the nonlynnear archives

My, um, little project

Lynn — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:35:00 +0100

My immediate family knows, and probably a fair number of friends do, too, that I am a bit of a packrat. (Oh, come on now, there is no reason to ROFLYAO.) So I have started a project to get rid of things — well, okay, in particular, to get rid of papers. How I have chosen to do so may elicit a few more guffaws, but hey — other people (who shall remain nameless) choose to use their leisure time in ways that I consider wasteful(!!), so I claim the right to waste my leisure time in whatever way I choose.

So here's my choice: I am recording the bare-bones information for a fair number of papers (receipts in particular) before I throw them away. Let's put it this way: doing so makes it possible for me to throw them away, and guess what: I've been able to recover a lot of personal history and fill in some gaps by doing so. This is important to me, given how ... surprisingly gapacious my memory can be.

I've already gotten rid of many kilos' worth of paper at this point.

A couple of things I want to mention in passing: WTF is it with practically all airlines that they do not print the effin' year on their boarding passes? How is leaving off the year a good idea in this time of overwrought "security" procedures? I have a lot of boarding pass entries on my spreadsheet(s) that will require cross-checking with other sources. I do not like this.

The same is true for SNCF train tickets, only with these it's at least theoretically possible to find the date from the "composter" stamp, assuming it's legible.

Speaking of legible, the other major thing I've discovered is that... there are a whole lot of receipts that are pretty much completely illegible now.—And by completely, I mean that holding them at angles to the light and using a magnifying glass doesn't reveal anything useful (and just takes up time). I hate the (lack of good) thermal print technology that produced — and still produced — such abominations. Bad! Bad!

I may always wonder about those events which may now be forever lost in the sands of time, but I'm happy to have been able to revisit, however briefly, some extraordinary moments in my and my family's past (some of which I will doubtless elaborate upon in this blog).

Hooray for paper trails!

Driving France's "death road"

Lynn — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:02:00 +0100

The road between Villard Notre Dame and Villard Reymond in the French Alps west of Grenoble and south of Vizille is the scariest road I have ever driven, period, and I have driven some very scary mountain roads (to say nothing of driving on a bridge in Costa Rica in the late 1990s that we had to help repair first in order to get over it).

Just getting up to Villard Notre Dame was hair-raising: an extremely narrow road with scary overhangs...

... and especially having to get through a single-lane, poorly-maintained, dark, rock-strewn tunnel:

The death road itself hadn't been maintained in years:

There was at least—at least!—at thousand-foot sheer drop to our right for a significant stretch, and more than once I was sure that our right-side tires were not 100% on the roadway. But we couldn't back up, couldn't turn around, could only press forward hoping that the road would not get any narrower because of rockslides and all. Had there been any further obstruction, we would have had to hire some kind of heavy-duty helicopter to airlift our car to a safe place. Or abandon it forever.

The moral is, if you arrive at a road with a gated entrance, and there's a sign there that says “if you take this road, your auto insurance is not applicable,” you should really, truly take a different route, no matter how much you hate the thought of back-tracking.

(Photo: Another of the roadsigns that should have been a clue to reconsider our route: "Uncertain viability. Travel at your own risk and peril.")

Note: A shorter version of this story was posted as a comment on Dark Roasted Blend on 2007-08-16 (World’s Most Dangerous Roads, part 4). Photos are stills taken from this video.

The dam vidange (2008)

Lynn — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 11:15:00 +0100

Every 10 years the water & power authorities are obliged to inspect any dam in France higher than 20 meters (65 feet), and this means draining the reservoir down to the dam's footings ("vidange" = "emptying"). Here are the dam photos, with a few literalesque French-to-English captions thrown in for your reading pleasure absolutely free!

Behold the dam in summer 2007, he is full of the water:

Behold the dam during vidange. The water, she is gone down 40 meters (130+ feet)! Note well the dark water line at the top of the dam (and also see where the line of the trees, they stop at the top-left of the photo):

A little further away from the dam, summer 2007; see the line of buoys of warning across the waterway!:

The same place, after vidange:

The front of the Quinson dam:

And looking up over the dam (remember, he was full up to the line of trees before the vidange!):

We then drove over to a little town about 8 km (5 miles) away called Artignosc, where the official "Lac du Quinson" is located (the "lake" in Quinson is just a place where the river widens), and lo! Here was the view from the main (okay, only) bridge into town over the reservoir canyon:

And then, looking toward Quinson Lake (Artignosc): all of the without-trees area of white in the distance, was entirely underwater before the vidange:

Smack-dab (okay, this is really not French at all) in the middle of the lake is the old bridge—the former main bridge—that used to cross the Verdon River up until the early 1970s. It was covered in stinky mud and lakeweed. (By the way, lakeweed when dry is like very, very brittle excelsior.) The entire lake area looked like another planet entirely:

In addition to inspecting the structural soundness of the dam, authorities hauled out all sorts of debris:

This once-every-10-years "vidange de retenue du barrage" was so cool! For my final shots, here's looking at the Verdon River on the other side of the dam. (Sorry about the power lines in the first shot below, but I really liked the light in this scene; by the time I got low enough to shoot again without wires, the light had changed; someday I'll get around to photoshopping the lines out.) Recreational boating and so on was not disrupted for lucky Quinsonnais vendors, but the tourist season in Artignosc (boat and kayak rentals, fishing, etc.) was cut short that year.

The 1994 Northridge quake

Lynn — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:55:00 +0100

The Northridge† quake was terrifying, even though I was living in Pittsburgh at the time. We were in the process of moving to the Boston area, and my husband had been home for the Martin Luther King Jr holiday weekend. As I was taking him to the airport, I turned on the radio for the traffic report, and instead heard news of a major earthquake affecting Northridge, Reseda, Tarzana, etc.— in short, places I had grown up in, and where my parents and siblings still lived.

When I got to the airport, my heart in my throat, I tried to call my family. The recorded message for the 818 area code was "Due to the earthquake in the area, your call cannot be completed as dialed." So I tried calling my brother in Santa Clarita; the recording for that area code: "Due to the mudslides in the area...."

My parents and siblings had all tried to call me while I was gone, but (@#!) the cassette tape in my answering machine had run out. (So much for my serving as "Communications Central" during emergencies!) It was hours before I was able to talk to any of them, but thankfully they were all OK. I was glued to TV coverage from the instant I got home (well, OK, from the instant I discovered that my answering machine tape had run out).

My parents' house sustained about $50K of damage, mostly from the chimneys exploding through the upstairs walls of one bedroom and the sitting room — but every wall of the house needed replastering (ironically enough, only one window broke). They were lucky: they had earthquake insurance (though with a $20K deductible); their house was one of seven out of 14 on their block still habitable; and they were able to get contractors in right away to fix the damage. (Other people waited for months and months.)

My siblings' homes escaped with minor damage — I think one of my brothers had a hot water heater fall over, and my sister lost part of the cinderblock fence in their back yard. However, it took awhile for gas and electricity to be restored in several sectors, so (if I recall correctly) most of them ended up going over to my parents (whose power was restored quickly, and whose gas was still in service, amazingly enough).

Since then, all my sibs have put (annoying) baby-locks on all cabinets and drawers, and battened down their water heaters and large pieces of furniture. I don't think anyone has anything heavy or loose mounted over their beds.

I was not able to go to California until sometime in November that year. Even then, 10 months later, there was still a lot of visible damage in some parts of the San Fernando Valley. Most striking to me was the damage to the main parking structure at Cal State Northridge: the pancaked concrete parking levels and the bizarrely twisted steel railings were astonishing and very sobering to behold. Such sheer power! (The library and many other buildings were still closed, and lots of classes were being held in the many trailers and temporary buildings dotting the campus.)

Even so, this wasn't "the big one" (catastrophe still pending).

† Turns out that the epicenter of this 6.7-magnitude quake was actually at the corner of Reseda Blvd and Strathern Street in Reseda — only two long blocks from my sister's house!

The 1971 Sylmar earthquake

Lynn — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:28:00 +0100

On February 9, 1971, I was nearly 16, in 10th grade at Taft High School, and living in Tarzana in the southwestern part of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. By 6:00 a.m. on school days, my older sister and I were supposed to already be up and getting ready to leave for an early-morning religion class, but we were still lolling in bed when the shaking started about a minute after 6. As there had been a fairly significant tremor around the same time about a month before, I planned on just "riding it out" in bed. As the shaking got stronger, however, my sister screamed, "Get up, you idiot, it's an earthquake!" (No duh.) Whatever semblance of calm I had had at the time evaporated, and I jumped out of bed.

She and I ran out of our room to the top of the stairs, where we met our brothers coming from their rooms (our bedrooms were on the second floor — ours was one of the very few "non-ranch-style" houses in the neighborhood). We could hear our next-door neighbors screaming over the deep sound of the quake itself and the sound of things falling or breaking. Our chandelier (on a long chain over the staircase) was swinging back and forth, hitting the walls. I yelled a prayer for God to protect us just as the electricity failed and the lights went out. Being plunged into near-total darkness was in some ways scarier than the shaking itself.

We all made it down the stairs and joined our parents (who came from their bedroom on the ground floor) in the guest bedroom next to the garage — this was a preplanned meeting place for just such an emergency (chosen because there was no second story overhead). We cowered together through the aftershocks until daylight had fully established itself. We knew that school wouldn't be held that day, but I can't remember if my dad ended up going to work downtown or not. (I rather doubt it.)

Our house was spared much damage — a couple of cracks here and there, and maybe one cracked window. Power was restored fairly quickly, and the first televised reports started coming in about the VA hospital in Sylmar that was hard-hit (accounting for most of the deaths)... and of the collapse of an overpass under construction on the I-5 en route to Santa Clarita. (The pickup truck that was squashed under the fallen segment of overpass remained there for months and months afterwards — a very grim sight.)

(As an aside, our Mormon bishop had just finished the graveyard shift in Santa Monica and was on his way home on the I-405. Just as he reached the crest and could see the brightly-lit panorama of the Valley before him, the earthquake struck. The Valley went totally dark, and then fires from broken gas mains started flaring up. He hadn't felt the earthquake, so he had no idea whatsoever what had happened — he thought the U.S. was under attack or somesuch. For someone with serious cardiac problems, it's amazing that he didn't have a heart attack then and there.)

Later that morning, a friend and I made our way down Ventura Boulevard, marveling at the cracked streets and shattered or cracked plate-glass display windows. Not a shop or store seemed to have been spared. We ended up at our local grocery store, Food Fair (later Theeee Movies of Tarzana), and helped re-stack boxes and cans. (For safety/liability reasons, we were not allowed to help clean up the aisles where bottles of cooking oils and dressings and jars of jams and jellies and peanut butter had fallen and broken. What a mess! —This was before plastic bottles were widely used, by the way.) Food Fair was the first store in the Valley to re-open that day (at around noon).

Meanwhile, there were great fears that the Lower Van Norman Dam on the north side of the Valley was going to collapse. Authorities were draining it as quickly as they could, but 300,000 people in the surrounding area were ordered to evacuate. Thankfully, the dam held, though it was damaged beyond repair. The huge broken slabs were visible from the freeway for a long time afterwards.

Schools were closed for three days to allow for thorough inspection, and of course when we returned to school, the earthquake took up a lot of class and social time for several days thereafter.

I remember two sizable aftershocks: one was during the early-morning religion class. When it started, we all ran outside. And there, on one of the patches of grass behind the church, a young tree was shaking violently back and forth — a very vivid image. The other memorable aftershock occurred when I was in 7th-period art class on the 3rd floor of Taft's C-building. The teacher yelled "drop!"—which I and all the other students did... but the thought occurred to me then that getting under one's desk when the floor was likely to drop out from under one didn't particularly make a whole lot of sense.

Those few moments of hard shaking in the darkness, accompanied by an other-worldly, loud and penetrating deep sound, was one of the scariest experiences of my life... but also one of the most interesting and exciting.

My UFO

Lynn — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 10:39:00 +0100

The first time I went to Girl Scout Camp Lakota in California's Frazier Park (about 100 miles north of L.A.), in late August 1965 when I was 9 years old, I and easily a hundred other scouts saw a UFO.

We slept under the stars. The night in question was cloudless, moonless, and pristinely clear — we could see the Milky Way. We had all just gone to bed and were talking while watching the heavens for shooting stars, when all at once an enormous, brilliant white disk streaked by overhead. It filled most of the visible sky as it passed. And as with one voice, practically the entire camp exclaimed, "Did you see THAT?!"

At the time, I didn't even know the term UFO. The Perseid meteor shower had long since occurred. I've never read nor heard of anything that could satisfactorily explain what we'd seen. Swamp gas? No way (no swamps in that dry place). Some kind of secret USAF aircraft from one of the desert bases not too far away? ... Implausible, given the size of the thing. Ball lightning? Nah.

Note, however, that I have not drawn any conclusions about the possible "alien origins" of this UFO. I am perfectly happy to believe that there may be other inhabited worlds and that, à la Star Trek, there may be extraterrestrials that possess the technology to visit our little planet. But "my" UFO remains a mystery, even if the memory of it passing over the tops of the pine trees (silhouettes clearly visible against its brilliant light) remains vivid to this day.

PS: My paternal grandmother (along with hundreds of others) saw a cigar-shaped UFO over Cincinnati (I believe) in the 1920s.

My grandma (left) looking at a UFO?

And one of my brothers and his friend as teenagers saw a UFO apparently "siphoning off" from a high tension tower behind our house in L.A. (they had just returned from dropping their dates off following a dance at a Mormon church — so no, they weren't drunk nor high). My brother was scared sh*tless and to this day does not speak of it.

PPS: I would love to see another such phenomenon. Perhaps I already have: driving homeward after nightfall from BYU on I-15 in the mid-1970s (or possibly during grad school in the early 1980s), I saw a large array of brilliant round lights over the cliffs somewhere between Beaver and Cedar City). I remember trying to figure out what they were at the time.

—What I'd really like to have, of course, is a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, minus the National Enquirer-style "kidnapped by aliens" experience.

Nonlynnear... slowly reviving.

Lynn — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:43:00 +0000

Just made the transition to a new blog host. While I will be posting pages of some of my previously-published material (essays, articles, stories, and the like... and maybe some line art), the primary focus of this blog is to record memorable experiences from my past.