My weekly practice is to prepare a few hands that teach specific lessons and go over them pedagogically after each is played. For the rest of the Monday afternoon, the women deal and play rubber bridge, and I kibitz. This week they dealt and played the following:

Were I South, I suspect I would have bid the hand exactly she did. After West doubled, here’s what would’ve gone through my mind:

• One loser in clubs
• One loser in diamonds
• And since my partner made a free bid of 2 spades, she has a strong five- or a six-card suit, so probably just one loser in spades. In fact, if North’s spades set up, I may be able to toss my diamond loser. Four clubs looks solid.

West had never doubled before. With great excitement, she led her diamond queen…and I needn’t go through the carnage. South went down five…smiling!

Should she have escaped to four spades? It would’ve likely gone down only two. Would East/West have countered with a doable five hearts?

*     *     *     *     *

(I’m going to categorize this under Sports…because South was such a good one!)

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

My plan was to use accessible poetry and short-short flash fiction to stimulate thought. I began with:

In these sessions we will discover that some things we read are like icebergs. But when I say that, do I mean that these written works are frozen and floating?  Of course not. What I mean is that, like an iceberg, there’s more than meets the eye. And if a writer refers to a “lonely cloud,” does he mean that the cloud feels some kind of emotion?

We started easy. I gave them Humpty Dumpty to read and asked, “Who was Humpty? And did he fall or was he pushed?” None of the participants—six to ten came each week—had any experience in this sort of intellectual challenge. Many of my questions (and that’s all I did…ask questions) got I-don’t-know’s, to which I responded, “I don’t know is the ONLY wrong answer.”

It only took one week for the students’ responses to become almost uniformly interesting and enthusiastic. Hands were shooting up. Over the next several weeks we did Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Percy Shelley, and many others. A sample of their comments about a one-sentence story by Bruce Holland Rogers illustrates their intellectual insertion into the process. (I have changed the students’ names.)

He left the village of his birth, crossed the mountains, crossed the seas,
saw great cities, learned a few words in a dozen tongues, met the high
and the low, and returned after years of wandering to the village of his
birth where for the rest of his life he suffered nostalgia for his village as
it had been when he left.

Q: Why did he leave his village?
…Santiago: To get a job.
…Cesar: To travel, and the mountains means challenges, and it wasn’t easy.
Q: Why does the writer mention that he “crossed the sea”?
…Corazon: Because that means he went very far away.
Q: He left a village and “saw great cities.” Why mention that?
…Corazon: Cities and villages are very different.
…Ariela: A village is small. A city is big…like Denver.
…Cesar: Or across the sea…like Paris.
Q: What makes a city great?
…Corazon: Restaurants, hotels, landmarks, different languages.
…Ariela: National parks.
…Cesar: Size, museums.
Q: What does it mean that he “learned a few words in a dozen tongues”?
…Cesar: He went to lots of places and learned the same words in different languages.
…Coco: It’s a big job to learn how to talk the language.
Q: Who were the “high and low”?
…Cameron: Royalty and servants.
…Ariela: People of different size.
Q: He “returned after years of wandering.” So what?
…Arcadia: He visited lots of places.
…Santiago: He was walking around everywhere.
…Cesar: But when he got back the village had changed.
Q: He “suffered nostalgia.” Why?
…Ariela: Because his village changed, and he liked the way it used to be. He missed the good old times.
Q: Was his journey a success or a failure?
…Leon: Both. Might have fun when he went to the other places, and when he came back the village had changed, and he liked it better the way it was.

Basho (1644–1694)

My small wings
I am forbidden to fly
I’m a flightless bird

…Cesar: Forbidden is the most interesting word in the poem. It means you can’t fly…not that you are not able, but someone or something has stopped it.
…Leon: It’s forbidden because there is a hunter out there, and it has been prevented.
Q: Why does this bird have small wings?
…Cesar: We had a cockatoo and had its feathers clipped. Maybe that.
…Coco: It could be deformed. But that would not mean forbidden. It would mean unable.
…Arelia: Maybe this is about a person who thinks of herself as a bird.
…Leon: I think it’s about a young girl who is not allowed to leave her house and go out with boyfriends.

The candle is lit. PSST’s goal is to get these kids to graduate from high school. They have promised each a $2,000 college scholarship if they do and gotten a commitment (with a certificate suitable for framing) from Sonoma State University guaranteeing admission if they graduate and meet the minimum entrance requirements. If the kids, the large majority of whom are children of Hispanic immigrants, succeed (and PSST will work with them continuously through middle school and high school), almost all of them will be the first in their family to go to college.

Paying forward.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

There are several techniques for transducing this energy from underground heat to in-the-grid electricity. One of these, a technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), is currently being tested by Sausalito-based AltaRock Energy only 12 beeline miles from my home in Northern California. One would think this would be big news in Wine Country, but except for a 2008 mention of seed funding by google.org and several high-profile venture capital firms, this potentially earth-shaking (remember that adjective!) demonstration project has gone unmentioned in my local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. But on June 23, 2009, NYT journalist James Glanz wrote a long article suggesting that AltaRock’s EGS experiment might cause earthquakes. It was reprinted four days later in the New York Times-owned Press Democrat along with a side story about earthquakes in Anderson Springs, the tiny Lake County hamlet closest to the drilling site.

Glanz based his warning on a 2006 earthquake caused by an EGS project in Basel, Switzerland, but he did not go unchallenged. Green Momentum, a specialized media company that focuses on providing independent news coverage events and developments affecting the “cleantech” industry, immediately opined that Glanz’s article “was certainly alarmist, if not genuinely alarming.”

As a survivor of the eight-year Bush/Cheney “cone of silence,” I am suspicious of PR Kool-Aid, but given the publicly available information about EGS in both Switzerland and California, it appears that there are many differences between the EGS processes tested by Geothermal Explorers International. Ltd. in Basel and the AltaRock test just underway near Anderson Springs.

Geothermal energy has great potential for helping to solve our long-term energy problem. Producing energy from geothermal sources is mostly clean (geothermal sources do tend to release greenhouse gases trapped deep within the earth, but these emissions are usually much smaller than those of fossil fuels) and power plants can be situated almost anywhere. The heat is onmipresent…just below the top layer of the crust. MIT chemical engineering professor Jefferson Tester calculates that the US’s total annual energy consumption is 100 exajoules. It doesn’t matter if that number is incomprehensible. Prof. Tester estimates that the geothermal resource for the whole country is about 14,000,000 exajoules. In oilman talk, that’s a lot of reserves.

             Luther Burbank          early geothermal investor

Healdsburg, the Sonoma County town in which I live, gets 43% of its electricity from geothermal sources (Q3 2009 report), almost entirely from The Geysers, the most productive geothermal energy site in the United States. The Geysers Development Company began selling electricity to Healdsburg in 1926 (world-renown botanist/horticulturalist Luther Burbank, a Sonoma County transplant, was one of the original investors), but as oil came down rapidly in price in the mid 30s, energy generation at The Geysers ceased to be profitable, and operations ceased. The first modern plant went online in 1960, with generation peaking in the ’80s at about 1,500 megawatts, enough energy to power about 1.5 million homes. Because this high level of production began to diminish available underground heat at The Geysers, output was purposely decreased to about 800 megawatts in order to stretch the site’s useful life.

Each day, Calpine Energy and the state-run Northern California Power Agency pump 11 million gallons of treated wastewater through a 41-mile underground pipeline from Sonoma County seat Santa Rosa and inject it into the extremely hot, permeable rock below. The water boils, creating high pressure steam that rises to the surface where it turns turbine generators, producing enough electricity to power most of the North Bay.

Geology of The Geysers

The geology of The Geysers is special. The caprock there is thinner than average, and the sub-surface rock is riddled with cracks, making the water-to-steam process relatively straightforward. AltaRock’s EGS technology, however, does not require fissured rock. This is an advantage: there are many, many more sites that sit above hot, solid rock than above hot, fractured rock. At Anderson Springs—which is near, but not in The Geysers field—AltaRock will drill deeply and inject water at very high pressure, thus cracking the extremely hot, solid rock, and producing electricity with the resultant steam. When the steam condenses, the water will be reinjected into the hot rocks below.

So what is the New York Times article worried about?

In 2001, Geothermal Explorers, a Swiss company, undertook an EGS project dubbed Deep Heat Mining Basel. In December 2006, at a depth of just over 5,000 meters (3.1 miles), full-scale injection of water triggered a 3.4 magnitude earthquake, big enough to rattle both the local windows and its citizenry. Geothermal Explorers immediately and voluntarily shut the project down. Glanz’s report suggests that the AltaRock experiment could engender similar man-made temblors in Lake County.

Anderson Springs knows about earthquakes. The number of earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.0 has increased dramatically over the last several decades. (See chart below.) Not surprisingly, some residents have mobilized, forming the Anderson Springs Community Alliance. Its mission is to raise “public awareness about numerous significant environmental impacts affecting the community due to ongoing geothermal development.”

AltaRock gave a detailed response to Glanz’s article on its website:

• We took extraordinary care in choosing our site at the Geysers to avoid siting on a major fault. The Basel Project drilled into a significant fault.
• Smaller faults mean smaller events, and the faults in the Geysers area are significantly smaller than at Basel.
• The geology of the Geysers is very different – seismic studies predict events at the Geysers likely to be imperceptible at the surface.
• Events of similar magnitude to Basel occur frequently in California.
• Basel produced an event with a magnitude which is more than 10 times the size of the maximum event estimated for our project..
• We have installed monitoring and control procedures and designed pressure relief mechanisms to minimize any impact.
• We are employing proprietary technologies to ensure a safe and well-controlled project.
• We have actively involved and informed the community.

Getting energy from geothermal sources is important…and controversial. Is it worth the risk of more earthquakes? Is the risk real?

There will be more in subsequent posts.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Riding for the unheralded Le Musée Historique team (Healdsburg Museum and Historical Society) were locals Chris Baldenhofer (former B&B owner), Bob Rawlins (retired submarine captain), and Kent Mitchell (ex-mayor), all Museum Board members. They mounted the stationary bikes immediately after a team of young men—all in professional cycling outfits—rode into first place with a combined distance of 2.5 miles in three minutes. Undaunted that their combined age was nearly 140 years greater than the leaders, the Musée threesome pedaled furiously and continuously.

Team Musée: Baldenhofer, Mitchell, Rawlins

There was no report from the Museum squad’s trainer regarding the condition of the team on the following day.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Aristotle

I have, in my dotage, become a Peripatetic (derived from Greek… literally “ones walking around”). The Peripatetic School was founded by Aristotle in 335 BC, so I am far from a charter member, but as with philosophy, striding about—especially to high places—affords one a wider view of the world.

Yesterday, as a pre-Valentines Day gift, my wife Ann asked me to accompany her and four other members of the local AAUW (American Association of University Women) chapter on a hike to the top of Mount St. Helena, at 4,343 feet, the highest point in Napa County.

Ann & friends atop Mount St. Helena

We began the ascent at 10 a.m. The air was clear and pleasant. Ever gallant, and remembering a Boy Scout always lets the slower hikers go first, I trailed the five women, all older than I, as we worked our way up the switchbacks. Soon, noticing that the oldest, a 4’11″, 75-year-old Ohio State Buckeye, was bounding upward from rock to rock with abandon that indicated knees far more forgiving than my own, I gave up gallantry, and adopted the pirate’s creed (“Every Man for Himself!”)…which, since I was the only man, granted me carte blanche. Spotting a steeply vertical shortcut, I scrambled, slipped, and scratched my way up the hillside from switchback #11 to switchback #12 and was relaxing on a rock (hiding my heavy breathing) as the hapless women came around the bend. They were unimpressed. One even muttered, “Cheater.”

Halfway up the mountain, we turned a corner and went from calm air to a strong, cold, noisy wind—a dramatic demonstration of leeward versus windward. The layers we had shed on the way up went back on.

Upward, dauntless peripatetics! Excelsior!

1912 remounting of the 1841 plaque

Hiking 5.1 miles while climbing just over 2,000 feet computes to a 7.4% incline. As we ate lunch, I wondered silently (the women were chatting amiably about birds, trees, and grandchildren) if Aristotle, in his many peregrinations up and down Grecian knolls ever calculated the inverse relationship between age and incline aptitude.

With both the air and our noses running clear, we saw far in the distance:

–to the west, range after range of low hills, with the Pacific shrouded somewhere beyond them,
–to the south, the skyline of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge, Marin County’s Mt. Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo near Walnut Creek,
–to the east, Lake Berryessa and by their snow tops, a hint of the Sierras, and
–to the north, what might have been a thin dream of Mt. Lassen.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition.

…more on Stevenson’s charming travelogue in my next post.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.