On one hand, solar, biomass, new vehicle technology and the smart grid all receive a boost of hundreds of millions of dollars under Obama’s plan. On the other, the president again suggested ending $36.5 billion in subsidies for oil and gas. Lest coal states and Republicans get too exercised, he also committed $545 million to carbon-capture technology and a whopping $36 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants, a move that drew howlsin some quarters.

Combined with a generous investment in biofuels, especially advanced ones, it appears the president is preparing to to herd resurgent Republicans and reluctant Democrats toward an energy bill this year.

Meanwhile, three of the West’s largest cities looked global warming in the eye and unslung their caulking guns. Seattle passed a law that requires large buildings report their energy use, San Francisco
invested $19 million in greener interiors, and Los Angeles took a step towardcollecting rainwater from its vast acreage of roofs.

A New York Times story detailed how thoroughly China is dominating the race toward renewables while the U.S. dithers. But the rising tide can cross the Pacific, as American Superconductors demonstrated when it
won a $70 million contract to provide wind-turbine control systems to Shenyang Blower Works.

Hybrid cars ended the week with soot on their faces as an authoritative study concluded that some hybrid models don’t save much gas and are loaded with too many expensive features. On Thursday, Toyota admitted that the 2010 Prius has a
braking problem linked to regenerative braking.

European sportscar makers fell over themselves announcing (or at least suggesting) models that could hug the road and hug a tree at the same time. BMW expects a plug-in hybrid by 2013, Ferrari plans a souped-up hybrid for…someday, and Jaguar toys with a hybrid powered by a tiny gas turbine.

In other news, tigers get a reprieve, and global warming may be the reason trees in the Eastern U.S. are growing faster.

The Week’s News from the Matter Network is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo Credit: www.democraticunderground.com

In a last-ditch effort to save climate legislation this year, a consortium of clean-energy groups met today in Washington and kicked off a week of intense planning and lobbying.

The notion of Clean Energy Week was born only a few weeks ago, when several groups realized they had planned events in the capital at the same time. Hasty organization didn’t prevent speakers at an opening press conference today from hammering on a consistent message: that the United States might gain 1.9 million jobs in the next decade if some version of a cap-and-trade bill is passed this year.

One participating group is the Coalition for the Green Bank, whose co-founder, Reed Hundt, said, “As the president made clear in his State of the Union address, a focus on green jobs is the immediate focus for the clean energy sector, and in fact by promoting the double whammy of clean energy generation and transmission along with energy efficiency, literally millions of fine new jobs can be created over the next several years.”

Organizers have high hopes for a “Business Fly-In” on Thursday, when 200 CEOs of clean-energy businesses arrive to meet with swing legislators and put a face on the possibility of jobs creation.

Other events include RETECH, a three-day conference between business, nonprofits and government on renewable energy.

Prospects for a climate bill retreated two weeks ago, when the Democratic Party lost its filibuster-proof majority in the Senate with the special election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

However, President Obama’s repeated emphasis on clean energy and jobs in his State of the Union speech last week has invigorated advocates that an agreement might still be won.

In Lobbying Congress, Clean Energy Advocates Seize on Jobs is a post from: The Ferris Files

We found our assigned campsite on a patch of riverbank so pristine that we could make out the prints a cougar had left the night before. Our tent stakes entered the silty soil without resistance. Steep ridges rose up on all sides. Millennia ago this valley had been hacked out by the Athabasca Glacier, so immense and muscular that it literally moved mountains. This humble river trickled down the mighty canyon it had created.

I looked around for the source of all that ice. To the southwest I could just make out the Columbia Icefields, where the Athabasca began, and saw isolated patches of ice that had retreated to the tops of the highest peaks. Global warming at work.

One doesn’t require a degree in glaciology to know that when this ice disappears, so will the river, and with it the freshwater that has supplied the towns and farms of central Alberta since…well, since there were towns and farms.

This glacier melt is the freshest, cleanest water on the planet. When it’s gone, what will we drink? Reclaimed ocean water? I felt brine in my throat.

Then I looked down at our bank, covered several feet deep with river sediment, the richest, most fertile soil you can imagine. The river has been dropping so fast that plants haven’t even had time to grow here.

It appears that only a few years ago, our campsite would have been underwater. That’s how fast the river is disappearing. Looking up at the dots of ice, I thought, just a few years left.

I looked around at our placid, majestic scene and had to fight back a sense of alarm. When I return to this campsite in a few years, will there still be a river? Will there be water for us to drink?

The Ice Machine, Running Dry is a post from: The Ferris Files

Greg Monzel holds a handful of street-caught amaranth.

Yesterday, on a 106-degree afternoon in Portland, Oregon, I met two food enthusiasts and searched for something to eat among the sidewalk weeds.

Urban foraging, as it’s called, is the latest wave in the local food movement, where “local” can mean a crack in the asphalt, and one adopts a relaxed definition of “food.” My guides were Rebecca Lerner and Greg Monzel, who have a passion for nourishing themselves with plants that most people consider pests.

In the blazing heat on NE Alberta Street, Greg spotted a purslane plant in the dirt strip by a Quonset hut. We bent down to taste a leaf. The dirt was littered with cigarette butts and Wrigley gum wrappers, which made me less than hungry. On the other hand, Rebecca told me, purslane is known to be rich in omega-3 fatty acids. The leaves had a refreshing crunch that reminded me of Romaine lettuce.

Why bother eating weeds? One day it might be a matter of survival. As global warming disrupts our crops in the same manner that this scorching afternoon browned the lawns, humans may need to learn to seek food from the margins. But Greg and Rebecca are having more fun than that. They seek to overturn the notion that food is something that must be bought from a store, or even grown in a field.

“We have this weird mentality that we hate these certain plants, for some reason. It’s kind of silly.” Greg said.

They also say it’s fun, spotting edibles where others see only overgrowth. We found mallow, a flower that reveals a cheese-wheel-shaped morsel when the petals are stripped away. We found volunteer blackberry bushes in a vacant lot and gorged on the warm berries. In the alley next to Dixon’s Rib Pit, we found a yellow dock plant and stripped off handfuls of the amber-colored grains, which the two would later boil like rice.

Recently, Rebecca tried to go an entire week eating only what she was able to forage on in the streets and parks of Portland and wrote about the experience on her blog. It didn’t go so well. After five days of nearly starving on a diet of stinging-nettle broth, pineapple weed tea and ant eggs, she awoke weak and seeing spots, and surrendered to the grocery store. She learned that the success of foraging depends greatly on when you do it (few plants were in an edible state in late May), and that foraging as a modern-world practice works best when it supplements a more conventional diet.

We returned to Rebecca’s place, where she and Greg steeped a tea from St. John’s wort, blackberry and huckleberry leaves, and self-heal and red clover flowers they had gathered that week. The brew had a slightly spicy flavor, respectable as any store-bought tea grown on a plantation thousands of miles away.

A Feast of Weeds is a post from: The Ferris Files

The bag bangs and rattles down the chute in a loud and satisfying way. It is a journey of only five floors but seems to take forever, long enough for me to reflect what makes this chute so much better than the trash cans I have known.

With my chute, I don’t have to carry my waste out to the side yard, or haul the bin to the curb each week, or worry about the trash can overflowing. Instead, I simply enjoy the sound of the bag arriving in the basement Dumpster with a soggy, feathery crash. Gone!

The chute works because of invisible elves. Every trash system relies on elves, of course – the Garbage Truck Elves who whisk the garbage cans off the curb, and the Dump Elves that store our nasties someplace we can’t see them, and sometimes Recycling Elves, the most magical of all, who transform empty cans of Campbell’s soup into the chassis of a Ford Focus.

The trash-chute system employs even more elves, including the Dumpster Removal Elf, the Refuse Room Cleaning Elf, and the occasional services of the Clogged Garbage Chute Elf. It’s like Santa’s Workshop around here.

Not to say that trash chutes are always problem-free. There are unspoken rules, rules so memorable when broken that one rarely makes the same mistake twice. Take the Bag Your Trash rule. I discovered it when I shook the contents of my vacuum-cleaner tube down the chute.Who knew there’s an updraft?

Handfuls of dust blew into my face, and suddenly the air of the refuse room was filled with lint. I beat a quick retreat and left one more chore for the Dustpan Elf.

In a few weeks I move out of this apartment building and return to the horizontal world of the trash can. I will miss the trash chute, its dramatic noises and the magical elves.

I will save my pennies for the day when, shopping at Target, I spy my first garbage robot.

Why Garbage Chutes Beat Trash Cans is a post from: The Ferris Files

Which immediately brought questions to mind. Who made the star of “Kiss My Brass” the voice of the city’s greenery? And since when do trees need a publicist?

I grew up in the California suburbs, where the trees grew thick and strong without the application of a single press release. No one needed to explain that the mulberry in the front yard was better than pavement, and this held true everywhere I looked: Trees were beloved, from the stoutest Sierra conifer to the most down-and-out palm in Beverly Hills.

In New York, however, MillionTreesNYC has declared trees as the biggest new sensation since Hannah Montana. Banners on the subway inform riders that trees provide shade, filter stormwater, clean pollution, and are quite nice to look at, too. Are New Yorkers such a bunch of Gollums that they need this spin?

Apparently they do. I did some research and found that if you’re a young tree, you might be better off in a logging camp. A 2004 study in Baltimore discovered that 325,000 of the city’s 2.5 million trees died each year, especially the saplings near big apartment buildings. Who could have guessed that a diet of urine, spilled Pepsi, and the occasional bodycheck by a car bumper isn’t the most nurturing environment?

Now I began to understand the logic behind the Million-Tree March. Flood the streets with a 100,000 saplings. Shake head regretfully as reports arrive of mysterious deaths near neighborhood taverns – somehow right around 2 a.m. – and knife attacks by deranged initial-carving lovers. The next year, send out 100,000 more.

One could draw a comparison between the MillionTreesNYC campaign and the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy: In the role of the slavering orc hordes, eight million New Yorkers; as the hapless, wide-eyed hobbits, a million tender saplings.

This puts Bette Midler in the awkward role of Gandalf, which might best be achieved by transferring that helmet of curls to her chin. We can at least be thankful these trees are deaf.

The battle will last a decade or longer, and the bodycount will be high. The gutters will run with fertilizer. If enough greenhorns are thrown in the trenches, a battalion of gnarled veterans will achieve the thick bark of maturity. The Big Apple might emerge a cooler, shadier Eden, where the maples stand tall and New Yorkers are saved from themselves.

Truly, those million trees are the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring, becomes the rose – uh, I mean the redbud.

Will the Trees Take Manhattan? is a post from: The Ferris Files

A closeup of Stuart Haygarth's "Spectacle" chandelier, made entirely from used eyeglasses. Photo credit: Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images.

Last year New York’s Museum of Arts and Design moved into a gleaming white cube on Columbus Circle,  giving no hint of its former identity as the American Craft Museum. But this popsicle-stick-and-glitter past helped me make sense of the current exhibit called “Second Lives.”

It demonstrates new uses for everyday things, and had me look at the rummage pile anew. (The exhibit continues through April 19. No photos were allowed; to see the best images, see the site here.)

The delight at MAD was in sighting an item that looked like your typical modern-art installation and, upon a closer look, finding it composed of things that might reside in my apartment: a tapestry made from high-end clothing labels, miniature trees cut from paper shopping bags, a chaise lounge soldered from quarters, a portrait assembled from standard black hair combs.

Many of these projects were so attractive and easily reproduced that they could easily be commercialized. Why couldn’t IKEA sell chandeliers made from old eyeglasses?  Or Target sell Buddha statuettes sculpted from phone books?

The exhibit asks, Why dig up new stuff from the ground? The material you need is right here!

As I left I brainstormed what art I could make out of the items that collect in the apartment no matter what I do. Light covers from plastic Food Emporium bags? Light fixtures from 7-Up cans? What could I confect from all my old MetroCards?

The Fine Art of Recycling is a post from: The Ferris Files

I saw a woman on 65th Street reach past the fence with one hand – the other held a cellphone to her ear –  and grab two stems with her fingers. A gardener had nurtured those shoots, someone else had trucked them into the city, and yet another person did the planting. The result: yellow florets of gentility amid the concrete and exhaust.

I heard the roots rip from the soil. The woman carried them off to adorn a cubicle or kitchen table. Two freebies for her, two less breaths of fresh air for the rest of us.

I’m Not OK with Your Bouquet is a post from: The Ferris Files

I braved the chill and dark to join this event because it combined two rarities. Jews are everywhere in New York, but if one’s not Jewish it’s unusual to see them worship. And no one goes out of their way to celebrate Apollo in Manhattan. Dionysus maybe, but not Apollo.

The event, called a Birkat Hachamah, comes only once every 28 years, when the sun rises in the same position it did on the week the Earth began. That’s approximate, of course; to learn how the rabbis arrived at this date, read this informative New York Times story.

As the sun peeked out over the East River, a trio played music. The congregants sang along with “Dayenu,” a hymn of thanks that Jews will sing again tonight during Passover. Among the men in yarmulkes, a black man in long dreadlocks mouthed the words with tears streaming down his face. The rabbi Joshua Metzger spoke over the roar of construction trucks roaring across 1st Avenue.

The ancient tradition of Birkat Hachamah is more relevant than ever because, Metzger said, “These days, natural processes are seen to be as magnificent as the splitting of the Red Sea.”

I squinted at the sun rising up from Queens and said, Amen.

Oy, the Sun! is a post from: The Ferris Files

LEDs at Greenhouse go easy on the eye, and the electricity.

The other night I attended a fundraiser at Greenhouse, the SoHo club that claims to be New York’s first eco-disco. The rumors said Stevie Nicks would be there. Even more than her purring vocals, I sought a bigger hit:  Can a hipster nightclub really be “sustainable,” or is it an illusion?

Since it opened in December in West Chelsea, Greenhouse has sought two stamps of approval. One is LEED status from the U.S. Green Building Council, to prove wise use of resources.  The club claims to have installed low-flow toilets, swanky waterless urinals, high-efficiency ventilation systems and bamboo paneling. It bought wind-energy credits to supply the power for the speakers, which tonight played (you guessed it) Stevie Nicks.

The second and more important stamp of approval is, of course, the clientele’s. A “green” nightclub must walk an uneasy line: kind to the Earth, yes, but without denying patrons the sense of luxury that they expect. No one wants to party with Dudley Do-Right.

The magic bullet? LEDs!

LEDs are the no-brainer of eco-chic. They use one-thirtieth the power of incandescent bulbs, going easy on the power grid, but they are twinkly and pretty and still novel enough to be hip. As an environmental gesture they are easily and immediately understood. I can’t confirm of Greenhouse’s other environmental claims without examining the water bill or drilling a sample of the bamboo siding. LEDs, we get.

Selso, Tim and Bobbi keep it chic at a corner table.

Greenhouse lays them on thick. Thousands of them twinkle from every wall. Alongside them climb ivylike leaves. Greenhouse says these are real plants, treated with fireproofing material, but between my fingers they felt like plastic. Hundreds of crystals hung from the ceiling.

I found my friend Bobbi and her friend Tim at a corner table. Under the transparent tabletop sprouted an arrangement of pinecones. In a moment we met Bobbi’s friend Selso, who wore a black cloth over her eyes and was, as the song goes, too sexy for this club.

Since this was a benefit the drinks were free. I was so bowled over by this fact that I neglected to notice if my martini was made with Vodka 360, the eco-brand that Greenhouse promotes as its house spirit.

Then Stevie Nicks arrived and proved a big disappointment. She walked with her entourage straight through to the VIP area, said she was delighted to see us all, then surrendered the mike without singing a note. Half an hour later she left. I found it much more enjoyable to talk with Selso, who commented how handsome I was before she sashayed away for a drink. I asked Tim, “So how do you know her?”

“Oh, Selso’s not a her,” Tim said. “Selso is a man.”

My jaw dropped. I watched Selso turn heads as he swung his hips and showed just a glimpse of corset. Which just goes to show that in New York, the women, and the clubs, are not necessarily to be trusted. The sparkly things can deceive you.

Eco? Maybe. Friendly? Mostly. is a post from: The Ferris Files

Saul Griffith breaks down his personal carbon footprint.

The conference, now in its second year, met as both the electronics industry and the green movement suffer from the economic downturn. Half the seats stood empty in the conference room, and the show floor held more journalists than there were exhibitors to them to interview.

Keynote speaker Saul Griffith, a design pioneer, advocated reducing our carbon footprint through what he called “the Montblanc pen approach to design”: Make far fewer products, but make them so well that they never need to be replaced.

But does that formula apply to gadgetry that is in perpetual upgrade? Stephen Harper, the director of energy and environment policy for Intel, said his company hopes to foster “a culture of repair rather than replacement” – an easy argument to make when your company makes just the microprocessors.

On the same panel, Michael Murphy, the manager of worldwide environmental affairs for computer-maker Dell, pointed out that constant replacement has its pluses: today’s Dell PC is far more energy-efficient than one made six years ago.

One thing is sure: The goal of a “sustainable” cellphone or music player is still many product cycles away.

Can Our Gadgets Really Be Green? is a post from: The Ferris Files

Emperor of the Air

“Emperor of the Air,” as read for Radhika Kumar is a post from: The Ferris Files

I’m writing to tell you that reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated and that the adventure continues here:

www.ayearinnewyork.com

That’s right, A Year In New York. I’ve moved to the Big Apple for a year! From July 2008 until July 2009, I am reporting every day for 365 days from the biggest, liveliest, most rat-infested hive of activity America has ever known, New York City.

What is it like to be a newcomer to America’s premier city at the beginning of the 21st Century? What sort of trouble can an outdoor adventurer find in deep urban canyons, on an island surrounded by fast-moving rivers, with a little open space known as Central Park?

That’s what I’m looking to create in a daily snapshot. Have a look, and post a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

A New Adventure is a post from: The Ferris Files

2. Make a comment such as, “Hello you two, at first I meant to get you a tiara and a pair of hot pants, but then I decided to get this other thing you’ll like even more.”

3. When prompted for your email address, enter David or Anjali’s email address. This way we won’t know who you are.

4. Don’t worry that your comment will be seen by others on the Internet. This comment will be forwarded to me, where I will gather the information and delete the message.

5. When we receive your note, we will remove the gift listing from the Registry page, so others won’t be able to claim it, unless we want a duplicate.

David & Anjali’s Wedding Registry is a post from: The Ferris Files

For an hour I hector a group of office workers, mostly women, to climb up and down flights of the fabled Dipsea Steps, and then I make them do all sorts of unpleasant, sweaty things with dumbbells in Old Mill Park. Often they are miserable. But they keep coming back.

This has been going on for several years now. One day a few months ago, while hanging around at the library that adjoins the park, I ran into the library’s director (and one of my students) in the company of a photographer.

The result is this photo which appears on the “Find Books & Do Research” page of the library’s website. The reference librarian in the picture is named Cathy and, truth be told, we are not finding books and doing research. We are clowning for the camera. Consider it our little secret.

Pretending to Work is a post from: The Ferris Files

Over the last 365 days, The Ferris Files has reported the highs and the lows, from the top of the highest mountain in South America (or very nearly, anyway) to the troughs of some sparkling Pacific waves. You, dear reader, have accompanied me as I danced drunk by a pond in Montana, sported a turquoise bolo tie around Santa Fe, ran through the mud in Seattle and on the famous Dipsea Trail, and, in one ignominious moment, fried all the wires in a homeless woman’s van.

The Ferris Files. We’ve come a blog way, baby.

Happy Blogiversary! is a post from: The Ferris Files

If that passes for “sport,” then we set a dangerously low bar for all those other sporty types like triathletes and hockey players and rodeo cowboys and wakeboarders who sweat and grunt and turn an ankle once in a while. Would you have respected Michael Jordan as much if, having just sunk a basket at the final buzzer, he had perspired so little that he could skip the shower and stroll right to the clubhouse for a bourbon? I mean really.

I recently tried golf for the first time, and after just one round I discovered how to make it the rough-and-tumble adventure that sport ought to be. Follow these instructions and you’ll have plenty of stories to swap with your mountain-biking, bass-fishing, elk-hunting, ultramarathon-running, cow-tipping, midget-throwing buddies over a pitcher of Coors Light.

1. Par? Forget about it! The “conventional wisdom” of golf asserts that he who hits the ball the fewest times wins. What kind of rule is that? If you’re looking for a sporty kind of workout, the work ought to be done by you, not the ball. No one ever burned off a carne asada burrito by shooting a hole in one.

The more times you hit the ball, the more opportunities you have to walk, put down your golf bag, swing, send a divot of turf flying, curse, swing again, curse again, pick up your bag, and walk the five yards to your ball’s new position.

All that exertion is great for your heart. However, it might be unpopular with the party of golfers behind you, who will call you names and throw things. Ignore them. Remember, this is your workout and they’re just living in it.

2. Take the route less traveled by. There’s a reason that the poet Robert Frost wandered in the woods and not down a fairway. The woods are so much more interesting.

Golfers spend vast sums of money on swinging lessons and titanium drivers in order to make their game as predictable as possible, which could be summed up as “sending the ball down the fairway and to the hole by the shortest possible line.” To which I say: Booooo-ring.

Imagine that after a round of golf you head to a bar to meet your friends, who are grizzled and dirty from a few days in the woods and have an elk strapped to the hood of their GMC Yukon.

When you tell them about the perfect thwock your ball made as you birdied on the 14th hole, they will not clap you on the back and buy you a round.  Rather, they will guffaw and demand that you buy them a round, and when they have spent all your money and left you passed out at the bar, they will steal your golf cart and stuff an elk eyeball into your drink holder.

If you want a good bar-worthy story, the last thing you want to do is stay on the fairway. Get comfortable with the bushes, the tall grass, and especially the stands of poison oak way off on the hillside. Hit the ball across other golfers’ fairways. When you get to a sand pit, really wallow in there, like a pig, if a pig wallowed in sand and carried a metal stick.

Note: bring a few extra balls.

3. Dress the part. Have you ever seen a pro football player at spring training going through drills wearing Dockers, two-tone leather shoes and a dumb little microfiber jacket? Of course not. That is because these are not the clothes one uses to exercise.

When you go on your next golf trip, consider wearing something more suitable to exercise, such as Converse high-tops or military fatigues or one of those reflective vests that make power-walkers look so cool. I go for the “Tony Hawk meets Lance Armstrong” look – plastic elbow guards and knee guards and those stretchy black pants that make the derriere look just smashing. Besides, it’s smart to wear a helmet; those little balls can come out of nowhere.

With these simple rules, you might be able to save your money on a gym membership and instead spend it on green fees, or rather, one green fee, as golf is just a leeeeetle more expensive than other sports.

When you limp back to the clubhouse, covered in mud and welts and grass clippings and with that big smile on your face, you may find the door locked. You might see that all the golfers inside are brandishing their putters as they cower behind a line of nervous Mexican busboys.

Remember it’s just because they’re jealous. Don’t take it personally. They just wish they could have a golf workout that’s half as exciting as yours.

How to Make Golf a Real Sport is a post from: The Ferris Files

I squared up to the ball – somewhere I heard that’s what you’re supposed to do, square up – and ignored the stares of my companions, including my Dad and two guys named Billy and Gus. Everyone wondered how the new guy would do. I swung.

Thwack! The ball sailed long down the fairway, past where the other three men had hit, and sliced it to the right – that’s what you call it, a slice – around the trees and toward the hole.

“Oooooooooohhh,” everyone said together.

It was all pretty much downhill from there.

On the third tee, I sent two balls into the berry bushes with such extreme prejudice that I probably created some tasty berry jam, if only I’d been able to find it, or the balls.

I sliced another ball so high into a stand of Monterey cypress that I thought it might just stay there. Then I saw the white dot fall. The ball landed on the asphalt path, and upon encountering such a hard surface it rocketed all the way across the adjoining fairway, where I had to make a walk of shame past another party of golfers. I did this not once but twice.

At least they didn’t yell at me, like the party of duffers behind us. My zigzagging, par-12 style was probably annoying them plenty. Then I landed in a sand trap (first of three times), fought my way out and walked off. “Hey! Clean the trap!” someone hollered. Ooops. I guess that’s what that rake next to the sand trap is for.

All of this was a blast, I’ll have you know. The nice thing about being a new-sport virgin is that everything you do is a personal best.

“That,” I told Dad after another ten-stroke disaster, “was the best fourteenth hole I have ever shot.”

Having a Ball is a post from: The Ferris Files

I visited again last week and found the people. In my absence the entire snout of the Baja peninsula – the area between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas known as “The Corridor” – had been colonized by hotels like the Querencia and the Westin Regina. Somebody sprinklered the desert and spawned golf courses.  They paved roads for the SUVs and in the medians they planted yucca and blue fan palms, wild plants made tame.

And the concrete trucks are just revving their engines. All over Cabo San Lucas and in the smaller towns along the coast, the empty windows of half-finished cinder-block buildings stare back at you. Rebar reaches into the sky like minarets. At the new Home Depot, “Grand Opening!” banners snap in a dry wind.

Part of the appeal of Mexico is eating tacos de camaron at a roadside palapa when a rusted-out old Chevy rattles past with its tailgate fastened with baling wire and five guys standing in the back.

Now there are roadsigns reminding you that seatbelts are the law and the truck speeding by is much more likely to be a shiny and sleek Ford F-150 Lobo. Which is fitting because everyone seems to be moving just as fast as they can. Look around the traffic entering Cabo San Lucas and you see a lot less cowboy hats and a lot more button-up cubicle shirts.

Drive north from Cabo San Lucas and immediately the landscape opens to wilderness again. On the road to Pescadero, however, I passed by a gated community, or at least the shell of one; it had a gate, a street, a guard, but not a single building yet. Flags flapped above a wasteland of cactus, which made me wonder what exactly the community was gating itself against. Tarantulas, maybe?

When I come back in another six years, I am sure I will find out.

The Peninsula vs. the Peso is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo Credit: jstangroom's flickr page

Sure, I said. Something about her seemed a little strange, but a dead battery is a dead battery. I drove my shiny little red box of a car around so it was nose to nose with her hulking van, which, I now noticed, was more than a little dirty and piled high in the back with stuff. She produced a set of jumper cables and she mumbled something about being in town to visit her daughter, who is in the Navy, and her battery being dead because she’d left a light on overnight.

So I connected the red end of the cable to the red lead of my battery and the black clamp to the black lead, just like dad taught me, and experienced the same pang of doubt I have no matter how many times I use jumper cables. Wait – is it positive to positive and negative to ground? Or negative to negative and positive to ground? Or does it need to be grounded at all? The hell with it. Let’s see what happens. I got back in my car and turned the key.

She climbed in behind her wheel. Nothing happened for a moment. Then I saw smoke curling gently from the seams of her battery.  Smoke began to drift up from other parts of her engine compartment too, and I quickly switched my car off before something caught fire.

The air smelled like fried wire and when we got out to look the reason was obvious: every piece of cable we could see in her engine was smoking, its rubber housing melted off. The jumper cables were hot to the touch. As I wincingly removed them from my battery I noticed that cable itself had gone soft and melted a black smudge on my grille.

She had mistakenly attached the red to the black and the black to the red, so instead of charging her battery I had given her a giant power jolt, like a child sticking her finger into an electrical outlet.

“I think, uh, I think your car might need to be towed to a repair shop,” I said, feeling apologetic though I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. “A jumper cable isn’t going to do a lot of good.”

“Yeah, my car needed a jump the other day too,” she said, unperturbed. “I ran out of gas and it just died at the station. Can you believe it?”

Do you need some help?

“No, I’ve got a friend coming. We stay sometimes on 14th Street in West Sacramento, at the homeless shelter. Do you know it?”

I shook my head, no. I got back in my car, which has its insurance paid and tags valid and its oil changed recently, the kind of little measures that assure me my car – and life – is in good working order. I knew a little problem with my car could turn into a big problem. She didn’t seem to have the same foresight. And she’s homeless.

Which makes me wonder. Maybe a person ends up homeless not because she’s lazy or unlucky, but because somewhere in her circuitry a fuse blew out. Maybe a disturbance like that makes a person blind to a small problem becoming a big one.

An Electrical Disturbance is a post from: The Ferris Files