

Camp Enari was officially named in his honor on General Orders of the 4th Infantry Division on 14 May 1967.

Mark Niggol Enari was born on 8 April 1942. His home of record was Pasadena, California.

His name is inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the east wall, Panel 13E, Line 4.



Camp Enari, Pleiku, Pleiku Province 1969

Garages, boats, trees and sailing

We may actually have a garage before the snow flies!

Camp Connell, CA - It's been a busy week here at Camp Connell, our home town.

The weather -- always a topic of talk down at the general store -- has ranged from scorching hot (90s in the mountains is NOT acceptable) to downright chilly (high 30s this morning).
As we like to point out, it is always much worse down the hill. Hotter (0ver 100) and colder (somewhere north), and windier too.

The never-ending garage construction project hit a milestone, hopefully not a plateau, as the trusses for the roof arrived Monday and were completely installed by Wednesday. Brad the contractor has been working alone because his helper/son ran off to the Bay Area to be near his girl friend.
It was highly entertaining and edifying to watch Brad balance on a two-by-four and juggle the large and heavy trusses into place. It's too complicated to describe with accuracy, but he used leverage, a piece of climbing rope, a level and chalk line, and ingenuity to get everything nailed solidly into place.
Brad at work on the roof

You may recall the project was caught last Fall by early and heavy snow, and was buried for five months.
Next step: finish the siding.

Fire-safing the property around the house is a never-ending job, particularly as we move into the hottest and driest part of the summer. We do live in a wilderness interface, a fancy term that means we are definitely in the woods.
This week I hired a local company to come in and "high limb" 12 large trees close to the house. That means that Arturo, my amigo who works for my poker-playing friend Dave, showed up this morning with a very large dump truck, the longest pole saw I have ever seen, and other assorted tools. My job, to keep the cost down, was to be the safety spotter, hold the ladder, and yell "LOOK OUT!" when a large limb started to fall on a head. Problem for Arturo: my Spanish is not great and so while I am trying to figure out how to say "DUCK!" in Spanish, the limbs have already bounced off the nearest hard surface.
Holding a three-section pole saw above your head for hours was a back-breaking job, but he has a cheerful disposition and strong arms, helped along by the fact he heads home this week for his daughter's quinciniera celebration. Mucho dinero is required, he told me with a father's accepting smile.
Arturo at the end of a long day

We both made it through the day safely. I managed to cut down several small trees, stack some future firewood, and break my chain saw for the umpteenth time.
For those friends who might worry about my tree-hugger credentials when I mention cutting down trees, be aware that our property is not a natural forest. It has become an overgrown thicket ever since the natives were chased out 150 years ago by gold seekers, and the hope is to restore it to its natural and safer condition.
Instead of letting natural fires burn, which remains a no-no near houses, we mechanically remove the excess trees and brush. The trees go to firewood for next winter, and the brush to the local yard waste collection station (just up the hill) where it is turned into high-priced mulch for city dwellers.
That's what sustainable culture is about up here at altitude.

Educational efforts continue for Pat and me at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, where we are volunteers. Pat spent part of today with a group of rangers and resource experts learning how to teach sixth-graders how to manage forest resources. Since the forest in parts of the park has not been allowed to burn for generations, the rangers now teach kids how to manage the forest back into a natural state. Yes, they do what we call "prescribed burns" but the controls are so tight for safety and air pollution reasons other steps are still required.
Most of today was fun stuff: learning how to core, plotting sections, measuring trees using a compass and geometry, and nipping off some little brushy stuff. Tomorrow Pat will be trained in "Creek Critters" and I will do a trail Patrol in the Sequoia grove.

Recreational moments exist also. This past weekend we took our sailboat Good News across San Francisco Bay, berthed at the South Beach Marina, and went to watch the San Francisco Giants lose another baseball game. We joined a group of members from the Oakland Yacht Club for the weekend, had a little wine, ate well, met some interesting people, and froze to death at AT&T Stadium, formerly known as PacBell Stadium, not to be confused with the stadium known as Candlestick, which is even colder.
We enjoyed two days of good sailing (wind 15-20 knots), didn't break anything, and got home safe.
A good time was had by all.
Our next-door boat on the San Francisco outing was party central. We heard a loud splash in the middle of the night, and learned later one of our wine-filled sailor friends took an unexpected swim in the 45 degree water. He got out very quickly, and had a good story to tell.

Gas prices, Spring, eBay, and good friends...

The news is good here this week in Camp Connell, as it always is, though the economic indicators are somewhat less certain. Here are some items to consider:

-- Gas prices hit $4.05 9/10 this past week at the local general store because the tanker arrived.

It appears that the big oil companies, Chevron in this case, set the price at the pump based on some mysterious formula and tell the local sales folks what to charge. Folks at the store this evening tell me they've seen prices as high at $4.29 in the San Francisco area, and the ski resort up the mountain charges more than our local store.
The price of gas doesn't seem like much of a big deal until you consider a long road trip. It was cheaper for Pat and me to fly to and from Mexico, even adding in the cost of an airport motel, than to drive. Next year we are hoping to go to Alaska, but driving seems a unlikely option.


--Weather report: the snow is melting in our front yard.

-- Today (Friday) was my last ski day of this season. The resort up the hill will be open two more days but we will be busy and it really isn't worth it as conditions are not great. The window for decent skiing is so small now, as the sun turns the icy snow into slush by noon, I'm starting to think about hiking at a lower altitude.
One act of faith: I purchased a season ski pass for next year.


-- Spring is officially here at Camp Connell. We have Crocus blooming, dozens of other bulbs fighting their way up into the sunshine -- some coming through patches of snow.
The other sure sign of Spring is that the work has resumed on the garage we were having built for last winter, but didn't quite make it. The site has been cleared of snow and tree debris, and the inspector came by yesterday and gave the go-ahead for pouring concrete on Monday to finish the slab. Then, if rafters and lumber can be found, the walls should start to go up.


Next week I have to arrange to have the snow tires removed from the Subaru. These are REAL snow tires, not your wimpy East Coast type that can stay on the car all summer.

And baseball season is underway for my 11-year-old granddaughter Delaney.

(UPDATE: The forecast calls for some rain mixed with snow in the middle of the week. No matter. It is still Spring.)



-- We have rented our former home in Sacramento after trying unsuccessfully to sell it for four months. As part of the cleaning out, I have vowed to sell off a bunch of small stuff on eBay. Made my first sale this week: a pair of commemorative drinking glasses with Apollo 13 designs. Sold for $1.29 (shipping was over $8, but the buyer in Iowa paid for that). The buyer sent me an email that said, "Say, are you the same LaMont that used to work for the TODAY newspaper in Florida?" Turns out he read the newspaper as a youth, and has been a space buff ever since.

-- Pat and I are back in school now, training the be docents at Calaveras Big Trees State Park. The park is only two miles away, and has over a thousand Sequoia trees, giant redwoods, big trees or -- if you are British -- wellingtonian.. Technically,they are Sequoiadendron Giganteum, and that's the sort of thing we are learning along with how to deal with drunken and rowdy campers (call the ranger). Should be fun this summer.

-- Coincidence, or not? I had a telephone call from Stan Rodimon this past week. Stan was a classmate at Marion Military Institute from 1957-1960, the school I wrote about recently, and then at the University of Alabama where we both graduated before going off into the Army and losing track of each other. He and his wife Linda were struggling married students when we last got together 46 years ago. They were good friends and interesting people. They promise to come see us this summer so we can do a bit of catching up. What a treat!

The old school ties... class of '58

Fifty years ago my family gathered to celebrate my high school graduation in the tiny town of Marion, Alabama at an historic but little-known private military school named Marion Military Institute.

Marion, or MMI as we called it, was the kind of Southern military prep school parodied in books and movies as a place where abusive older cadets and uncaring staff mistreated younger students. Sorta like Pat Conroy's "The Lords of Discipline."
The reality was different.
Most students were there to get a better education than public schools offered. Some had been encouraged to go to military school as a final option by their local sheriff. Others hoped to earn an appointment to West Point or the Naval Academy, or had been dumped by unsuccessful or uninterested parents. I'll let you guess which categories I fell into.
Most of us came from Southern states, the exceptions being what we called the "sons of South American dictators," an unfair label we liked for the Latin American students.

The staff was a mix, like most schools. Some were great, and challenged us, and others were duller than dishwater. The staff member responsible for discipline was dumber than a post. He kept pictures of naked women under his desk blotter, and was rumored to have three testicles. We doubted it did him any good.
A history teacher was the dullest man alive, but was related to someone important.
My English teacher was brilliant, and wrote short stories for the Saturday Evening Post as a sideline.
My math teacher and tennis coach used to do back flips off his desk to get our attention, and we learned math from him.
The "barracks" where I lived was a dormitory with small rooms that housed two students, a bunk bed, footlockers and two desks. It had indeed been used as a hospital in the Civil War. The marble steps were worn into gentle curves by the thousands of feet of 100 years of teenage boys coming and going. The building is still there, but the steps have been moved to the side as sort of a monument to all those polished shoes running off to class or drill.
The corps of cadets really did march off to stop the invading Yankees in the 1860s, only to be run back home to their mamas in short order. But they still brag about it.

Since then the school has survived good and bad administrations, the Viet Nam War and anti-military sentiment which reduced enrollment dramatically, the collapse of the local town economy, and a host of other problems. It remains proudly military, with state support, and is fully integrated and coed and modern these days, as it should be.

But back in May of 1958 we were not concerned with history. We wanted to survive, and move on with our lives.
We were living in post-war world where right and wrong were clearly laid out by our parents, adolescent boys talked about sex but knew nothing about it, and television was not allowed. All white. All male. All straight, so far as anyone knew.
We all expected to serve in the military, so most of us volunteered when the time came.
We all smoked and cussed with competence and wore crew cuts. Very simple.

We attended classes six days a week, were restricted to our rooms and desks six nights a week as "study time," and were not allowed to leave campus except for Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday afternoon. We marched to church services on Sunday (there was a Jewish exemption -- those students were driven to temple in the city of Selma on Saturdays-- a popular religious choice), and were allowed to go to church on Sunday nights if our grades were good enough.
There was one movie theater, one pool hall and one cafe and a Baptist girl's college (not "women's college") for entertainment.

No cards. No booze. No drugs. No sex.

We couldn't wait to move on to a real college.

It wasn't all work, of course.
Every year we would load up the band and drill team on the school's aging bus and go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for several days. We always made it on time to the big Rex parade every year, but more than one cadet was sidetracked briefly by the B Girls on Canal Street. If you were tall enough to put money on the bar, you were welcome. Almost all of us discovered we could actually drink all night and march in a long parade in the next day's heat. Being New Orleans, sympathetic parade watchers would hand us a cold beer once in a while as we marched by.
We even learned the location of the jail nearest the French Quarter, which appropriately enough, was on Basin Street.
It was all quite educational.

No one was ever brutalized or murdered or raped while I was there at school. Most cadets adjusted pretty well no matter what our reasons for attending.

No matter who you were you had to make good grades, or you were gone. And if you seriously broke the rules more than once, you were gone.

I got caught gambling once (just as I won my first big pot at the poker table) and spent several hours of graduation weekend marching around a square -- we called it "penalty tours" -- with full combat gear on and a rifle in the 90 degree heat.
But I survived, it only happened once, and I graduated on time.
That weekend a group of us, including some liberated female students from the Baptist college, managed to sneak off to a cocktail lounge 30 miles away (Marion was in a "dry" county) for a night of breaking the rules.

On graduation Sunday approximately 50 of us sharply polished red-eyed 17 and 18-year-olds marched up to the stage set up on the lawn near the campus snack bar in our "summer" khaki uniforms and accepted diplomas, along with an earnest speech to go out and change the world for the better.

Few of the class of 1958 have changed the world at all. Several died trying in Viet Nam.

We all tried to do our best, I am sure, but the long-term impact will have to be measured later, and so far it doesn't look like the class of 1958 will make many history books.

Most of us went on to graduate from four-year colleges. Most went into the military, as volunteers in the 1960s.

Most of us survived.

---

My memories of that particular graduation day details are still a bit fuzzy.

There's a picture somewhere taken on the lawn of the only Marion motel where my family stayed. My older sister, my biggest booster, wore a gigantic floppy pink hat to match her pink outfit and smile; my mother and stepfather dressed up appropriately for the solemn occasion; and my new brother-in-law, grinning because he skipped all the parades and stuff and stayed at the motel to drink beer and play pop music on my Stromberg-Carlson hi fi.
My aunt showed up with one of her husbands or boyfriends, and let me drive her 1956 Chevrolet Impala sometime during the weekend.
My date for the big graduation dance was a pretty girl from Mobile, my home town at the time. We attended the well-chaperoned dance, which probably ended around 11 p.m. so we could make church and graduation on Sunday.
The band was Johnny Horton, whose one hit was "The Battle of New Orleans," and they were great.
I spent that summer working briefly in construction, then boot camp at Fort Benning, Georgia at the Infantry School, where those of us almost through with ROTC learned how to scrub garbage cans, shoot a rifle and other interesting stuff. I still enjoy camping out.

I am glad I was there, and happily recommend the school to those who are interested -- almost no one I know.

I learned a lot that served me well. I got a decent education. College was never really hard after that, and the discipline didn't hurt.

And I can still take apart and reassemble a 30 caliber machine gun with a blindfold on if needed. Fortunately, there's not a lot of call for that these days.



Note: I'm not going back for the reunion. Too much to do right here.

Mexico photo album

Best-looking toilet I've ever seen - at Mario's....


The bed's a bit firm, but looks great...





Pat's on the front porch, actually a palapa....


Sanders at El Gerasil having morning coffee and a bun... by the jardin...


LaManzanilla, a fishing village still. Looking north along Tenacatita Bay...


Two men fishing at sunset in a tiny boat off LaManzanilla...


The cathedral at Cihuatlan, just south of where we stayed...


Sanders and Michael beach-walking near Arroyo Seco.....


Where the river meets the bay at La Manzanilla...


Tourists meet the vendors at Tenacatita Beach....

Sustainability: geography and history

Local food -- Papaya -- comes from the tree in the yard in Mexico...

Camp Connell, Ca -- While we in the United States struggle to adapt new
technologies to survive what many fear will be a major economic
collapse, there are two places I visited recently which were far better
prepared than we are for hard times.
One place was historical, the other geographical.

I was in Mexico, our "Third World" neighbor to the
south. Yep. The same place people leave seeking opportunities in the
U.S., just in case you like a little irony.
I was struck by the similarities between the way the Mexican people live
today, and the way we lived in the U.S. a few generations ago.
That prompted a memory/historical visit to my grandparents.

Maybe if we open our eyes and minds to our past and our neighbors to we might actually improve the planet.
----
Up here in the Sierra Nevada we are swept up in the effort
to become part of what is popularly called a "sustainable culture."
I know. This is California and we are expected to be trendy.
But that does not make the current efforts any less sincere, or less important.
We humans will either find a way to adapt to our planet in better ways, or we will choke life off the surface.
Despite the Luddites among us who deny we have a problem -- our president
acting as "chief denier" -- it only takes a quick look around to see
where we are heading.

We are using up the world's fossil fuel
supplies, fouling the air beyond belief at the same time, and wasting
our fouling basic resources like water.

Our food supply is
endangered by forces we have turned loose without understanding, from
patents on seeds to tax benefits for corporations to grow crops we
don't really need.
One potential agricultural disaster is the declining world population of bees, upon whom we depend
for most of our food supplies. If they die, food supplies shrink.
Sea life is 90 per cent depleted, and the cycle of life that depends upon clean water
moving from ocean to sky to land to ocean is being strangled by bits of
plastic bags trapped in the ocean and waste from our cities.
It's a bad old joke, but the affluent society has become the effluent society, and we are drowning in it.

As people accept these as serious concerns, and as my
generation accepts a larger share of the responsibility for creating the
problems, the effort to reduce our impact is gaining strength.
We've begun to learn:
-- Eating local food is healthier for us, and the planet;
-- Electricity as we use it is a luxury item, not a necessity, and solar
power is a realistic option for much of the world's energy needs;
-- Walking beats riding, and riding on shared transportation is more efficient;
-- Those of us who live near the sea have a close-by food supply that is
inexpensive, and healthier than corn-and-manure-fed beef;
-- And pesticides and herbicides are extremely dangerous, and not always necessary for health or food production.

Our ancestors knew this stuff.

My grandparents and great-grandparents lived closer to the land and created far less planet survival problems than we have.

When an economic recession staggered the economy a hundred or more years
ago, people did without luxury items, and more important, met many of
their basic needs on their own.
A much higher percentage of the population lived on farms, Even those who live in the cities kept chickens for eggs and occasional dinner meat, and had a milk cow in a
shed on the property.

The Barry family home in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1800s...

My grandmother lived in a city, and the
photograph of her family gathered on the front steps 100 years ago
shows the garden was part of their daily life. As a boy my father would go help pick his dinner from
their yard.
It's paved over now, more room for cars to park.
During my childhood most city people gave up gardens, except during war time,
but the produce man still came around in a truck direct from his farm. Fresh
vegetables were always available from a local supplier.
The mass migration off the farms and into modern cities guaranteed us a new
vulnerability to economic depression. In modern America when someone
loses their job, or the factory closes down, they don't supplement
their food supply with a garden. They get food stamps, if they are
lucky.
We traded one kind of sustainable culture for modern
appliances, convenience, and mechanized world where cash replaced
barter (and the rich get richer).
---
Also, now consider Mexico today.
Life in a village seems a lot like the life led by my grandparents' generation.
People don't talk about recycling much in Mexico, any more than my grandparents did, but they live it.
Little is thrown away.
If an appliance breaks, someone has the skill to fix it for far less than
the cost of a new one. Old cars are kept running through generations of
owners. Old houses, torn down, find their usable parts hauled off to be
reused somewhere else.
People can't afford to be wasteful.

Shoes are not just made here in the town of Huerta, they are repaired rather than thrown away...

It is not idealizing poverty to recognize that their priorities start with
needs, but in the U.S. we worry a lot more about what we want rather
than what we need.
Of course, many Mexican village people are poor. They don't have a lot of flat-screened television sets, and
I didn't see a single Hummer rolling down the street. But they manage much better than we do on a lot less.
I met a family of three that lives far below our poverty line. Because they
live in a small village where community counts for something, they have
found a place to live in a very small house that meets their needs. It
was not clear to me whether they pay rent, or live there for free. The
house was empty and it is entirely possible that
someone who knew about it simply encouraged them to move in, and the
owner either wasn't around or was glad to have someone take care of his
property. It happens in a community where people watch out for each
other, and family members still live near each other.
In another village a friend of mine bought some commercial property that included
a small decrepit house. A man living there heard through neighbors
that the place had been sold, and moved on. There was no dispute, no
eviction, and no conflict. It was simply no longer available for his use.
My temporary Mexican neighbors don't have room for a garden,
but have skills despite some physical limitations (not handicaps). The
entire family cooks, and they prepare fancy food treats and take them
downtown to sell, generating cash. They set up a table in front of an
abandoned store on main street, and established their business. People
like their treats, so they buy them. The economy works.
The mother knows a local realtor through a family
member, and helps clean rental units on the beach. They also take in laundry from the neighbors. To do the laundry they rent a washing machine for fifty pesos (about $4.50) a day. She
can make that much off of one lazy tourist, like me, and the rest is
her profit.
I know they are poor, but I also know that they are members of the community in good
standing, contributors to village life, and responsible for themselves.
They are living and working in a sustainable culture.

Mexican construction workers, on a break, designed
and made a tool to pick fresh papaya from a tree near the work site.
The papaya was going to waste until they spotted it, got permission,
and retrieved it for lunch.
There are some other aspect of Mexican life I find appealing.
If there is a hole in the sidewalk, people have enough sense to walk
around it. You assume responsibility for your own safety. If you trip,
it is because you didn't look where you were going.
You can walk in the street, but it is up to you to get out of the way if a truck comes along.
If a restaurant sells bad food the health department does not descend with
warrants and shut them down. The place closes because no one will go
there any more.
Few people sue over disputes in Mexico, because the
loser may go immediately to jail. You have to consider whether that
would really help you get the other fellow to pay his bill, or maybe
you should work it out directly.
If something breaks, you fix it, or find someone who can.
Ride sharing on a bicycle is normal, as is carrying three or four people on
a low-cost motor scooter. Walking is the most popular mode of transport.

I recall all the jokes I heard over the years about abandoned car
bodies in the yards of rural homes in my native South. I even made a few jokes myself
about an uncle in North Georgia who had a mix of cars, trucks and even
a road grader sitting in the weeds.
But he never had to go look for parts. And he could fix anything.
The old road grader worked, which he proudly demonstrated one summer, and he
sold a rusty Model T truck in the shed to a collector for a lot of
money.
He wasn't a redneck hillbilly people joke about.
He was a pioneer recycler.

Maybe we need to go back to history class, and study our geographical neighbors lifestyle.