Category: Letter

Thanks for your article on global warming. We are not hearing much about it in this country from the corporate press. My opinion is that Minnesota will be a “warm Nebraska” much sooner than 50 years from now. One of the factors that is not taken into account in some of the computerized models is the diminishing snow cover that will reflect less infrared radiation back into space. Another factor is that obsolete technologies, such as the internal combustion engine, are growing faster than the world’s population. In Beijing, the streets were once clogged with bicycles. Now they are clogged with automobiles. When the nations of the world should be scrambling to build renewable energy technology that doesn’t create greenhouse gases, and when we should be taking emergency action to deploy a national and worldwide conservation program, our oil-friendly leaders are carrying on with a war that will spew megatons of unnecessary toxins and gases into the world’s atmosphere. Even if most of the scientists around the world are wrong about global warming, is it still OK to fill our air with cancerous filth? I don’t think so.
Don Johnson, Minneapolis

One day at college, in New York City, we were discussing getting smacked by a cab or a bus. What would they do with you if you were not identified [Hidden Treasures, April]? I was told you would be brought to Potter’s Field—taken across the river and buried standing up, after they took a snapshot of your face. So one fine Saturday in May, we went to the old Potter’s Field in New York City, burial site of the unwanted and unknown. I could not believe the files and files and files of photos, some dating way back, many children (of the streets) and others who were just found and not claimed. It was fascinating. There are no markers, just land. They did, indeed, bury you standing up and on top of one another. Kind of creepy and mostly sad. We intended to stop a few hours, and spent nearly eight looking through these files of men, women, children, and some with both woman and child—nameless photos of people buried over the period of a century. This was way back in 60s. I never thought of Minnesota as having any potter’s fields—I thought that name was just for New York City’s.
Joy Kangas, Hamel

Thank you! I was absolutely thrilled when I saw your interview with Louise Erdrich [“The Novelist at Rest,” March]. I’ve been a long time fan of hers, but had no idea that she had a bookstore right in my old stomping grounds. I cannot wait to go there and spend an entire afternoon shopping and reading. I haven’t ever seen your mag before, but will definitely look for it from now on. It’s fabulous, and I look forward to reading it for years to come.
Melinda (Lin) Galarneau, Farmington

The other day, Amtrak announced that the Empire Builder—the famous train from Seattle to St. Paul—could not make it through its normal route at Glacier National Park here in Montana. “Snow slides” threatened the tracks, and passengers were routed around the hazard on buses.

In the last five weeks we’ve gotten ten feet of snow. The last time this much snow fell in such a short period was 28 years ago. Needless to say, the backcountry has been a winter wonderland of seemingly endless days of perfect powder. It’s also been dangerous. There have been six deaths due to avalanches where I live, the mountainous regions surrounding Yellowstone Park. Three fatalities in the Tetons, two in the Beartooths, and one in the Crazies. Three were snowmobilers, two snowboarders, and one skier.

The dangers of backcountry skiing are never far from my mind. I always carry rescue equipment—an avalanche beacon, a shovel, and a probe pole—as do all the people I ski with. I’ve taken courses on avalanche safety and snowpack evaluation, and I dig test pits every time I go skiing. Despite this, I have been in an avalanche.

It’s not impossible for me to describe what it’s like to be in an avalanche. The visceral part I can explain easily. The sonic boom. The wall of snow 12 feet high that ran over me. The boxing match I was involved in, with 30 heavyweights all punching me at once. The tumbling that should have won me a gold medal in gymnastics.

The thoughts in my head are easy to relay, I remember all of them. Watching the wall of snow coming toward me and thinking, Well, if I turn my back to it and do a backstroke sort of thing, maybe I can keep myself on top. When the wall of snow hits me, I realize that no, I can’t do the backstroke. I’m not even sure where my back is in relation to the rest of my body. I’m going to die. Susie is going to be pissed. Oh, and bummed out too. I’m going to die in a collision with snow. I’m going to die when I hit the rocks below. This thing is so big that even if I live through it, I’m going to die from the amount of snow. Was that light? I’m going to die. I can’t believe it. But I don’t want to die. Not like this, all alone, under snow.

All this I can explain, and to some extent you’ll understand. What I can’t explain is the fear, a fear so intense that I have no words for it. A fear I can’t even summon into my memory, I can’t access it in any way. That I can’t recall the fear is probably a self-preservation mechanism. I certainly wouldn’t be able to ski, if the actual full force of that fear hit me every time the thought of an avalanche came into my mind. My memories are compelling enough without that fear. To keep skiing, I have to rationalize. I do other dangerous things: climbing, kayaking, riding in cars. The worst injury I’ve ever suffered was walking in a downtown Bozeman intersection when a car decided to run a red light.

This doesn’t mean I’m cavalier about risk. There are days when I decide the snowpack is too unstable to ski. Other days I only ski in the trees. But avalanche safety is not a crystal clear thing. It’s fairly easy to know when it’s unsafe to ski, but it’s almost impossible to know that it’s totally safe. To put your skis on is to acknowledge that you’re willing to take a risk, but so is getting in your car.

Surviving an avalanche is somewhat different than other near death experiences I’ve had. By contrast I’ve had climbing accidents that never fully registered. Rockfall is fast. It misses you by ten feet, or three inches, and you say “I almost died.” But it’s not real, it’s already in the past. Avalanches give you time to contemplate mortality while you are in them, and any change in me came from that time of fear, the foreknowledge of impending death. I now know, in no uncertain terms, that I am afraid to die.

It’s hard when I hear about an avalanche victim. A movie plays through my head of what happened to me. I remember feeling fear, and I think about dying alone, under the snow. But, it’s a little abstract now, and it doesn’t get to my heart. What gets to my heart is to go out and carve through two feet of fresh powder, like a porpoise playing in a cold, dry ocean.—H.J. Schmidt

Usually I enjoy your “letters” from far-flung places. They give insight into what’s going on on the ground. That said, what the heck were you guys thinking when you published Wade Savage’s “Letter from Baghdad” [The Rakish Angle, March]? Is the fact that a Minnesotan was there, like a Kilroy on the wall, more important to your editorial needs than the accuracy of the facts asserted therein? Good grief, people! Just because a local yokel travels to a particularly verboten portion of the Middle East does not mean he is qualified to judge what goes on there. If Mr. Savage had managed to read a history book published after 1930, he would have known that pan-Arabism, which is what he says is most Arab’s profound dream, was given a whirl by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 60s. He began the Ba’ath Party in Egypt, and while it had limited organizational success, spreading to Syria and Iraq, it failed miserably because they could not unite under the common goal of one Arab nation-state. Why did it fail, you ask? Perhaps because, while the goal was noble, the cultural differences from one country to the next were insurmountable in practice. For Mr. Savage’s information: there is an Arab EU: it’s called the Arab League. There’s also OPEC, if you really want to delve into economic cooperation issues. Mr. Savage, despite his travels to Iraq, would be well served by sitting his butt down in a college level Middle East History class.

Kathleen Nelson, Edina

I greatly enjoyed Stephanie March’s “Taters!” in the March 2003 issue. However, I believe that the potato is heading once again for Cinderella status. If you have a look at the new U.S. Government “Food Pyramid,” the potato is now considered a most unfortunate form of carbohydrate.

Richard Webb, Minneapolis

Terrific article on the history of TCRT and the light rail system [“Get Rail,” March]. Best researched in the last 30 years. A nice postscript would be totaling up the cost of all the light rail studies that have been done over the last 40 years.

Richard Landry, Minneapolis

Craig Cox’s analysis of light rail was shallow and poorly researched. His most glaring omission was his failure to consider the issue of “capacity.” A single track of transit can carry 40,000-50,000 people per hour. A dedicated busway can carry just 20,000 people per hour. A car lane can carry an absolute maximum of 4,500 people per hour, and that’s with three people per car! Clearly, light rail transit has the greatest peak-demand hauling capacity. With no more room for highway lanes downtown, the only way to significantly increase capacity in the long run is by building a light rail transit network. Secondly, Cox doesn’t consider regional air pollution which frequently exceeds safe levels during the summer months. While diesel trucks and buses account for only 2-3 percent of highway vehicles, they are responsible for 25 percent of the smog-forming pollution and over half the particulate matter in our city’s air. Only electric rail (or electric buses) would significantly improve regional air quality. Finally, Cox makes some historical errors. The Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company was forced to share much of its right of way with cars, eliminating its potential advantage in speed and peak capacity. More importantly, Fred Ossanna was in the pocket of General Motors, whom he hired as “consultants” to rip up the TCRT and convert it to buses. GM repeated this process in hundreds of American cities, using front companies like National City Lines and Yellow Bus Company, to purchase and destroy trolley systems. A good account of all this can be found in David St. Clair’s book The Motoriza-tion of American Cities.

Andy Singer, Rake contributor,
St. Paul

We were in the Al-Amariya bomb shelter, listening to the guide’s report that 400 women and children were incinerated here when U.S. “smart bombs” found their way into the structure. The men and boys had stayed home to prevent looting of their houses. I was standing next to Ahmed, the friendly, ever cheerful professor of veterinary science at Baghdad University, who led us from one site and meeting to the next. And I asked him whether it was only a bomb shelter (because it looked to some in our group like a communications center, and perhaps at one time had been one). He became agitated and his face took on a grim expression. He told me that relatives of his had died in the shelter. As sympathetically as I could, I said that our government had admitted it was a mistake. I had difficulty believing they would deliberately bomb an installation they knew to be a bomb shelter. “Why not?” he said. “Your government deliberately bombed and destroyed the bridge over the Tigris River at a time they knew people and vehicles would be crossing it.”

As our visit to the shelter was ending, a congenial young reporter from Austrian Radio wanted to interview me. He asked me to comment on the fear of many Austrians—that if Saddam Hussein were not deposed he could become another Hitler. Saddam has the psychological capability to emulate Hitler, I said. But he lacks not only the geopolitical capability, given the fractious Middle East, but also the economic and military capability, which was lost in the Gulf War and the resulting sanctions and controls.

During the first day of the conference, I had lunch beside the Tigris, with several professors of veterinary medicine. Two splendid Arabian horses were being saddled up in a nearby pasture, and behind them in the distance were the twin stacks of the city’s electric power plant. I asked what would happen if the plant were destroyed—as it surely would be—when the bombs started falling again. They said it would be like 1991: For weeks if not months, residents would have to use candles, do without refrigeration and flush toilets, and get their water from the polluted river.

During a trip to ancient Babylon the next day, a professor of architecture said that all Arabs share the dream of an Arab nation that includes all the Arab states, and that Saddam Hussein is the only leader still alive who genuinely represents that dream. I said it seemed to me an unrealistic goal—how could those independent states ever agree on a leader or a central government? He replied that it need not be a nation, but perhaps something like the European Union. If the Europeans can have such a union, why not the Arabs?

On our last day in Iraq, six of us visited the Um-Al-Maarak (“Mother of All Battles”) mosque in the outskirts of Baghdad. It is a gleaming gem in blue and white, surrounded by inviting pools and walkways. It was built by Saddam Hussein, and is the model for an enormous mosque under construction, to be called the Saddam Mosque. It is intended to be the largest in the world. We were told that its grounds form a map of all the Arab countries from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, visible from above.

I thought that finally I understood the “problem of Iraq.” History is repeating itself, but on a much larger scale. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Turks were driven out of the Middle East by tribes of the Arabian peninsula assisted by British soldiers, one of whom was Colonel T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who supported a “pan-Arabic” union of the tribes. When Lawrence asked his superiors to supply the Arabs with cannons for use against the Turks, his request was rejected for fear that with such armaments the Arabs could become too powerful to manipulate. Today, the United States and various other western countries wish to unseat Saddam Hussein because they fear that he or some leader inspired by his example will one day establish a union of Arab states that will control all the resources of member states, especially the oil, and thus become a powerful economic competitor to the western nations and their various unions and alliances.

A more recent history seems to be repeating itself, too. To justify the Vietnam war, our government demonized Ho Chi Minh, leader of the movement to unify Vietnam. The U.S. argued that the result of inaction would be the domino-like collapse of the countries of Southeast Asia, and maybe even a Chinese invasion of our country (by sea, in their navy of what were then mostly junks?). Today, our government demonizes Saddam Hussein, and insists that he must be removed to protect us from anthrax and nerve gas (to be delivered in his 300 km-range rockets?).

It was shocking to learn that Eisenhower, perhaps our most honest president, had said that the Vietnam war was really about the “tin, tungsten, and rubber” of Southeast Asia. Today we are more cynical. We’re not surprised when our commentators generally agree that a principal aim is to insure that the vast oil reserves of Iraq remain available at acceptable prices. That doesn’t mean we have to assent. A common theme of the anti-Vietnam-war movement was that a Pax Americana—the U.S. as policeman of the world—was neither acceptable nor possible, and most Americans agreed. Today, our government maintains that a Pax Americana is both viable and right—whether the United Nations concurs or not. An alarming number of our fellow citizens seem to agree.—Wade Savage

I beg to differ with a few of the assumptions Mr. Hans Eisenbeis makes in his recent article on SUVs [Good Intentions, February], but in the interest of space, I’ll only rant on one: I have no self-hatred nor is any element of my sense of self tied up in my opinions about SUVs. I hate SUVs so much, I even renamed them a few years ago—after practically being run off the road once again by a white, gold-trimmed, dinosauric SUV driven by a petite soul whose head was no bigger than the “switch to 4-wheel drive” toggle. I now call them FUVs. The new name reflects what I really wanted to say after that incident. But, due to my “reasonable” nature (apparently due to my Northern European roots, according to Hans), I could only sigh. And daydream of making a citizen’s arrest for attempted vehicular homicide. I hate the FUVs of the world because:
—I can’t see around them when they’re behind or in front of me. They impair my ability to drive defensively.
—They’re gaudy—incredibly ugly—and now so damn popular that my otherwise psuedo-cool-n-campy view of Anywhere, U.S.A.’s Main Street is wrecked. It’s now just plain old ugly.
—The popularity of gas-guzzling FUVs has raised the price of gasoline. I am absolutely, positively 100 percent sure of it.
—When FUVs park next to me, I have to pull out of a spot blindly. If I ever hit anyone/thing because of that, I’m just going to have the victim call the FUV owner’s insurance company.
I hate very few things. I hate bigots, I hate polyester pants, and now I hate FUVs. It’s that simple. No extra passion, no nothin’, other than they drive me crazy. People I love and care for drive them. My siblings drive them, my friends drive them, my boss even drives them. But I’ll always hate FUVs—no matter who drives them or how they’re packaged; no matter how “cute” or “cool” automakers try to make them.

Betsy Gabler, St. Paul