Ouch.
ouch ouch. These losses from the Rodeo fire may not look that heavy, but it's a
sparsely populated area. One article claimed that if a similar proportion of the
population had been evacuated from Phoenix, a third of a million people would have
been involved. And it looks like probably half of the houses in the airpark are
gone. One of the worries now is whether the area will ever recover. Lots of the
residents are retirees, who have nothing tying them to that particular spot of
earth, or part-timers from Phoenix or Tucson. The question is whether there will
be enough people there to maintain the infrastructure, like the senior center, the
grocery, and yes, the airpark runway. Building a cabin in the woods worked for
Thoreau, but he only stayed there a year. We'd like to retire on this land
someday, and being able to buy food locally or see a doctor nearby will be
nontrivial considerations. Also, it hurts on pure ecological grounds; the White
Mountains of Arizona have one of the largest stands of Ponderosa pine in the
world, and it's very sad to see some idiot burn down a chunk of it, even knowing
that the forest itself will likely outlast the idiot.
We've had
actual clouds today and yesterday, along with humidity high enough to be stifling
(doesn't take much when it's over 100 degrees F). So maybe we will have a
href="http://ag.arizona.edu/maricopa/garden/html/weather/monsoon.htm">monsoon
season after all. What is laughably called the "monsoon" here officially
begins when the dew point is over 55 degrees for three days in a row. It really is
a monsoon, technically, but what with being in a desert and on, and on the
northern edge of the affected area, the effects are pretty marginal. The problem
is, monsoons don't always bring us rain. Sometimes the rain will evaporate before
ever getting to the ground. Often, thunderstorms in the mountains will have
mutated into dust storms by the time they reach the city. Still, we get our water
via those mountains, and at this point rain in any part of the state will find a
red carpet with WELCOME in big letters laid for it before it even reaches the
ground (and then quickly removed to allow the water to soak
in).
Also, the increased humidity seems to cause my hands to be
shredded worse by the oats, and now I've added a charming problem with chafing
underarms after rowing for a half hour or so -- can't even blame it on a sports
bra this time; this is sheer friction of skin on sweaty skin. Plus stubble. Sorry,
you didn't want to hear about that, I know.
And now I've spent almost
a whole entry talking about the weather, of all the boring things, only our
weather is not that boring at the moment. Just unpleasant. But here's something
completely different to think about. The other day,
href="http://suzanb.diaryland.com/anaphile.html">Suzan wrote that she'd like
to photograph anorexic women to show the beauty they see in themselves, in
achieving a body with nothing to hide the lines of the bones. This is something
I'll never do, as my photography skills rest more with mountains than human
bodies, but I think it would be cool to do that and then do a companion series of
nude photographs of fat women, again trying to show the beauty of their shapes. If
I were a good enough photog to do it right, it would almost be playing off air
spirits against earth spirits, lines against curves, with the thin women remote
and very light, all straight lines or the subtle curve of bone, with the unearthly
beauty of the dying, disassociating themselves from the frenzies of daily life.
Maybe in black and white. The fat women would definitely be in color. Gloria
Steinem once wrote something like, "it is only the female curves of breast and
belly that make the image of the Buddha believable," and that's what I'd be going
for here. Ripeness. Roundness. Incarnations of Demeter. A more grounded shape that
has something to give to a suppliant, that can nurture from its own abundance,
rather than the fey disengagement of the others. Hmm. Maybe pregnant women too,
for that series.
I'll never do it, unless I take up a new hobby and
learn a whole new set of lighting skills. But wouldn't it be cool?