A slaughter of butterflies

[randy_byers]

I'm back from my parents' place on the Crooked River in Central Oregon. Had a great time with the family -- my parents, my brother and his family, and my niece and her fiance, but not my sister, who is still in China. My only exertion was hiking the last couple miles up the highest hill in the area with my brother and his wife. Fantastic views! From Prineville to Redmond to Terrebonne to Madras, and the green agricultural valleys in between and the mountains beyond in all directions. The fire between the Three Sisters and Mt. Washington (also known as Squaw's Tit in elder days) threw up huge plumes of smoke, obscuring Mt. Jefferson and everything else.

On Saturday, my parents invited a friend of theirs who taught high school astronomy in Mt Vernon, Washington over for dinner. We talked about Oregon geology, about volcanology in general, and then, after dinner, looked at the many stars visible in the high desert sky. My parents' birding telescope was strong enough to show us four moons of Jupiter, which amazed everyone. The last stragglers of the Perseids blazed above us too. I saw two.

Today I drove into a swarm of butterflies on the shoulders of Mt. Hood, as I headed toward Portland to see my niece's first photo show in a gallery (of sorts). I killed many beautiful orange-brown butterflies, and their frail corpses littered the highway for miles on end. I was reminded of the Gary Larson Farside cartoon with the insect's horror movie called The Windshield. My niece's show was really, really good. She has an amazing eye for people -- complete strangers in foreign countries -- making casual gestures that are full of character and strange beauty.

Film at 11.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

NIMBYs often refuse wind generators on the grounds that they're noisy and sometimes hurt wildlife. And then I go look at (and listen to) a busy motorway filled with fossil-fuel-burning cars mowing down the local fauna, and I reflect on how totally screwed-up confused our civilization would sound from the outside.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The subject of wind generators actually came up several times this weekend, largely because there are a number of new wind farms east of the Cascade range. The guy who taught high school astronomy has a daughter who works on one of them, in fact. Maybe we could power our cars with sails. It would be slower, but cleaner and less damaging to butterflies.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

At the very least we should have vertical axis turbines up and down the dividers of busy highways, spinning clockwise in my country and anticlockwise in yours, to recover a little of that energy.