Driving to the oil patch

First two flames, one on each side of the road, like sentinels. Bright, 10 or 100 times brighter than any streetlight and wavering like a living thing. You feel naked and speed past hoping to escape notice.

Then fog. White soup fog so thick you can only see the center yellow dashed line right against your front tire if you squint. So thick you wonder if it will ever let up, if you will never make it out, run off the road or hit another person before you even see them. So thick you almost pull over but think of the danger from passing cars and think surely it can’t last much longer. Right?

Twenty, 30, 40 miles later you are justified and the white soup fades to patches, a veil of gauze on the world. Then it is gone altogether, leaving pitch black. No streetlights in western North Dakota. Then the lights again, bright, sputtering orange lights silhouetting the rolling prairie where there should be no light. Naked again, you speed on.

Sixty miles out the hotels start to speed past, neon light after neon light spelling “NO vacancy.” No vacancy in rural North Dakota, population none.

And then, over a crest, there it is. Mud-covered (from what? There was no mud – unless it was in the air, permeating everything to remind you why you’re really here) and breathless from brushes with death in the form of California, Alaska and Tennessee drivers, you see it. Destination: Oil Patch.

Destination: American Dream?

Haruki Murakami: After the Quake

after the quake by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first Murakami book. Aside from spelling difficulties that meant it took me forever to find it at the library, I really enjoyed it (and it reminded me some of John Cheever’s short stories, though less dark, for no reason I can really explain).

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Famine politics

“There is no end to politicians who pursue, at the cost of all compassion and paying the price of human flesh, their denials, dogmas and ideologies. … In Ethiopia and in many food crises of the present and recent past, it is oppression, war and ‘civic mayhem’ that have been the main reasons for famine mortality.”

I just finished Thomas Keneally’s book “Three Famines,” which documents some history of the Irish potato famine, a WWII-era famine in Burma and more recent famines in the 1970s and 80s in Ethiopia.  In general, the book sort of outlines what I hear from talking with aid workers on the policy level and on the ground in hungry countries; food shortage is a key instigator of famine, but the problem is much, much more complex than just not having enough food to feed people in a country. In some cases, food is even shipped out of a country while people in the country starve because they don’t have enough – I was told this happened in Niger during recent food shortages. And even when there is enough food in the country, lower levels of food reserves drives up prices so the poorest people can’t afford enough to sustain themselves.

This book is rather confusingly organized and poorly written, and missing most citations that would give the author a lot more credibility, but still gives a good look at the politics of famine and the government policies and structures that elevate a food shortage or drought to famine proportions. Keneally provides a good reminder that just pouring money or food into a starving country isn’t necessarily a complete or entirely effective solution to a problem that is much broader than poor crop yield.

 

Germany

Bonn, Germany

On reading

A Nigerien woman demonstrates that she can read and write by writing her name in the sand in Adouna, Niger, Aug. 2010.

He ate and drank the precious words,

His spirit grew robust;

He knew no more that he was poor,

Nor that his frame was dust.

He danced along the dingy days,

And this bequest of wings

Was but a book — What liberty

A loosened spirit brings –

-Emily Dickinson

Book love

I started unpacking books and thought, "Ok, I think these will all fit, this is reasonable." And then I kept finding books ... in every box. There are stacks all over my apartment.