Hot Water

Mark and I are militant anti-car drivers.  At least that's what they would say about us if we lived in 1970.  In a LIFE magazine from that year there was a story that talked about the fear of people "being militant" about not driving their vehicles.  

 Any time we can find a good reason to not get into our vehicle we try not to go, although sometimes we are just lazy.  So when we took our car into the body shop last Friday, we thought "no sweat, we'll just ride home" (we weren't feeling lazy).

What the picture doesn't tell you is that the Boundary Country like the rest of Western North America is in a massive heatwave and we just got the "third burst" of it after experiencing cooler temps for a week or so.  How soon do I forget?  We knew at the beginning of the summer it was going to be a tough year for water with the lack of accumulated snow at higher elevations .  Already forest fires have been totally crazy and the budgets overspent.BC has just experienced the warmest winter and spring since 1948 when temperature records began.

I really think I am in denial too.

So, we rode our bikes into the heat thinking it wouldn't get so bad, but at about 2pm getting water at our favorite watering hole (Tugs at Curlew) the woman working said it was 100 F out, that's 43 C for my celsius friends.  That's nothing to what the temperature  was in Iran where it hit 73 C.   It was hot. where I was, but a lot hotter in Iran - when you look at the numbers it seems impossible that anyone could even live in 73C.  But yet we do and adapt.  I think we need to do something different because our adaptations  and the critters of the world like the plants and animals aren't going to be able to adapt quick enough to what we are experiencing now.  This is climate change warm up.  A pre-event for us silly humans who think we can control nature.  We change nature, but I think it's way more powerful than our societies and governments - we need to learn within it's confines and respect the feedback we are getting.

We have just got to protect our winters.  Places that used to be viable ranches will end up having problems because without the winter snow I grew up to expect, our groundwater will not be replaced.

I saw so many homeowners in the middle of the day in Grand Forks watering their lawn.  It saddens me that even though it's a Stage 4 drought alert that people want a green lawn.  Tonight when I was coming home I saw people watering the road and I wondered how bad is this climate change going to have to get for people to realize this is serious. 

I strongly believe that climate change and reducing our CO2 emissions is the #1 enemy to our species and to all the other living things on our planet Earth.  We are slow to change and the change is coming at us faster than we ever expected.  The summer we are having this year is the summer that will be EVERY year in the year 2050.

We made it to the border before closing and crashed in the local city park to cool off on their nicely green cool lawn that absolutely nobody was using except for us. Then before we road home, we stopped again to sit in the creek to cool off again for the last 15 km home.  I really hope that the elections that are coming in the US and Canada the public selects leaders that are going to reduce carbon emissions to as little as possible.  All the other critters and beings on the planet can only wait for us humans to change.  Change we must.