A Cactus Blooms as I Exit the Prairies -- Barely Escaping With My Life

It was a close call. But now I'm finally in a safe place. Swimming in REAL turquoise waves.

Sometimes you must escape from an "island of prisons". And I must thank all of my friends who have helped me out whether they know it or not. You just might have saved my life...

I realize now that I must take my own advice. It is indeed a fine balance. But sometimes "something BIG needs to happen. Because 'fundamental changes' means everything shifts." But this means be smart. It doesn't mean it's over... You kill off that prickling negativity -- the seeping black oil that corrupts the mind and soul, but stand up strong like the carefree blossoming flower. Yeh -- don't ever let them tell you it's over.

Saskatchewan is just being overrun by oil interests and they don't really even know it yet. And the good hardworking farm town of Saskatoon isn't quite ready to be a star on the map. At its corer it is still a hard-working farming community. The whole northern portion of the city caters to it. Remember, 80 per cent of the men don't own a proper pair of dress pants, as one club owner wanted me to keep in mind. The locals just hate the foreign yuppies that are buying up all the million-dollar housing, putting average homes out of reach of average people. And it's very hard to get an event up and running if you don't have your country music in place.

And yet potash mines are planned. A lady with connections tipped me off to another one yet that's going to go forward. Cameco has big billboards set up, to convince the labour market that their uranium mines are the answer. Don't forget, they've assembled worldwide talent to tap what's there beneath the ground. And OIL... well, it's only the beginning. There's more oil to be had in Saskatchewan than in Alberta -- and they haven't even discovered most of it yet. As one of my rides said, as we headed south -- looking out over the rise and fall of the valley: "Wow, last time I was here there weren't any oil wells." And now across the misty green hillside stood stark black donkeys, consistently pumping like the diligent machines they are. Working as efficiently as possible -- because this is their nature, so the guy at the top can increase his stability. There were probably about 30 now. And the tar sands are still on the way...

Oh ya, this is a very dry place. A place creative minds can get sucked up in all too easily.

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Currently the future of this blog is in jeopardy... I'm not sure where I will go from here (and yes I mean that literally) -- though I have some really cool ideas...

But what I do now know is this: despite the incredible sadness my experiences have left me with... THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING!

I only had one way out. A business card with a map on it in my wallet: I swim naked in the stream, run up and down the hills, and burn away all the creeping insidiousness. Caught in the arms of the strongest defenses. Family farmer. The guy knows how to fix things.

It is here I see the most amazing sight: a small little cactus with a bright yellow flower poking its head out of the needles in the evening's dying rays. It is small and insignificant. Really it is nothing. But then again, it is the most stunning singular image that I see for acres and acres in all directions. Given the climate and terrain I think, I've never seen anything quite like this.

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Waves are like uranium because...

Waves are now power plant fuel.


A new way of wave riding. You too could could be hitting waves from the comfort of your own home if some new renewable energy projects go right through to completion. BC Hydro, General Electric and Chevron TVC among other giants are hopping on "board" the wave power bandwagon.

So ya, a gas company is working on getting rid of greenhouse gases. Weird.

"Chevron estimates its project would eliminate 308,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be produced by coal-fired power plants."

Click here for a really straight-up introduction to wave power (brought to you by Chevron's partners)... you're bound to learn something.

Also, BC Hydro's trying to get its citizens on board now. Just so you know the company's boss is the B.C. government, specifically the part that's in charge of exploiting petroleum, coal and that sort of thing, and promoting those industries.

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life UNDERGROUND: As Goes the Surfer So Goes the Oilman and the Miner

Last week, while dining on seafood here in the prairies I had the opportunity to chat with a hydrogeologist from Pakistan named Rashid. Being surrounded by proudly-racist but hardworking farm boys with nice vehicles, and lulled by the long winds that flow across tall grasses only to hit up against the concrete skyscrapers and animal byproduct warehouses of the urban centre we have come to inhabit -- sometimes I feel like I'm missing out on something. It's as if I can't quite tap into the full range of ideas and innovations that are so ripe and plentiful when you get a wider variety of people at the table. And Rashid was a breath of fresh air.

Now Rashid's seen waves of sand spin across the Arabian desert, and had a peice of the petroleum extraction pie for himself to taste -- learning about how static and dynamic natural processes affect what humans want to do ("I mean, you can't just take a pipeline meant for the water and cover it with mountains of sand. It's not going to work."). I figure, hey, if a multibillion dollar mining corporation will headhunt a guy to fly him around the country, I can probably trust what he says. Or at least what he knows. I mean, hell, he's in Europe right now at a geologist's conference.

And so I read about groundwater. I read from the book that mining engineers will highlight line by line as they try figure out how best to interact with the way the world works around them. Because they've figured out that we can't just dictate. To get the most out of the natural environment you have to come to terms with its flow.

Water and Mining: Groundwater

From Groundwater by R. Allan Freeze and John A. Cherry...

"This may well be the only book that either of us will ever write...We recognize and appreciate the lifelong influences of our parents, our wives, our families, our teachers, and our students. This book is dedicated to all of them./This book is also dedicated to the taxpayers of Canada and the United States, few of whom will ever read it, but all of whom have contributed to its birth"

The endless circulation of water between ocean, atmosphere, and land is called the hydrologic cycle. The land-based portion is called groundwater.

To study groundwater is to understand the geological environments that control the occurrence of groundwater, to look at the physical laws that describe the flow of groundwater, about the chemical evolution that accompanies that flow, and how we fit into the cycle.

The old school emphasized the importance of groundwater solely as a resource, just a decade ago. They focused on the development of water supplies through wells and the calculation of aquifer yields. The only thing they considered "problems" were any threats to the extraction of water resources.

"But groundwater is more than a resource. It is an important feature of the natural environment; it leads to environmental problems, and may in some cases offer a medium for environmental solutions. It is part of the hydrologic cycle, and an understanding of its role in this cycle is mandatory if integrated analyses are to be promoted in the consideration of watershed resources, and in the regional assessment of environmental contamination."

Translation: to understand the water under our feet is to understand the movement of waves on the ocean, to understand that perfect breaking wave at Mavericks or La Jolla. And miners are starting to realize it.

And rich oilmen take note, the same forces that surfers take so deeply to heart -- swell generating earthquakes, varying landforms, and underground streams that hold up the back end of things (all elements involved with the hydrologic cycle) -- watching all these little details enfold over time is also like viewing the migration and accumulation of petroleum. You have to credit way we play in waves with allowing you to buy that big 10 gallon hat. That Harley you were given for the great job you did patching up the rig real quick, and turned down because you already had 6 -- thank the lonely idiot out in Tofino or the native Hawaiian on the North Shore in big swell season.

And here is a Navajo woman's reaction to the manipulation of groundwater in her homeland:

"I want to see them stop taking water from inside the mesa. The water underground works with the water that falls to the surface of Mother Earth, will wash away....I want to see the burial grounds left alone. All of my relatives graves are being disturbed. I want to see the mining stopped."

To get the way water moves through sand and rock and space and time why not start by looking at Darcy's Law.

Because all this liquid stuff that we swim in or drink from the ground or use to help us get at the uranium or petroleum -- you probably don't know the half of it --

"Water is formed by the union of two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom. The oxygen atom is bonded to the hydrogen atoms unsymmetrically, with a bond angle of 105 degrees. This unsymmetrical arrangement gives rise to an unbalanced electrical charge that imparts a polar characteristic to the molecule....Water is unusual in that the density of the solid phase, ice, is substantially lower than the density of the liquid phase, water. In the liquid phase the maximum density is achieved at 4 degrees Celsius....The formula H2O is a gross simplification from the structural viewpoint and is also a simplification from the atomic viewpoint. Natural water can be a mixture of" six nuclides. "Eighteen combinations of H-O-H are possible using these nuclides."

-Flow Nets by Analog Simulation
Mapping it out: "The analogy between electrical flow and groundwater flow is the basis for two types of analog model that have proven useful for the generation of quantitative flow nets.


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-Read a bottled water consumption blog called Liquid Asset here.

-Find out about the affects of groundwater on coastal areas and ecosystems here. The page is produced by the U.S. Geological Survey.


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So ya, I had fun reading about groundwater on a heated afternoon on my day off from both jobs anyways.... You'd be surprised what you'll find out about what you thought you knew if you only start flipping pages.