The events described in this story took place during the winter months of 1967 or 1968, probably during the Christmas break. A college buddy and I decided to take a trip to the desert to see if we could find the gold described in my father’s lost gold mine story dating from the time of the Great Depression. While we were mainly interested in finding a large cache of gold and getting rich, we were also very aware of many “stories of power” associated with the uninhabited desert regions of the western United States. The destination for our trip further enhanced the feeling of mystery and power because in addition to stories of gold, it has many ancient rock art drawings called petroglyphs on hundreds of rocks in the area. I have always been drawn to these examples of art, finding them to be totally inscrutable, but clearly of great importance to the artist. The origins of the petroglyphs are completely unknown other than that they are extremely old (possibly several thousand years old). According to the local natives in the area, they were created by “the ancient ones” for some unknown purpose. The mystery and intrigue of the area was very much evident to my friend and me as we set up camp and proceeded to search for the lost gold.
My father’s “lost gold mine story” started on a summer day in the early 1930’s. My father worked as a waiter for a “poor farm” in Marin County, California. One morning my father’s friend, the cook, got a call from the hospital in San Francisco informing him that his elderly uncle was dying and wanted to see him. Since the hospital was only about 30 miles away, the two of them went to see the dying uncle. It turned out that the old man had a story about a lost gold mine that he wanted to pass on before he died.
The story, as I recall it, is that the uncle and his partner had been prospecting along the Whipple Mountains next to the Colorado River, approximately 40 miles south of Needles and a little north of Vidal Junction. When the days started to heat up at the approach of the hot summer months, the two prospectors packed up their mules and wagon and headed toward the coast a couple hundred miles to the west. After traveling for a couple of days they headed due west up a wash toward the some mountain peaks when their water barrel fell off of their wagon and broke. This put them into a bit a fix because it had already gotten too hot to travel in the desert without water and it was too far to go back to the river. They continued up the narrow wash (dry creek bed) hoping to find water, when they came upon a fresh water spring shaded by desert palm trees. They named it “Two Palm Springs” because of these trees. That solved their immediate problem, but since they no longer had a barrel, it didn’t solve the larger problem of getting out of the desert. They decided to take short trips into the desert hoping to find the next source of water. While doing that, they came upon an area that was covered with geodes (round rocks with a hollow, crystal lined center). The area had so many of them that it made it difficult to walk. Past that they spotted a rock arch. Under the arch they found gold! Somehow, the uncle’s partner died and was buried on a small ledge near the spring. The uncle managed to get across the desert to the ocean, but didn’t ever get back to the gold. Sometime later he became sick and ended up in the hospital, where my father met him and heard the story. Shortly after my father and his friend visited the uncle, the old man died. So, being young men in the middle of the Great Depression, the two of them jumped into my dad’s car and headed to the desert in search of gold.
They drove to Needles, turned south on the road toward Vidal Junction, spotted the mountain peaks as described by the old man, took a trail west toward the peaks, went up the wash, and found the spring, with a cross marking a grave behind the spring. They figured that with this much of the story being true, they were almost rich! However, the story didn’t have enough details to help them take the next step. They spent a few days hiking through the barren, rocky, mountains looking for the mine, but were not successful. They did find signs of early man in the form of broken pottery near the spring and dozens of enigmatic petroglyphs pecked into rocks a few miles to the west on the far side of the mountain. More interestingly, they climbed up a cliff going to the top of a mesa and partway up came to a ledge with a cave behind it. There were desert sheep horns on the ledge. They went into the cave, but had no lights so couldn’t go very far because it was too dark.
They spent a week or so searching for the gold without success. Since this was the middle of summer and extremely hot, the two green horns got smart and high tailed it back home where my father’s fiancée (my mother) was waiting. Following that brief excursion to the desert, my dad got married, had kids, and was unable to return until twenty or so years later when I was about seven years old.
When I was six or seven, we finally made a return trip, and then made it a family tradition to take week long trips during the cool seasons of Christmas or Easter vacation to search for the lost gold. We never found gold (or the cave), but we found a lot of other interesting things. We found many signs of early man, found what my father called an early Spanish mine that looked like a rectangular hole in the ground to me, but it did appear to be man-made. After a few years of exploring the area, my father contacted the Museum of Man in San Diego concerning the artifacts that we had found. The curator, Dr. Davies, of the museum joined us on a few of our winter vacations. Dr. Davies was very impressed and excited with the things that we had found because archeologists had never found such artifacts in that part of the desert. Our discoveries filled in a blank in the archeology maps.
During the fall of 1967 I had been telling my college friend stories about the desert and the lost gold mine. When Christmas break came, we took his VW bus, his beagle dog “Amigo,” and headed south to check it out.
We took the highway south of Needles, finally finding the unmarked turn-off to the peaks. We followed the rough dirt track across the flat desert floor to the head of the canyon leading to Two Palm Springs. That was our first major decision point because the wash was rocky with a very sandy bottom. I had always used a four-wheel drive vehicle for this road. All we had this time was the two-wheel drive bus. We were faced with the possibility of being stuck in the sand many miles from civilization. Being young college kids, instead of pondering the possible results we just drove right on in – it all worked out just fine. We drove a couple of miles up the wash to the end of the road and set up camp close to the springs. I was amazed at how well that bus did in the rough and rugged desert country. It seemed that if a jeep could make it, so could the bus.
The springs were in good shape, and full of clear water. There had recently been a fire that had burned several of the palm trees, allowing more water than usual to fill the small pond. Someone had hauled in some galvanized pipe as if they were going to “improve” the spring, but had done nothing other than carry the pipe to the area. There was much evidence of animals using this spring, including big horned desert sheep that live on the steep hills in the area.
While exploring a rocky canyon below the springs we came upon old, rusted barrel hoops. When I saw them I recalled that my father’s story included a discussion that the original prospector’s barrel of water had fallen from their wagon and broken to pieces. When I saw these metal hoops sticking out of the sand and rocks in the river bottom I got pretty excited because they might be the hoops from the prospectors’ broken barrel, and that I was finally finding physical evidence to support the old prospector’s story.
I told my friend that my family had thoroughly explored much of the country to the south of the springs, we should concentrate our efforts searching to the north. After walking a short distance, we came upon an area covered with small, two to three inch diameter geodes. There were hundreds, and possibly thousands, of them littering the surface of a small rolling hill. This got me pretty excited because afield of geodes was another element in my father’s story. Previously, my father had expressed his opinion that since we had never found them, the geodes must have been part of a myth and weren’t an important element of the description on how to find the gold. I think my father had begun to doubt the entire story by then because of all of the years that we scoured the desert looking for clues and finding none. Now we had found the field of geodes, adding a bit more credibility to the original story.
My father’s story indicted that after passing through the bed of geodes we should see an arch. We started searching for an arch on the cliffs, wondered what type of arch we were looking for. One type of arch has a clear space under it that you can see through to the sky beyond. Another type of arch is a place on surface of a cliff, looking a bit like a relief of an arch carved on a rock wall. I had no idea which type of arch we might be looking for until we turned a corner and saw an arch very near the top of a high (3,000 foot or so) cliff-like mountain to our right. The blue sky was clearly visible though the arch from where we stood.
We were getting pretty excited by now. The next task was to decide what was meant by “under the arch.” The most obvious answer was inside of the arch itself, directly under the arching rocks. That meant a difficult climb up a steep and rugged, bolder strewn mountain. The mountains in this area are just bare rocks with very little vegetation beyond a bit of grass here and there with a few small shrubs living in between the boulders and rocks. We headed up the mountain and finally got to the top, slowly working our way over to the arch.
The arch turned out to be about eight feet wide and about six feet tall at the highest part. It was made from a brown colored, volcanic material. There was nothing under the arch except for a flat rocky surface. We looked around for awhile, but could find nothing that indicated the presence of gold or any other unusual substance. However, while we found no gold, the view from up there was magnificent! You could see across the hazy blue desert to the Whipple Mountains and the Colorado River to the east, the entire layout of the southern portion of the mountain ridge, and the great flat valleys surrounding the barren mountains.
We sat down to enjoy the view. I became transfixed. Not just a little transfixed, but totally and completely transfixed – I slid into a trance that lasted for what might have been minutes, or hours; I have no way of knowing. My mind just stopped functioning as we sat and sat, staring at nothing in particular. I had stopped talking, stopped moving, and stopped thinking!
After a very long time my mind slowly formed a tiny thought that not only had I stopped thinking, I could not move. I was stuck on the top of the mountain, under the arch. With considerable difficulty I managed to speak enough to my friend to ask what he was experiencing. He slowly spoke as if from a great distance that he had stopped thinking and could not move. Awakening from this very odd, and frightening situation we both jumped up and started running down the mountainside to get out of that “haunted” place. The hill that we ran down was more of a cliff than a hill, strewn with giant boulders and other dangers. However, neither of us took heed of the danger; we just ran as fast as we could, jumping from rock to rock – hoping that we wouldn’t slip or knock a large rock loose to crush us on the way down. We finally made it to the bottom, and after catching our breaths decided that we would avoid that place in the future.
I have never experienced a place with so much power that felt like it could suck me entirely into it. I felt that I was caught completely; my entire being was under its spell. Since then I have returned to the arch one more time out of curiosity and found nothing unusual, just a bunch of brown colored rocks. It seems to have been both a time and a place that was important.
I still have a question about what is meant by “under the arch.” From up on the hill, all of the mountain below us could be considered “under” the arch since they are all below the arch. I have spent many hours looking in this area along the gravely wash, but have found nothing. Not only do I not know what was meant by “under the arch,” but I have no clue about the form of the gold. Is it ore? Is it placer gold mixed with small particles in sand? Does it consist of chunks of gold? Is it a lost Spanish treasure? As far as I know, the gold is still in “them thar hills.”
I told my father about this new find, and that of course sparked another trip to the desert. This time he took along a friend of his from where he worked. We found the geodes again, and went back to the arch, but found no gold. Sometime later his friend returned with a truck and picked up all of the geodes (his form of “gold” since they were worth about a dollar each). He picked them all up, and the next time I was there that landmark was completely gone.
I have been reading (too many) right-wing materials in an attempt to understand where they are coming from. Obviously, there is no “one” point of view, but there are a few things that seem to be common. Some things that keep coming up are calls for “smaller government”, “fewer regulations”, and “elimination of taxes”. Mixed in with that are a bunch of other topics including such things as “include (Christian) religion in all government activities”, “provide government funding to private schools, and “outlaw abortions.”
It is my observation that in most cases the folks on the right don’t really mean what they are saying. For example, they would like to eliminate environmental regulations so that they can take freely from “the commons” without having to worry about spoiling the neighbor’s environment (in the broad sense of every being a neighbor). However, this is only desirable if there are sufficient regulations to prevent a company from trashing their neighborhood. It is one thing to be able to poison a river down stream from your operation, but it is entirely a different thing to have your water supply poisoned and “your” fish killed by someone else. It is one thing to be able to pump unlimited amounts of water to irrigate your crops, but an entirely different thing when neighbors pump the water out of “your” (shared) aquifer so that your crops die. This sort of logic expands to almost everything. When they want protection, they want government. When they want to take as much as they can for as little as they can, they don’t want government. Let me do whatever I want, but protect me from what others do to harm me.
This expands to other areas, such as health care. Many agricultural families and rural folks don’t want government funded health care (Obama care?) because they don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s health care, and frequently they don’t need it because their wife works for the government (State, university, local government, etc.) which provides the family with free health care. This isn’t just happening in the rural areas, it happens everywhere including folks that work for a large corporation that pays the insurance bill. I understand this, sort of. However, the reality is that there are many, many people who do not work for the government or large corporations and therefore don’t get free health care. These people can’t afford insurance, so they don’t get it. Besides, even if you could afford the insurance, why buy it? – if I need medical care the government will always provide it for free. Instead they put off health maintenance (preventative care), and get their health care from emergency rooms. This ends up costing the tax payers (including those opposed to government supported insurance) many times as much as it would cost to take care of their health care. If you just look at costs and dollars, it is vastly less expensive for everyone to have a centralized payment scheme along the lines of Obama Care. It is not only less expensive for the “society everyone”, it is also less expensive for each “individual everyone.”
I think almost all of us want a clean/safe environment, high quality inexpensive health care, excellent schools, good roads, etc. Not only that, but I think everyone knows that it costs something to get these things, and everyone knows that it requires an effective government to manage it. There are some things that we might not agree upon, such as outlawing abortion. But even those aren’t so clear cut. In the 1950’s and 1960’s when abortion was outlawed, there was a really high number of young ladies that were killed and/or severely injured from amateur abortions. Many young ladies crossed the boarders to Mexico or other countries seeking abortions, which often ended in catastrophe. It got so bad that the public finally rose up and demanded that the laws be changed so that women had an opportunity to get safe abortions instead of dying from the botched attempts. The idea was that it was far better to provide for rare, but safe, abortions than to continue on the path that was created by outlawing the practice. It was a pragmatic approach to a serious and deadly problem that had become common in the “middle class” (“white”) homes across the nation. It is important to note that nobody was mandating abortions, nobody was forced to do anything against their will or their religion. The current push to outlaw abortions isn’t with making people do anything that they don’t want to do, it is about making other people do things that the other doesn’t want to do. The laws allowing for safe abortions also didn’t (and don’t) result in more abortions than were being performed illegally, it merely reduced the amount of harm being done to the women.
In summary, I think we are all pretty much in agreement about what we want in our Country. We want a balance between “unfettered freedom” and protection from what happens with unfettered freedom. We want everyone to pay their own way as best as they can, and we want to minimize the costs of supporting those that can’t.
A common thread that I keep finding in my research into right-wing literature is a complaint that the “liberals” are at fault because they have failed to stop the right wing folks from destroying things. For example, I commonly see descriptions of devastating pollution events (spills into rivers, screwed up wells, etc) as being a failure of “the government” and “the liberals” from stopping the “conservatives” (not conservationists) from creating these spills. They realize that the perpetrator of the spill was trying to save money and therefore just dumped into the environment. That is apparently their right to do. However, the liberals are at fault because either the liberals (or nasty “environmentalists”) failed to stop them from doing that, or more damningly, they failed to clean up the mess before it impacted the community because there was insufficient resources to do the cleanup.
An interesting example are the large open gold mines in the desert run by large corporations to extract gold cheaply as possible. They mound up huge piles of “ore”, sprinkle it with a cyanide laced water system that dissolves the gold. The cyanide/gold solution is stored in large open ponds. All this just happens to be on some of the main migratory bird flyways and a surprise to all, the birds land in the ponds and dye. That is just dead birds, no problem. But of course the water also seeps into the ground water and poisons the local wells along the way. Eventually the mine runs out and the company leaves, leaving the process of cleaning up their mess to the government (taxpayers) for decades into the future. I don’t think “conservatives” want this sort of thing to happen, but it seems to be the “duty” of industry to try to move as much of the costs of their actions into the public domain as possible so that the public picks up the costs of the damage that they do, instead of the industry. That approach is much more profitable than preventing the problems in the first place. It happens with roads and infrastructure in new subdivisions, it happens in oil drilling and fracking, it happens in the lumber industry, chemical industries, agriculture, semiconductor industry, etc. , etc. It seems that everywhere you look “industry” tries to get all that they can, leaving the cost of the damage created to the public to pay.
This brings me to the point of the story. The “right wing” folks want the same things as the “left wing” folks. However, they seem to believe that it is their “right” (maybe “obligation”) to push as hard as possible to do it anyway they want to increase profits by taking as much from “the commons” (resources owned and shared by everyone) as possible. They can do this because they are confident that the other side will do everything that they can to prevent them from damaging the commons. It is like a giant game of tug-of-war, with the right trying to take as much as they can, and the left trying to protect as much as they can. This might result in some sort of dynamic equilibrium, but at great cost to the environment and the public good. The balance of power is with on the right because that is where most of the money is concentrated.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to perform an “experiment” where instead of deciding what sort of “freedoms” and “taxes” we want to struggle over, we talk to each other to figure out what we jointly want and what they should be like. For example, do we want good schools for our children? If so, what does that mean? What would “good” look like? Perhaps we can come to an agreement about that – if so, maybe we could then figure out how to do it – together. Another example might be about what we want for our environment, and what does that look like? Then maybe we can figure out together how to get that done.
Some perhaps thornier problems involve “freedom” of beliefs (including religious beliefs). If I understand it properly, freedom to have your own religious beliefs was a big deal at the beginning of this Country. Does freedom to have your own religious beliefs mean that only if your religious beliefs happen to be the same as mine, or does it mean we each get to have that right – even though I am a Buddhist and your are a Hindu (or whatever)? It is my opinion that it applies to each person’s beliefs – and that we don’t “shame” or otherwise force otherwise to practice their beliefs when they don’t align with mine. Apparently this is a complicated and important issue for many – I don’t exactly know why, but it sure gets a lot of angry confrontations. We keep hearing that this is a “Christian Country” based upon what I don’t know about. As far as I can determine, we are a Country that was created upon the proposition that we are free to believe in whatever religion we want (but the practice of the religion needs to conform with the laws of the land). I don’t understand why we can’t be agnostic in public places, and religious in private ones. Maybe we can come of mutually agreeable definitions of a few terms, perhaps “God” would be one that is agree to mean whatever you want it to me, either a big guy in white robes, or “energy”, “the great unknown”, or whatever form applies to a wide variety of religions, included none in which case maybe it just means something like “everything.” But even that should be easily negotiable because I think everyone’s desire is to be allowed to have whatever beliefs work them them, and to practice without interference (as long as that practice isn’t causing harm to anyone or anything thing). The sticky point seems to be when one person wants to force another person to pay attention to their belief. What to do about Christmas? I think it is Santa Claus (no-religion) with private additions as suitable – I see no reason to object to anyone’s displaying important things, as long as they are done so as a matter of personal belief and not the Country’s (Government’s) belief. We should be able to agree upon symbols that are acceptable to all.
What would happen if we decided to work together to find the best approach for understanding and achieving the “common good?” Are we strong enough to do that? Are we compassionate enough? Do we have the energy to do it? Are we civilized enough? Can we talk to neighbors with curiosity, wondering what it is important to them and curious about what is really important to ourselves? Can we share, compromise and find common ground? Once we do that, can we find ways to accept, and deal with, those areas that really are differences?
I have been wondering what the implications of a declining birth rate might be for a country such as the USA (or the world). The world birthrate in 1950 was almost 35 births per 1000 people, today it is a bit under 18 per 1000 (it is about 12.5 in the USA) – a 50% decrease since 1950! In 1950 there were about 2.5 billion people in the world, today there is about 8 billion – and increasing rapidly. In the USA, the population went from about 150 million to about 330 million people in the same time period, with a projection of around 450 million by 2100. Obviously, there is not an immediate “risk” of a decreasing population in the world, or the USA, any time soon. That doesn’t mean that the growth will continue everywhere during that time. For example, Japan’s population peaked at 128 million in 2008, now it is about 126 million and is projected to be about 105 million in 30 years. In that means that they will have about 12 million excess housing units, millions of empty class rooms, and untold numbers of empty hospitals. There are many countries around the world that are, or will be, experiencing significant overall population decreases, at the same time that they will be experiencing vastly reduced birthrates leading to a major shift in the age distribution within the country.
While there is little “danger” of running out of people any time soon. However, “local” changes can result in major problems. One obvious issue is that while average birthrates are decreasing in countries, it does not decrease uniformly across ethnic, age or society groups. Therefore, some groups will grow in percentage of the population while others are reduced. This is bound to have a very stabilizing influence on “the balance of power” within countries – creating fear and hope (depending upon who you ask). For people in groups that maintain low birthrates, it will feel like an “invasion” by groups that maintain high average birth rates.
Looking into the future “crystal ball” of countries such as the USA, it appears that while the population will continue to increase for many decades, the available work force will change radically. The highly trained and experienced people will “retire” (but not die), resulting in a workforce that is much younger, less trained (and smaller because many of the productive people will be removed from the workforce due to old age and retirement). We hear about the growing problem of the smaller number of youths having to support the growing number of oldsters, both in terms of “retirement” dollars, but also food and other material things. My guess is that this will be manageable for the current cohort of old folks because many, or perhaps most, were able to plan for their “golden years”, but it might become a problem for later generations that don’t have the excess resources required for such planning.
As populations decrease there will be a decrease in things like housing needs, which will result in reduced home values instead of the “normal” annual increase. It is likely to also end up with a lot of vacant homes and office buildings. Perhaps this will reduce housing costs enough to take care of our current homeless crisis. A negative population growth curve will result in fewer people to fill jobs, perhaps increasing wages because labor becomes a scarcity rather than a glut. For awhile, housing will become a glut, rather than a scarcity making housing more affordable, but also removing the profit incentives for building and maintaining property. This is likely to result in vast numbers of abandoned buildings. Maybe building demolition jobs will replace building construction jobs? Other odd things will happen such as sewer systems will fail to function because of insufficient water flow, requiring the replacement of sewer infrastructure. Power grids will need to be revised to meet the new demographics. Highways will become under utilized so instead of a continued need for more and bigger highway systems (funding highway construction projects), simple maintenance will be sufficient. Fewer houses being built will result in less logging, and therefore the failure of the economies of many rural communities that depend upon logging as the source of good paying jobs. Oil will once again become a glut on the market as demand decreases.
The change from an economy based upon continued growth to one that experiences continued shrinkage will be dramatic and pervasive. Almost every industry that depends upon supplying the needs of the population will face a future of decreasing, rather then increasing, profits. Investment opportunities will be harder to find, and will likely return a much smaller return on investment. Taxes on profits will decrease, resulting in a much leaner government, perhaps so much leaner that they will find it extremely difficult to maintain the minimum necessary level of service.
But it is not all doom and gloom – there will be lots of benefits in terms of a cleaner environment, less pressure on the natural resources, the potential for far better paying jobs for those that are available to serve the job markets, and many other things. My remembrance of a USA with a half of the current population was that it was pretty nice. We were not “short on people,” we had all that we needed. There was not so much crime, very little (or no) homeless problems, not so much crowding everywhere, much prettier parks, plenty of job opportunities for the young people, much better schools and a lot more. Some of this was the result of fewer people, but some was the result of a rapid growth curve coupled with an economic system that was designed to thrive during growth creating funding. For example, if you purchased a house at the top of what you could afford, within just a few years wages grew so that the percentage of income devoted to housing was reduced to almost being a nominal amount. It was easy to “bet” on the future because the future was always increasing, making the effective cost of investments such as property decrease rapidly. This will probably not be the situation in a economy based upon shrinking populations and therefore shrinking markets.
I think we are in for some interesting times, or at least my children and grandchildren will see them. I think it is best to figure out what is likely to happen, and begin the process of educating people about what to expect so that they can understand it as an inevitable result of dialing back the population rather than thinking that what they are experiencing is the fault of the government, or because some group is trying to invade in a silent war or some sort. These changes, and many more, WILL occur as we readjust to better fit our population that the world can sustain. The end result will be MUCH better, but the path to getting there from here will be treacherous and difficult. It is pretty clear that the population of the earth will decrease because we are operating above the carrying capacity of the earth. The question is whether we just keep going until it collapses on its own (with all of the horrible consequences that we create), or do we try to manage the decrease in ways that get better over time rather than much worse. It is a choice, but one that we might not be capable of making given the political and social unrest that has been happening in the USA over the past decade or two.
In California the second half of the 1960’s were times of free-love, free-spirits, war protests, and psychedelics- especially LSD. As a physics student in college, I didn’t have the time or inclination to become deeply involved in the emerging “drug culture” – but there was something intriguing about the stories of LSD induced hallucinations. By the time of the events described in this story I had read Carlos Castaneda’s first book, “A Separate Reality,” and was very curious about his claims of experiencing and encountering an actual parallel reality. I didn’t have access to the plants that Castaneda used as the gateway to his experiences, but at the time high quality LSD seemed to have similar results and was readily available. The stories made it sound like LSD might offer a doorway to similar experiences. In the spirit of “scientific experimentation” (and “fun”) a friend of mine and I obtained some samples to see what would happen. What I experienced was so unexpected, and so profound, that I ended up adding it to my growing collection of experiences of the unknown. This event started me on the quest for trying to learn how to see, or observe, the spiritual side of life – but without the use of drugs.
I was about 21 years old, living as a student in Arcata in Northern California. One Friday night, my friend and I decided to try some of the new “acid” (LSD) that was in town. Not being experienced with it, we decided to take an amount that was guaranteed to be “good.” We did that, and then drank a beer while waiting to see what would happen. After an hour or so we decided that nothing was happening, and that our acid must not have been as good as claimed – so we took another hit of the same amount. Since nothing was happening, we decided to walk the mile or so from my house to a college beer bar/dance club called “The Keg” where there would be live music and lots of our friends. To this day I have not decided whether my experiences in the Keg were real, or whether they were just the effects of too much LSD. I have tentatively taken the position that they were both.
We walked through town and chatted as if nothing special was happening, which was the case at that point. When we turned the corner to The Keg, we had to walk next to an old three story brick hotel. Suddenly, the entire building swayed out over the street as if it were made of some sort of soft rubber, then swayed back the other way. My reaction was to duck so the building wouldn’t hit me. Then it dawned on me that the building wasn’t swaying, it was only my visual perceptions that made it appear that way. I looked around to see what other odd things might be happening – but that was all that I could see that looked of the ordinary. I asked my friend what was happening with him, and he described the exact same experience. In fact, we both had to duck when the building came back again. It continued to move with a large vertical wave as we stood and watched.
Since that seemed to be the extent of the experience, we decided to cross the street and get a beer at pub. Upon opening the door we were in for the surprise of our lives! We knew that it was going to be busy since it was a Friday night with a dance band playing rock and roll music. What we weren’t prepared for was a room full of huge fibrous eggs where people should have been. We stopped at the door and talked about the oddity of the thing. I could tell that they were people because I could recognize the image of the people inside of the “eggs,” recognizing friends and others. However, the striking feature was that they were all encompassed inside of large, glowing “cocoons” of energy fibers that extended a couple of feet in all directions from their bodies.
I turned to talk to my friend about it, and was startled to see that he looked the same. We talked about odd phenomena this for some time. I was quite surprised that we were apparently both seeing the same things since our descriptions sounded exactly the same. I was (and am) convinced that we weren’t seeing a hallucination, we were finally actually seeing reality. We decided against getting a beer at that time because it was clear that we really didn’t need one, and it wasn’t at all obvious how we could walk through the crowd because the space was filled with people’s cocoons.
I noticed that I could move my fibers with the same kind of intent that I normally use to move my body parts. I could reach out with a long fiber just like I could reach out with my hand or arm. At that point I realized that I could communicate with others just by using my fibers to connect with the other person’s fibers. As a test, I projected a fiber across the room and touched a girl on the far side of the crowd. She looked over at me and just followed the fiber back until she was standing in front of us talking as if it were the most natural thing to do. My friend had been watching this experiment, and expressed great surprise at the results. The girl soon left us to go dancing, and that allowed us to experiment a bit more.
We found that both of us were capable of this feat, and that we could see each other doing it. It was kind of neat because it made it so easy and fun to draw people over to talk to us. We spent quite a long time with this activity, but finally decided it was time to attempt getting a beer from the bar. It turned out to be easy to walk through the crowd; the cocoons were soft and comfortable to slide between. Upon approaching the bar I was surprised to see a couple of male figures sitting at the bar who didn’t have the cocoons. My friend expressed concern that instead of being fibrous, they were black. I noticed that they were not only black, but that the black was more of a void than a color. They were featureless and the color of the inside of a dark cave – there was no color and no light at all. These men were solid so you couldn’t see through them, but they seemed to absorb all of the light that touched them. At first I was tempted to go up and talk to them, but then realized that they frightened me in an odd way. Not in a way that they would do me bodily harm, but in a way that was more like they would somehow damage my cocoon. My friend and I decided to stay away from those guys. We couldn’t figure out if they were dead, would be dead soon or maybe they were not humans. I don’t know what we were seeing, but they clearly were not the same as the rest of the folks in the bar, and were not something that we cared to play with. We quickly agreed to leave these guys alone; whatever or whoever they were was not our concern.
We spent the rest of that night enjoying the music, enjoying the interactions with the egg people, and basically having a good time. After closing time we walked up to my friend’s house on the hill. Along the way we found that everything was sparkling, and that all of the living things had their own – but unique – cocoons. We finally got to his house in the pre-dawn hours, where I laid back on his couch and watched huge, glistening snakes intertwine with one another where there should have been a ceiling. I found them to be beautiful and in no way frightening. It was not like watching a movie because it was in full 3-D and in the room with me. However it wasn’t at all scary or upsetting because it was clearly just the effects of the drug. I rather enjoyed the show. At this point my friend and I were no longer “connected” and seeing the same thing. He was describing his hallucinations, and I was describing mine, but they were different. Finally the sun came up and things seemed to slowly get back to a version of “normal.”
Experiences of improbable “coincidences” happen to all of us on a regular basis. They have the feeling of being magical or otherworldly, but are they? How improbable does an event, or series of events, have to be before we put it into the realm of the “great unknown?” This story of finding old photographs of my brother is an example where I have to conclude that I just don’t know. It remains a mystery to me.
Experiences of improbable “coincidences” happen to all of us on a regular basis. They have the feeling of being magical or otherworldly, but are they? How improbable does an event, or series of events, have to be before we put it into the realm of the “great unknown?” This story of finding old photographs of my brother is an example where I have to conclude that I just don’t know. It remains a mystery to me.
On a summer night in 1954 my brother was coming home from his grammar school graduation party with a friend in a station wagon driven by his friend’s father. They pulled onto a main two lane road from a side road; the driver of the car on the main road was going too fast, and did not have his headlights turned on; he crashed into the side of the station wagon without applying his brakes or slowing down. This was before the days of seat-belts, and most of the occupants of my brother’s car were thrown out of the windows. My brother’s friend who had been sitting in the back seat with him went through the side window first, and died instantly from a piece of glass though his head. My brother followed him out of the now open hole, and landed on the ground. The dead boy’s mother was killed. The father, who was driving, managed to hold onto the steering wheel and was severely injured but did not die.
My brother had lots of very severe injuries; the most severe one was that his liver was torn in half and almost totally destroyed. He was in the hospital for a long time. He was in the critical care unit, so I couldn’t visit him except to stand in the parking lot below his second floor room and wave to him. It was good to see his face through the window, even though we couldn’t talk – at least I knew that he was alive.
He was still extremely sick for weeks after coming home. I remember that he kept a two pound coffee can next to his bed that he would periodically fill with blood and mucous with a great hacking, body contorting, cough. He couldn’t do much except lay in bed. I would stay and talk to him as long as a seven year old boy could. The memory of his coffee can full of blood and mucus remains vivid to this day.
After a long time his liver finally did that amazing thing that livers can do; it healed and regenerated itself. Then there was the legal action trying to get him some compensation for the events of that night, but with little success. The lawyer wasn’t very aggressive and ended up settling the case for almost no money. I heard the discussions about this, but was too young to understand or care. I had my older brother back, which was all that mattered to me.
About ten years after the accident I was walking around the plaza at our home town of Sonoma. The town has a large square in the center of town which is ringed by old Spanish style buildings containing various stores, restaurants and other establishments. Many of the buildings are separated by narrow alleys leading to courtyards in the back out of sight from the plaza. Most of these courtyards were used as parking lots for the people who worked in the stores.
As I was walking past one of these alleyways, I had a strong desire to go through the alley and explore the back of the building to see what was there. This was not something I had ever done before because I had always felt that the alleys led to private property and were off limits to me. I screwed up my courage and went down an alley to the parking area. There were several 50 gallon garbage cans lined up on one side of the parking lot. I felt compelled to go to them and lifted the top of one of the cans. The can was full of trash, but right on top was a bunch of large, black and white photos. I picked them up to see what they were of, and found that they were a set of nighttime photos of an automobile accident. For no particular reason, I “stole” the photos and took them home.
When I next saw my brother I showed him my find. He immediately recognized the photos; they were photographs of his accident! Over the years I had often heard stories, but this was the first time that I was able to see any photographs or other evidence of the accident. I guess it was just a coincidence, but it was totally out of my normal way of doing things, and it all seemed so “natural” – every action felt like the right thing to do at the time.
This book is focused upon the personal and societal impacts of mass incarceration in the United States. The author’s contention is that the “War on Drugs” has resulted in changes to policing and incarceration so impactful that they have recreated most, or perhaps all, of the evils of the Jim Crow era. In brief, the idea is that putting people in prison for long periods of time ruins the lives of the prisoners while in prison and for also for the rest of their lives, but also their families and ultimately the society as a whole. Alexander does a very good job of putting it all into perspective, including making the case that the negative impacts are mainly to the black and brown communities while the financial rewards are enjoyed mostly by white “middle class” people and businesses.
I found much of the book to be tedious reading because it rehashed the same ground several times, and partly because I am already aware of many (or most) of the problems that she describes. For readers that haven’t thought deeply about these kinds of issues perhaps it remains fresh and interesting. That said, I did find the last chapter to have many very interesting, and new to me, ideas where the author offers some suggestions for a path forward to a future where Jim Crow no longer has a welcome home, and where all castes, or classes, get fair and equitable treatment. One of the interesting ideas that she puts forward is that perhaps the way we are currently implementing “civil rights” has become more of the problem than a solution. Maybe the idea of being “color blind” is the wrong way to look at the problems and the solutions. The problem with being color blind is that it changes the focus from “fixing” the entire system (including solutions for disadvantaged whites, blacks, and browns) and instead focuses on individuals who make individual mistakes (or choices).
An example is the problem of long term, mass incarceration for drug use. The prevailing narrative is that individuals make poor choices by using drugs, get caught, and are then punished for their evil ways. Another point of view might be that there are societal reasons why some many disadvantaged people use drugs and why so many more of them get arrested and incarcerated than a similar population of “advantaged” people. Maybe the causes both of use, and of the use of prisons to solve so many crime problems, has deeper roots than the badness of individuals.
It is apparent that improvements created by civil rights and individual exceptionalism does not float all boats – it floats a few special cases, but it sinks many more, including whites that are bypassed on the social scale and therefore end up paying the very real costs of things like affirmative-action. I ended up at the end of the book wondering what sort of changes to Society will be required to move to a truly more equitable situation for all. Obviously, we need to figure out how to work together to find a joint solution rather than break up into special enclaves where we are all protecting our part of the pie under the mistaken idea that there it is a zero-sum game where the advancement of one necessarily results in the demotion of another. Continuing on the current path is far too dangerous, and too expensive in terms of tax supported dollars and lost resources.
I attended a rather amazing party celebrating NYE. It was a free zoom based event called “New Year’s Eve.rywhere” hosted by the Co-RealityCollective (CRC). I was notified about the event because I had attended last year’s (2020) virtual Burningman event, spending time in the Sparkleverse. This event was connected to that in some way that I don’t quite understand. Apparently CRC hosts various on-line parties, perhaps in support of good causes, or not. “The” party was not actually a party, it was more of a bunch of marathon party’s held in more or less the same virtual space. There were seven or eight separate “rooms”, each with its own set of hosts and activities. I chose the one that was about new year’s everywhere. It was something like 26 hours long, spending time at each of the time zones to party and ring in the new year at that point in time as “new year” raced at about 1000 miles per hour around the globe (that is about how fast the edge of “dawn” moves in the middle latitudes). The party and celebrations were relatively “tame” by most people’s fantasies of BurningMan. Mostly talking, sharing stories, sharing songs, a little music, and generally friendly times together with strangers from around the world.
Each time zone had local tour guides that usually talked a bit about their location, and a bit more about their local NYE traditions. We learned about food, drinks, costumes, and some interesting traditions such as the first-foot tradition associated with Vikings, good luck, as well as food and drink. The attendees changed as the day went along, peaking at each NYE celebration in one location but then moving on to the next with mostly new people, but also those of us that hung in their and moved with the flow. Old people, children, young folks – they were all represented. Not so many children since it was late at night for those in the time zone.
I found it charming, mildly fun, a little interesting – but it took me awhile to warm up to what became a big epiphany for me. I realized that something important was happening, at least to me. I was watching all of these different people; different accents, different word usage, different cloths, different traditions, different skin color – everything seemed different. That was until it came over me that everyone was just the same when they were “looking out” of their bodies at the world. We all feel the same inside, we all feel the same about what it is like to look our of eyes, to taste things, to feel a little (or a lot) drunk.
I was odd because I have “known” this for as long as I can remember, but I suppose it was an intellectual knowing. Watching the party creep around the world make it very clear that there is something very much the same everywhere. Sure, we all have different ideas, all have different agreements about what is important and true, our minds do all sorts of different things when sorting, storing and interpreting the massive flow of “data” (experiences), but while that is true – there is a common feeling of what it is like to be on the “inside” looking out. I can’t exactly describe what I was experiencing, but it has to do with a visceral understanding that if I were to somehow be “transported” into any of these people it would have felt very much at home. There would be a lot of interesting things to explore, but beyond that I would recognize almost all of it. My Buddhist friends talk about responding to others understanding that they are “just like me.” I knew that, but sitting and watching the flow from place to place brought it home in ways that even traveling around the world hadn’t done.
Before I forget – Happy New Year to you all. I sure hope it is better with regard to sickness and death, financial security and anxiety – but my experience has been that there were many good things that came to me because of the change in pace and a shift in understanding what it is important and what is not. I would like to maintain some of that even after we have moved forward and look back at the time of covid. May you all be healthy, wealthy and wise throughout the coming year.
This story takes place in 1961 or 1962 when I was 14 or 15 years old. It would have been during the cooler months of the year, so it was probably either on a Christmas or Easter break. My mother, father and I had decided to spend a week at our favorite camping place the Turtle Mountains south of Needles. We enjoyed looking for gold, Indian artifacts, and just nosing around in the desert. What we found on this trip was totally unexpected and has remained in my memory as one of those “great unknowns.”
As was normally the case, we got up at about 2:00 am to get a nice early start on a long drive to the desert from our home in Sonoma. This early start would get us into our camping spot in plenty of time to set up camp before dark. On these trips I usually slept in the car until we were about in Bakersfield, waking up in time for breakfast before continuing over the Tehachapi Pass to the Mohave Desert.
The trip through the desert was uneventful, but beautiful as always. I especially liked the part of the desert from Mojave to Needles, passing through old railroad stops in alphabetical order – Amboy, Bagdad, Cadiz, Daggett, Essex, etc. At about 3:00 pm we pulled off the highway onto the faint track across the desert toward Mopa Peaks and “our” campsite next to a small oasis at the foot of North Mopa Peak.
When we got to the beginning of the road into the wash that winds its way up the canyon to the oasis we were stopped by a cable strung across the road. There was a white painted sign hanging in the middle of the cable. The sign said, “Keep out, Government Project in Progress.” The first thing that struck me was that while the lettering was stenciled in black, the paint had run down the sign so that it was really amateurish, not at all like a government sign. If the government does anything right, it is that they make good looking signs. Because of that, we decided that whatever was going on was not related to a government project. In some ways that made it even more perplexing – after all, this is government owned land, nobody has the right to post keep out signs.
My dad decided that the best thing to do was to wait for a bit before going past the blocked off road. We set up camp for the night at a nearby rock wall. When we first started going to the Turtle Mountains the “rock wall” was just a campfire with a couple of piles of rocks to provide a wind break. Over the years we added a few rocks on each trip, and the wall started to get much bigger. Apparently others did the same, and it eventually began to look like the remains of an old cabin. In fact, the BLM show it as the remains of a cabin, but it is actually just a wind break.
We set up camp and in a short time heard a vehicle slowly making its way down the sandy wash toward the sign and our camp. My father and I walked over to the sign to intercept them and find out what was going on, and to find out if we could gain access to the places we had come to explore. Once at the gate, we only had to wait a few minutes until a jeep station wagon with three men in it drove to our location. The driver got out to open the cable gate and stopped to talk to us. The two others stayed in their vehicle. I don’t recall exactly what they were wearing, but they were all dressed appropriately for the desert.
After exchanging hellos with the driver, we told him that we had driven in a couple of hours before and were camping over by the rock wall. The driver said he knew that because they had seen us when they flew over earlier in the day. This was a surprise since we had seen no aircraft, and there was really no place that seemed likely to act as a landing place for an aircraft. We asked what they were doing flying around in that area, and he said they had been working on their spacecraft and were test flying it following some repairs. I asked why they were there in the first place. They said that they were scientists and had been performing a survey of the planet when they developed trouble with their vehicle and were forced to land it to fix the problem. I asked why they had picked this location to work on their spacecraft, and the answer was that they had flown over much of the area and this spot appeared to be the “least contaminated with humans” that they could find.
Once it was clear that this conversation was headed in rather unusual directions, I started to pay a bit more attention to these guys. One of the odd features of the older gentleman sitting in the back seat of the jeep was that he had quite large (actually, very large) ears. This was before the time of Star Trek and Dr. Spock, but there may have been movies with spacemen having large ears. I thought it was kind of comical that these guys who claimed to be spacemen should have such big ears. I then noticed a much more intriguing thing, which was that while I was talking – they weren’t. I could “hear” and understand what they were saying, but it was as thoughts, not as sounds! I was “hearing” them, but their mouths weren’t moving and it felt more like a thought than a sound. This was most unsettling to say the least.
The conversation continued for some time. One of our concerns was to be able to get to the spring to get water because we didn’t bring enough to last the week that we hoped to be there. They showed great revulsion at this idea, saying that there were lots of little wiggly things in the water and that the water was therefore not fit to drink. We tried to explain that since there were things living in the water, that meant that it WAS fit to drink, otherwise the water would not have any life in it. They weren’t convinced at the logic of this. We asked if we could go to the spring to get water, but they said that we were not allowed to enter the valley, and they agreed to bring us water when they came back from town.
The conversation went back and forth in this odd way for awhile, until they finally said good bye and drove away. As they were driving away, my father (who is normally a most level headed guy), turned to me and excitedly asked if I noticed that they weren’t talking, but rather were just exchanging thoughts with us. Now THAT really freaked me out. I had kind of decided that I was just making the thought communication thing up because the topic of the conversation was so odd. However, to have my father bring up the topic meant that if nothing else, it wasn’t just my imagination running wild. If so, his was running wild in the same way. We went back to camp and by the time we got there we were talking a million words a minute telling my mother what had just happened.
We spent the night there by the rock wall, but they never came back so we didn’t get our extra water. The next morning my curiosity got the better of me and I hiked up to the top of a nearby hill in the hopes of getting a view of their space vehicle. However, I couldn’t see anything of interest from that vantage point because of the twists and turns in the valley and I didn’t have the nerve to approach any closer.
We decided to go to the nearby town of Vidal Junction to get breakfast and fill our jeep cans with water. The town was very small, consisting of a California Agriculture inspection station, a small motel, a restaurant, an old fashioned service station and a few houses. I guess the total population was less than 30 people. We went to the restaurant for breakfast. We ordered our meals and when they were served, my father told the waitress that we were camping near Mopa Peaks and asked her if she have any idea about what was going on out there by Mopa Peaks about 30 miles from town. She didn’t answer, but rather finished serving us and then left. In fact, everyone left the restaurant. The other customers got up and left, the waitress left and so did the cook and helper. We were soon by ourselves. When we finished there was nobody to take our money, so my dad just left what seemed about right on the table. We went outside to get water and top up on gasoline, but there was nobody in town to help us. The service station was open, but empty. We went across the street to the inspection station and it was empty. We thought that maybe someone might be at the motel, but when we checked, it was also empty. It appeared that everyone had abandoned the town after my father had asked that question. We finally got some water from a tap at the service station and went back to our camping spot.
We didn’t hear anything more from these self-proclaimed spacemen, but also didn’t go to our favorite spots because the cable and sign were still across the road. The whole thing was weird enough that we didn’t want to push our luck.
We returned the following year to see if they had left any signs of their activities, but could find nothing. That was the end of the story for about forty years until years later when my father and I got to talking about that day. He said that the most unusual part of the whole thing for him was that they were there in a big, fancy, black car that couldn’t possibly be driven in the part of the desert that we were in. He just couldn’t figure out how they got there. Not only that, but he couldn’t figure out why they were wearing suits and ties in the desert!
This was really weird because I remember seeing folks in a jeep and clothes that made good sense in the area. My father recalls experiencing something entirely different. Over the years I have often wondered that if they were really spacemen, how did they get their clothes and the Jeep? Maybe they didn’t have to get anything, maybe they merely allowed us to visualize then in the cloths and a vehicle that we knew about. Maybe they didn’t have to be able to speak English, or have these vehicles; maybe they only had to get us to think.
I guess I will never know what really happened that day, but I will not soon forget it either. The whole thing stands out as a very strange “close encounter” of a weird kind.
A friend of mine sent a link to an interesting article about recent advances in grid scale battery storage. It all sounds like great news since the big drawback on using inherently variable renewable energy such as wind and solar has to do with the inability to store excess production for periods of lower production and brief fluctuations (which is typically only minutes away). The issue is that the grid has to supply exactly as much energy as needed, constantly. The amount of energy needed is called the “load”. The supply has to be varied to match the load because there is no way to control the load, it just happens as people do things. There is enough flexibility in letting the supply voltage vary with the load so that predictions about future needs (in terms of minutes or hours in the future) are sufficient to adjust the output of traditional power plants to keep things running. This is not the situation with variable sources such as wind or solar, these are not under our control. Therefore, the current situation is to level out the supply to match the load using peaker power plants that operate in a way that almost entirely wipes out any advantage of using wind, and most of the advantage of using solar. As odd as it seems, it takes so much extra natural gas to provide the peaking function as wind turbines make. The turbines are big and impressive, but they do very little to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to power the loads attached to the grid.
This situation changes completely if there is sufficient storage to level out the production to match the loads over time. With sufficient storage in place the wind turbines don’t need fossil fuel peaker backup, and hence the use of hydrocarbon fuels can actually decrease. Maybe. The “maybe” part has to do with how the batteries are actually used. They can be used to reduce the number of peaker power plants, or they can be used to shift the time of production with the respect to the time of delivery. For example, wind produced at night when usage is low, and the cost per kw is low, can be time shifted to times of the day when loads are high, and price per kw is high. Using this approach, not much happens to the total amount fossil fuel used, but a LOT happens to the value of the energy being sold to achieve much higher profits for the energy industry. I’m not saying that they would do a thing like that, but it is certainly possible and makes the battery installations perhaps not so “green” as one might think at first.
I have a BIG problem with this approach to solving the energy storage requirement. Going into all of the concerns of this is a book length discussion. I can only touch on the issues in this blog, more study is required to fully understand the issues. The main cause of the problems that I am concerned about is that it is based upon two assumptions, (1) it is not possible to reduce the loads, and (2) large power production and long distance distribution of electricity is the only option available to us. Obviously, both of these assumptions are no longer true. They were basically valid at the time that the current electrical infrastructure was created, in the early 1930’s – but things have changed.
One of the most dramatic changes has been with regard to improved “efficiency” of almost all things powered by electricity. One example is the change in energy required for lighting. A $1.00 100 watt incandescent light can be changed to a $5.00 light that produces the same amount of light while using only 18 watts of electricity using $10.00 florescent lights, then we went to 10 watts with a $5.00 LED bulb, which is likely to soon go back to incandescent lights once again, but this time they will use less than 1 watt and cost less than $1.00. At that point we will have cut the energy for lighting to be only 1% of what it was, and at an installed price that is at or below the starting point. Another opportunity is the energy used to condition buildings, especially small buildings such as homes, small apartments and small businesses. It is currently possible to modify existing homes in California (and most of world) to use less than 1/4 of the energy that they currently do for heating and cooling, while making the building much more comfortable, and at a price that SAVES tens of thousands of dollars over not doing anything. When I first heard of this I was incredulous so I went into the general contractor/engineering business to see if it is true. It turns out that it is, and it is easily done with normal, off-the-shelf, traditional building practices and materials. It just takes a little big of care. For example, I found that I could easily fix an existing house that was in need of a new HVAC unit (because of a failure of the old unit) at a cost that is less than 1/2 the cost of fixing the old system, with a resulting energy use of less than 1/2 of the original – resulting in a much more comfortable building. That means that the new system cut energy use by 1/2 and resulted spending 1/2 as much as would have been the case without the improvements. That is more than “free” to the homeowner- it is making money for nothing. There are many, many examples of where this is possible. Another example was my changing my pool filter pump to a different type that matched the needs of my pool. This simple change, that cost $600 for the new pump replacing my old $600 but failed pump, reduced my $120 a month electricity bill (just to run the filter), to $20 a month. I now us 17% of the power with a savings of about $100 a month. The new pump was “free” because I was replacing the old one because it had failed. However, even if I was replacing a good pump that change paid for itself in 6 months and has been running for over five years, saving me around $6000 in power bills. It is hard to make a return on investment like that in the stock market.
Beyond these kinds of “local” efficiency improvements are the huge efficiency improvements available by eliminating long distance transmission of power from large power plants, whether they are traditional, solar, wind or any other generation. Losses from long distance transmission are in the neighborhood of 50%. This means that if power were to be made “locally” instead of at a distance, the amount of production required to supply the load is reduced by one half. That means we could do with only using 1/2 of the power that we are currently generating. The point is that local production matching local use is much more efficient, and we now have the means to do so with the new technologies of “roof top” solar and local battery storage. The price of solar panels has decreased from $6.00/watt when I purchased my system ten years ago to $0.50/watt (or less) today. Even at the high $6.00/watt price that I paid, my system was paid off in about eight years and now I will get an additional 20 or more years of free power. At today’s rates, my solar system would have been paid off in about 3 to 4 years, and would be a huge “income” source (through reduced energy costs) for all of my retirement years, saving over $100,000 should I be lucky enough to live into my 80’s – which I hope to do.
Coupling local generation with local storage, while being connected to the grid to “share” with other nearby grid loads that can’t be met without using the grid (for example, many industrial usages that require a lot of power on a small footprint), can result in massive reductions in the amount of energy needing to be “wheeled” by the power transmission system with remote large scale power generators. My calculations, based upon California PUC data, shows that changing to locally (on site) produced electricity from solar, coupled with on site storage capable of a few hours of storage, can reduce the State’s utility provided energy budget to the point where no large solar installations are needed, no wind turbines are needed and no fossil fuel power plants are needed. This includes a situation where most vehicles have switched to electricity. If we were to do the many “small things” that are readily available and affordable at the consumer side, we would find that we eliminated almost all of carbon producing sources of power, had done so at a significant savings to the consumer, without requiring subsidies or tax incentives to do so. We would have better operating equipment and buildings, almost zero carbon “foot print” and would have vastly reduced energy costs to the consumers.
If the question is, “are we there yet?” the answer is “yes, but we have to use what is available.” We can do it right now, without adding any extra taxes or any extra expenses, while creating an immediate increase in high paying jobs to do all of the small scale installations required. The utilities would still have a very critical role in maintaining the transmission lines to keep the grid working, and they would continue to operate existing clean energy production, such as the current hydroelectric and nuclear power plants (until they finally wear out). Mainly we just need to switch our point of view about energy production and use from being “utility centric” to “user centric”.