A Shock on the River, a Sale at the Caves

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Photo #671: Mississippi BoatLocation Taken: Mississippi River, near St. Louis
Time Taken: November 2012

I’m reading yet another book on earthquakes and volcanoes, and hit the section on the New Madrid Earthquakes, a series of extremely strong quakes in 1811-1812 along the Mississippi River, near the Missouri/Kentucky/Tennessee border. I’ve read about these quakes dozens of times, but this time I recalled an interesting bit of trivia I learned when I visited Mammoth Caves in Kentucky years ago.

Mammoth Caves was a great source of saltpeter, one of the necessary components of gunpowder. And saltpeter production was ramping up in preparation for the War of 1812. And yet, despite the ever increasing value of saltpeter, the various people who had been gathering it from the caves all decided to sell their rights to it to a single owner, Charles Wilkins.

Wilkins ramped up the saltpeter business to industrial scales, providing a very large percentage of that good for the Americans fighting in the war that raged for the next three years. Once the saltpeter business stopped being lucrative, the caves passed hands a few times, and eventually became a National Park. If all those small land owners hadn’t sold their shares off, who knows if that would have ever happened. It certainly would have been far more difficult for the National Park people to negotiate ownership of a hundred people versus just one.

So why did all those people sell at that opportune moment, right before the caves became an economic bonanza?

The New Madrid Earthquakes, of course.

Less than six months before that sale, a series of gigantic quakes shook the area, destroying towns all along the Mississippi, and scaring people for hundreds of miles around. Including those living in Mammoth Caves territory.

It was a good thing all four of the major earthquakes (ranging between magnitudes 7.0 and 8.6) hit in the early morning hours, or else those saltpeter gatherers might just have been down in the caves when the ground started moving. As terrifying as the quakes were on the surface, it would have been even worse if you were underground at the time, the ground shaking back and forth by as much as a foot each jolt, your lantern extinguished due to falling over, and the rock ceiling above you groaning in a most unsettling way.

And while thankfully that wasn’t the case, the destroyed towns and toppled chimneys were definitely enough to make a whole lot of people think this area might just be a rather poor place to settle down in. That offer to buy their land must have seemed god-sent.

There hasn’t been another earthquake at that scale in that area since then. A 6.6 one hit in 1895, and a 5.4 in 1968. Both damaged buildings, but didn’t get to the town-destroying level. Smaller earthquakes happen there all the time, though only about one per year is strong enough to be noticeable. The biggest earthquakes tend to hit that area about every 300 years. It’s been 200 already. However, this is a very unusual fault zone, and is nowhere near fully understood by scientists, so who knows what the future will bring.

  

I bet all of you are staring at something that produces light RIGHT NOW!!!

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Photo #670: Ferry LightLocation Taken: North Sydney, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012

Have you ever stopped to think how miraculous lamps and other modern lights are?

With just the flick of a switch, we turn night into day!

I know, I know, most of you are going “So?” right now. But that’s because you haven’t really thought about it.

For millennia, all we humans had to see what was around us at night were the moon, the stars, and fires. The moon is a fickle light, fading in and out as the month passes. The stars are glorious, but not exactly the best for illumination. And fire, well, that’s a different miracle. One that requires a lot of maintenance and carries a lot of danger with it.

Electric lights, however, those are a very different thing. Sure, they have the downside of needing a power source, but with batteries, they’re still far more portable than even the best torch. Imagine you’re traveling in the woods with a torch looking for a lost child, and you find her up in a tree, too afraid to come down herself. What do you do with the torch while you climb up to get her? You definitely can’t carry it and climb. Setting it on the ground or leaning it against a tree might set the woods on fire. If you’re lucky, there’s a patch of bare ground nearby, but how often do you see bare ground in a forest? Perhaps you could stick it upright in the ground, but that’s a difficult thing to manage when one end is made of burning hotness. The best option is to bring someone else with you from the start, to either hold the torch or climb up in your place. A flashlight, on the other hand, you can drop at a moments notice, and easily position to illuminate where you need light the most.

Modern life is built around the electric light. It lets us work and play without caring about position of the sun, lets us browse the internet into the wee hours of the morning, lets us travel around the clock. And it doesn’t cause fires, and needs almost no maintenance. And they can endure harsh conditions. The light in this photo is attached to a ferry, exposed to the weather and salt water all day every day, something no self-respecting fire would ever put up with.

Heck, one of the ways you can tell how powerfully ubiquitous it is is how those who live with it don’t even think of it as anything special.

If you’ve ever had a power outage lasting overnight, you know how few things you can do when there’s no light. You can talk or do other similar things with the people around you, or you can just go to bed.

Or, I suppose, these days you can just pull out your smartphone or tablet and play on that for as long as the battery lasts. That’s got electric lights in it too, mind you. And once that’s gone, well, you can sit and stare into the blackness trying not to think about all the things that could be lurking out there, waiting for you to just close your eyes for a moment…

  

Ice Does Not Think. Ice Just IS. I am Ice Right Now.

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Photo #668: Ice WaterLocation Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

I think my brain is frozen.

I suspect it might have to do something with the bath I just took, and the fact that we currently don’t have hot water. And the cold water is really cold, because it’s been hanging out right around freezing for a bit, which affects the reservoirs the water’s coming from.

Well, aside from the time it was solidly below freezing. That’s what froze and then burst a pipe heading out of the hot water heater. It can be really irritating to live in a house that’s a hundred years old and acts it. We don’t exactly have anything even vaguely resembling climate control, just a furnace that was giving its all. Which, alas, was not enough.

We’ve had a plumber in. They said there was no way to even begin fixing the pipe without taking up the tile and the like. So it’s still not fixed, nor will likely be in the near future.

Hopefully it won’t take as long to fix as the last time this sort of thing happened. That was when I was a young kid, perhaps seven years old, and the hot water heater itself broke. We hauled water heated on the stove up the stairs to the bathtub for more than a year before everything lined up and things got fixed.

Which, perhaps, is why I’m not heating and hauling water for my baths. I burned myself one too many times doing that.

So I’m just going for pure cold water. And pouring it over my head. Repeatedly.

It is very cold water.

My brain is ice.

  

Evil Guy, eh? I couldn’t even bother to give him a real name, sheesh.

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Photo #667: Evil GuyTime Drawn: February 2006

This particular file has the name of “Evil Guy”. That was the entirety of what I decided was important about this particular character. And really, there’s nothing specifically evil about him, though his expression has a lot of callous greed in it. Which, actually, was what I was trying to go for.

This is one of a set of drawings I made when I bought a brush pen. If you don’t know, that’s a felt-tip marker that has a cone-shaped flexible tip. It acts a lot like a tiny paintbrush, allowing you to vary how thick the line is fairly easily.

That line variance is a surprisingly important thing once you get good at drawing. It lets you bring shadows and highlights into the line drawing itself, to give a hint of the color gradients that exist in real life even when you’re working in pure black and white.

I never got very good at using a brush pen. It didn’t take too long for me to decide that its largest line width was just too thick for my tastes, and that it was tough to get smooth lines with it. But I still work with line weight variation a lot, both in my digital and physical pieces.

And this piece did let me play with coloring in Photoshop. I was just learning the program at the time, applying what I’d learned in my art classes and following random tutorials on the internet.

I haven’t a clue how I made those fancy circular shapes in the background. I think I was following some sort of tutorial, but I might have also just stole them from another image. But then again, I’ve always kept away from incorporating other peoples works in my own, so that’s not too likely. Ah well, maybe I’ll find that tutorial again sometime. Though it has been about eight years since I made this, and the internet is a very different place, so who knows if it even exists anymore.