North Coast Journal January 25, 2007 : IN THE NEWS : SHORT STORIES

January 25, 2007

Heading: Short Stories, photo of Dinie Lean at her Tompkins Hill ranch.

LOUD PAVEMENT On a clear and breezy Friday around rush hour, Gerridina "Dinie" Lean was finishing the last of the day's chores. The sun was beginning its descent behind the hills and a few more horses still needed to be fed. On Lean's 42-acre Tompkins Hill ranch in Fortuna about a mile from Highway 101, the Ferndale Valley stretches out below, green and vast, and the sparkling Eel River winds its way to the Pacific. "That's Centerville Beach," Lean said, pointing to a dark blue sliver on the horizon. Wearing tall rubber boots and dirty jeans, she opened a metal gate and tromped through the mud and horse manure toward a big stallion at the far end of the fence. Feeding on hay, the horse seemed scarcely to notice the little woman who worked on the buckles of a jacket that wrapped around his torso. The weather had been cold lately and most of the 12 horses were wearing coats for warmth. The night before it snowed. Stepping out of the corral, Lean, 59, headed up a steep hill toward the top of her acreage and talked about the huge snowflakes that blanketed her hilltop property the day before. There was no evidence left of it now.

And that afternoon, Lean told another story that was slightly hard to believe: The noise of the highway was deafening. There were days she felt like she was standing in the middle of traffic. But go figure, today, there was nothing, not a peep from the river of cars below, just bird song and wind in the trees. She knew it seemed implausible to a newcomer, particularly to a city slicker -- if you can call Eureka a city -- that such an irritating noise would plague this place. And as much as she loathed the roar of the 101 she seemed to want it back at this moment more than anything.

With her head cocked to the side and her greenish-blue eyes dancing on the torn earth, she got quiet and listened hard. Nothing. She tried covering her ears with her gloved hands and then quickly removing them and listening hard again. But it didn't help. The city slicker wished for the sound, too, but it was no use. The northern wind was too strong, according to Lean, and was masking the sound. But if the breeze were coming from the west, well, you'd want to get your earplugs then. It would be so loud you just might pull your hair out in frustration. In fact, Lean's hair is getting wispy, and she thinks it's stress-related. The noise bothers her that much. The topic chokes her up, brings tears to her eyes because, she said, things just aren't the way they used to be. It was always so quiet here, not like Southern California where she grew up. And that's why she loved her home so much. It was the definition of peaceful.

A noise started then, a grumbling engine, but it was just Lean's partner, Rogar Hespelt, hauling hay on a quad. He confirmed Lean's claims: The noise was really obnoxious at times. They've both talked with Caltrans about the problem, which they say has gotten worse since the agency laid new asphalt on a section of the highway between the 12th Avenue and Fernbridge exits a couple of years ago. At first, Lean said Caltrans told her they actually had used a noise-deterring asphalt, but later corrected that and said it was a special porous asphalt that minimizes the risk of hydroplaning. As the years go by, the sound gets worse and Lean and Hespelt guess that as the asphalt degrades it gets noisier. They're hoping that next time the area is repaved, Caltrans can use a different type of concrete.

Caltrans engineers could not comment at length about the topic before deadline, but Mark Suchanek, Caltrans deputy for maintenance and operations for District 1, said that there was no before and after noise study done on that section of the highway. "If anything," he said, "repaving should have made it quieter, not noisier." Suchanek said, however, that he can't discount that Lean is hearing more noise now, since the decibel levels were never measured. The highway is typically repaved every five to 10 years, he added.

-- Helen Sanderson

TOP

dingbat dingbat dingbat

WHITE PAVEMENT Fhyre Phoenix awoke in the middle of the night, brain ablaze. He had an idea for saving the world! Again. But this time, he thought, the solution was one that ordinary citizens could enact with ease. There was just one minor, niggling obstacle. So let's hark back to where it all began: in the letters to the editor section of the Jan. 9 Arcata Eye.

"I woke in the middle of the night with the concept of creating `Urban Icebergs' to replace the ones melting at the North and South Poles," wrote Phoenix, an Arcatan activist of the busiest proportions. "Urban Icebergs are made by painting rooftops and blacktop (parking lots, driveways, city streets and even highways) white so that these surfaces would reflect light and heat back into space and perhaps slow global warming." It was something "that every homeowner, painting contractor, town, city, county, state and country could take part in." Only problem: He didn't know how to achieve the whiteness. Paint? Stain? And thus he ended his letter: "Any ideas? Anyone?"

Ah, a challenge. Shunting aside, for now, past Phoenix light bulbs that flickered then went dark -- including a proposed topper over Highway 101 through Arcata upon which an "urban eco-village" could sprout with trees, bike paths, plazas and affordable domiciles -- we fondled the notion of white pavement. Could it be? Would it be ... possible? Gathering nerve, we contacted Peter Lehman, an environmental resource engineering professor at HSU and director of the Schatz Energy Resource Center.

Sounding slightly incensed, but patiently accommodating, Lehman responded first with a suggestion: Fhyre Phoenix "should take a course in science."

"First of all, you're not going to paint the streets white -- it wouldn't stick," Lehman said. "Painting the buildings' roofs white, that's not a bad idea. It would keep the buildings cooler."

Indeed, the notion of urban "heat islands," where the local climate heats up from all the pavement and concrete, isn't new. To combat it, some cities even have green-roof laws that require new retail buildings -- including a Wal-Mart in Chicago -- to be roofed with a cover of vegetation.

Still, white rooftops would have little planet-wide impact, Lehman said. Sure, how reflective the earth is has a lot to say about what the temperature of the earth is. "One of the issues in global warming is the reflectivity of the earth -- the albedo," he said. "That's the refraction of light hitting the earth and reflected back into space. And the large factor is how much of the earth is covered in ice. The real effect comes from clouds and ice. The more clouds, the shinier the earth is. And the more ice, the shinier. Because ice is real shiny, light gets reflected back." But, as the earth warms, and the arctic ice caps melt and shrink, "more of the earth is brown and it absorbs heat which makes it hotter. It gets hotter faster.

"But can we, by painting things white, affect the albedo effect? No. It would have little effect. Do you think we're going to paint the forests? Do you think we're going to paint the ocean? It'd take a lot of white paint to cover the earth."

We'd be better off, said Lehman, spending our waking hours coming up with sound ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. "I'm glad people are thinking," he said, exasperated. "But I wish our scientific literacy were higher than that."

Phoenix, meanwhile, is still pondering the whitewash. Maybe paint's not the answer, he agrees -- too slippery when wet. And you'd have to mind the glare, for sure. But a stain, perhaps. "I don't think there's only one solution" to global warming, he allowed, in a phone conversation last week. "But there's hundreds of millions of rooftops." It'd help. Of course, he added, "the elephant in the living room is population reduction. I'm not talking about taking someone out and shooting them. But we're at six-and-a-half billion people. The rivers are polluted, the rate of animal extinction is higher than ever before. I mean a negative birth rate. Over four to five generations, I'd like to see the population cut in half -- all through voluntary means." Any ideas? Anyone?

-- Heidi Walters

dingbat dingbat dingbat

TOP

Comments? Write a letter!