Faux snow and Kafka
A whole bunch of weird stuff Reviewed by (who else?) B. Frank
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– science.howstuffworks.com
“The lower the temperature, the more water you can move through the machine. We don’t want dry snow, of course. Snow is too fluffy. We want slop. We want wet sherbet.”
— Ted Taylor, quoted by John McPhee in “Ice Pond”
“I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful. All that can be seen from outside is a big hole.”
— Franz Kafka, “The Burrow”
It is winter on the dry side of Colorado’s driest mountain range — a dangerous time for curious minds with access to literature and an internet connection. I am hidden from the prying inquiries that might have saved me. Now, a certain fascination with snow and deprivation has led me to this course of study. I could blame John McPhee, although he was just the interviewer of Taylor, whose answer to shoveling a million pounds of ice was to buy a snowmaking machine. Taylor could shoulder responsibility for my present state, but he died over a year ago. Some will blame Kafka, though he was just bringing messages from the nebulous edge of sanity.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the oily plutocracy that has stolen the country is scraping the bottoms of our pockets for the last of our coins, making the heating and/or cooling of my burrow ever more difficult. This isn’t the first time we’ve been through this windfall and pillage cycle. In response to the last time, in 1980 a retired bomb-maker (Taylor) came up with a way to use winter’s cold for summer air conditioning. Ever since then, the idea has had (to coin a pun) an underground life as an alternative energy source. And why not? It isn’t technologically difficult, and once you get past the hole-digging, it’s easy (if you can afford a snowmaker). If you’re poor, then you shovel, as the plutocrats say. The upside of poverty is a reduction of winter heating costs, because snowshoveling is quick heat, and, after shoveling a million pounds of it, you’ll be headed to bed early anyway. Remember, to save energy, it helps to shower and sleep with a friend, which is another upside — if you like that sort of thing.
So I’ve been making like the vice-president lately, hiding in my burrow and plotting an energy future. To frustrate his plan for our perpetual national bondage to oil barons at home and abroad, my burrow is off the grid. Now I figure to dig myself a hole, find a wrecked refrigerated van, put it in the hole, and stuff it with snow whenever it comes. In the spring, I’ll bury the whole thing. Come summer, I’ll just sit on the ice and ride out the hot days with a cool one in hand. That is, if the snow comes.
From the howstuffworks.com site comes this, “So, the main things you need to manufacture snow are water and cool temperatures. It helps the process along if you mix a nucleator of some sort into the water supply. The water will already contain lots of stuff that can act as nucleators, but increasing the count is a good idea because it ensures that more water droplets will freeze before they reach the ground.” (Nucleators are the particles around which a snowflake forms.)
Snowmaking machines were invented just after WWII, about the time Ted Taylor got his first job making atomic bombs. By 1980, when I first experienced the dubious joy of skiing fake powder, the machines were evidence of a forward-thinking ski corporation looking to maximize its profit. Being a skifor- the-love-of-snow-not-for-profit sort of bum, I turned and headed for the backcountry. But now, in the throes of this mid-life energy crisis and as a card-carrying Amerikan (spelling courtesy Kafka) capitalist, I’ve been thinking of becoming the king of faux snow entrepreneurs. Just think, if I dig my hole big enough, it’ll be a gold mine.
To McPhee’s story, “Taylor has lately been mulling the potentialities of abandoned rock quarries. You could fill an old rock quarry a quarter mile-wide with several million tons of ice and then pile up more ice above ground as high as the Washington Monument.You would build pipelines at least ten feet in diameter and aim them at sweltering cities,” mulls Taylor (with an eye toward broadening profit potential), “As sea-water freezes, impurities migrate away from it, and you are left with a concentrated brine rich in minerals.” OK, no seas around my burrow for several millennia now, so I can’t produce brine as a saleable by-product; but I can spearhead an initiative to turn my local river into a massive faux snow-bank. Then, instead of pumping it into the fake lake known as the Animas/La Plata Project and sending it down the river to PHX (Phoenix, to the uninitiated; ergo a favorite bumpersticker: “Don’t PHX FLG!”), we could hose Phoenicians down with snowmelt when they get too hot and press north towards our burrows. Maybe the fools will even pay us for the experience! I could go on, but it may be that I’ve already followed Taylor into the nebulous mental zone that made him design a starship (to be powered by openair nuclear explosions) after he stopped making bombs.
Before I start digging that hole, it might be good to spend a little more time in Kafka’s “Burrow” to see how insanity feels, “But the most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it might be shattered.” “The thing to do, really to do now, would be to go carefully over the burrow and consider every means of defending it, work out a plan of defense and a corresponding plan of construction, and then start on the work at once with the vigor of youth. That is the work that would really be needed, for which, I may add, it is now far too late in the day.” And then, “In the Castle Keep I choose a lovely piece of flayed red flesh and creep with it into one of the heaps of earth; there I shall have silence at least, such silence, at any rate, as still can be said to exist here.”
Here are a few details to consider. It’s said that Franz Kafka starved to death in a tuberculosis sanatorium. After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty killed Ted Taylor’s starship dreams (one of the first stops was to be the planet Pluto (from Gk. Plouton “god of wealth”), he spent the rest of his life advocating the control of nuclear weapons and designing renewable energy systems. The ice pond idea worked, but foundered when Taylor tried to make it a business. John McPhee is still giving us elegant examinations of humans and their multifarious habits and habitats. Recently, he’s written about hauling coke and coal by boat and train.
Oh, and faux snow? It’s now the standard at every resort that wants to be anybody in the world of downhill skiing, and my Colorado Plateau neighbors over in Flagstaff (FLG) are waiting to see if a court will order that their filtered sewage (More “nucleators,” anyone?) be pumped up the San Francisco Peaks, the sacred mountain of the Hopi and Navajo, and atomized to feed the Arizona Snowbowl’s dreams of long, dry powder seasons; damn the persistent drought. Talk about crazy ideas, hunh?
Contributing editor B. Frank starts getting a bit weird this time of year. He lives in Southwest Colorado, and, as a result, no dark beer between Durango and Flagstaff is safe.
