Small Oregon Port hosts giant cruise ships

Astoria, Oregon, is a port town of about 10,000 at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River. It’s rich in history, and calls itself “the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies”. Lewis and Clark wintered near here at a fort they built after reaching the Pacific in 1805; the town itself began as a fur-trading site for John Jacob Astor; it is the site of the Astoria Column, a 125-foot (38 m)-tall column with an observation deck at the top and a spiral frieze all the way up depicting events of Oregon history; fancy Victorian homes dot its hills, remnants of the fortunes that were made in lumber, shipping, and salmon fishing. But it’s a small port these days. Many big cargo ships bypass Astoria, going up the Columbia to off-load at Portland, and timber exports have declined. For years Astoria has been wooing cruise ship traffic, putting $10M into piers to accommodate the larger cruise ships. The Port has organized volunteer “cruise hosts” to lead tours and make visitors feel at home.

This year the preparations really paid off, as ships cancelling their planned stops at Mexican ports due to the H1N1 flu are looking for alternatives, and Astoria was ready. The scheduled 13 ships stopping in Astoria expanded to 21 for the season, and one of the biggest pulled in on May 12 for a few hours. Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas is 1,020 feet long and carries 2,700 passengers. The Port’s marketing director said that about 80% of cruise passengers generally disembark when the ships stop.

There were tours for all sorts of interests: history and bicycling at Fort Clatsop (the Lewis and Clark overwintering site which has been re-created in replica, with historic re-enactors); galleries, shops, and restaurants; the Columbia River Maritime Museum; Seaside and Cannon Beaches; “Shot in Astoria”, a tour of locations where movies have been recently filmed; a refurbished 1920’s vaudeville and movie theatre; the great view from the Astoria Column, high on its 600-foot hill, and more. And just walking around taking in the river, the ocean, the hills and the city, is worth a visit.

Top of the Astoria Column, photo by Terry Richard/The Oregonian.

And perhaps best of all was eleven-year old Tyler Delay selling messages in a bottle! Are they bottles for the visitors to toss in the ocean, having added their own notes inside, or mysterious ones that Tyler has scoured up himself in years of beachcombing? Guess we’ll have to go to Astoria to find out.

Photo by Ross William Hamilton for The Oregonian, accompanying The Oregonian’s article (from which most of this information is derived). Sorry this photo isn’t as good as it should be; it wasn’t part of the online article and was scanned from the newspaper.

Hydraulic mining scars, wildflowers, dogs, and poison oak, a short early-summer walk in the Siskiyous

We took our new English Mastiff Jack for his first off-leash walk in the woods this morning. He is a 3 1/2 year old rescue who has been with us for nearly a month now. He has settled in very well, comes when called at home even if he is barking at the UPS guy, and so we thought he was ready for an off-leash ramble. Our elderly female Rhodesian Ridgeback went too.

The nearby Gin Lin Trail is named for a Chinese mine owner and “traces the remains of a late-nineteenth-century hydraulic gold mining operation in what was known as the Palmer Creek Diggings, now a part of the Rogue River National Forest.” [more info]

Hydraulic mining used huge pressurized streams of water to turn hillsides or mountainsides into slurry that could be run through sluice boxes to trap the gold. The photo below shows a large-scale operation in action, somewhere in this area of the Oregon Siskiyous, in the latter half of the 19th century. For scale, notice the tiny figure of a man wearing a white shirt, tending the left-hand water hose.

The tremendous destruction takes geologic time, not human time, to heal. Huge clefts are made in the land, piles of big rocks and new hills of “processed” dirt are put anyplace convenient, and the subsoil brought up doesn’t support plant life as well as the now-buried topsoil did. All this is easily seen along the Gin Lin Trail.

Miners followed “pay streaks” of gold that might be only a hand’s-breadth wide, through the ground, making ditches like this.

The picture below shows a steep slope of discarded material. Both the angle of the slope, and the composition of the material itself, are hostile to plant growth. Even on the top where it is closer to level, trees and shrubs are not as numerous or healthy as in undisturbed areas.

And here’s some of the big river rocks moved as the mining went on.

The gold being sought had been deposited by watercourses running down to the river below, seen in the background of this picture.

Looking over the fence, from the same spot as the previous picture.

The dogs had a good time, and Jack stayed close and came when called, as we expected.

Because of the mining, it isn’t the best place for wildflowers, but we saw a few. This is Elegant Cat’s Ear (Calochortus elegans); the common name refers, I believe, to the fuzziness and triangular shape of the flower petals. This doesn’t show the plant’s leaves but there’s a good photo on Flickr that does.

Lupines don’t mind disturbed soil as much as many other plants do.

I think this is the Yellowleaf Iris, Iris chrysophylla.

And below, Iris bracteata, Siskiyou Iris. [caveat: I’m no expert on wildflowers so my identifications are not guaranteed! This USFS page has photos, range maps, and descriptions of the Pacific Coast iris species.] In our experience, this yellow-flowered iris is less common around here than Iris chrysophylla, the Yellowleaf Iris.

Below is my least favorite native plant around here, the glossy-leafed Poison Oak, Toxicodendron diversilobum.

In spring its leaves are usually glossy like this, and may be reddish too. On another plant it would be attractive but to me, the shiny fresh leaves are as ominous as the froth on a bodysnatcher pod.

We found it along most of the trail, flourishing as if it had been thickly planted and then fertilized and tended. If only my plants at home looked so good! Ravines were choked with it, and of course the dogs wanted to go running down into such places. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten poison oak from a dog’s coat, in all these years of living here, but there’s always a first time. I’ve often gotten it from secondary sources like clothing or even the touch of someone else’s hand. (In a post last year I described something that helps lessen the itching and make the blisters go away faster.)

The damned stuff was everywhere. Every plant visible in the photo below is poison oak.

Finally the trail ahead was overgrown with it and we gave up and headed back. The dogs ran ahead, enjoying the downhill rush, and got out of sight as we neared the small parking area, where I heard excited voices. It turned out to be the teenage park maintenance crew and their adult supervisor, cruising the areas to do things like gather up garbage strewn around by animals during the night. They were excited by the sudden appearance of a dog who outweighed most of them, and Jack had been pleased to see them but hadn’t bowled anyone over or been a pest. He’s a sweet affable guy except when defending his home turf, and even then has a good sense of proportion.

We loaded up our tired dogs, filled their water dish in the car, and headed home.

Thirsty dogs drink from the birdbath.

More about credit cards, debt, pyramids, and eschatology

My recent post “Why I’m canceling my Bank of America credit card” brought a comment pointing out that cancelling credit cards can adversely affect one’s credit score, perhaps making it difficult to borrow for cars and houses. That may well be true, but it seems to spring from a view of credit and debt quite different from mine. Rather than dump this on the hapless commenter as a reply, I’ll say it here.

First, the companies have no incentive to restrict credit, and I expect they’ll soon be back to sending out credit apps to dogs and kindergartners. When the banks lose money through extending credit unwisely, they raise rates on the rest of us to recoup. Worst case, as now, the taxpayers bail them out, they buy each other up, write off debt, get tax breaks for losses. So I think people can safely cancel all but one or two cards, and still be able to use credit to make major purchases.

Second, I’m hoping that ordinary people, who DO have an incentive to learn from the present debacle, may start restricting their debt to large necessary items. Cars and houses usually do require going into debt. But I’m old enough to remember life without credit cards; my mom had a metal “charge-a-plate” for Macy’s, and there was layaway at some stores, but no credit cards. If you wanted something you saved up for it. If you couldn’t afford to go out to dinner, you didn’t go. To those accustomed to incurring chronic credit-card debt for indulgences, such a life may seem a bleak prospect. But actually I recall very few people growing despondent for want of cruises, concert tickets, and designer handbags.

Back in the 1980’s when I saw items at an Oregon department-type store bearing tags that said “Want me? Buy me!” and a credit card logo, I viewed it as a dangerous & selfish attitude to cultivate. Along with it came the re-definition of human beings as “consumers”.

The present economic system is a pyramid scheme because it is predicated on continual growth. We do not live in a world of infinite resources and space, therefore neither population nor consumption/production can continue to increase forever. Business interests, and even the administration, expect increased consumption to get us out of this depression. If it does, it can be only a temporary fix.

I know there are a lot of optimists out there who say not to worry about dismal stuff like the economy, climate change, and all that, because the world is going to end in 2012 (Mayan Calendar theory) or “soon” (some Christian fundamentalist theories). But I just can’t be that optimistic. Call me crazy, but what if we’ve got those Mayan numbers just a little bit wrong? Or some translator introduced an inaccuracy into the Book of Revelations? What if God has changed His mind, and now thinks it might be amusing to see how His little creatures manage with these challenges? We just can’t know. Better to keep our eyes on the ball, as it were (in this case the planet & its inhabitants) and not count on the Umpire calling the game on account of End of Time.

Why I’m canceling my Bank of America credit card

Going through a pile of mail last week I came across two items related to Bank of America.

First, the AARP newsletter had a short article about a guy collecting unemployment in (I think) New Mexico. The state issues the monthly amount via B of A debit card. When this fellow had questions, he was charged for the phone call to the bank; when he makes more than one withdrawal in a day he is charged a service fee. The amounts are small––but then, so are unemployment benefits. And whatever the amount, the fact that the bank levies these charges on unemployed people (who also have to pay taxes on their benefits) is appalling. The state also should take action, should have negotiated a different setup, but it is the Bank of America that is profiting from people for whom every dollar is precious.

Second, I received a tender missive from Bank of America, announcing that the interest rates were being raised. “The standard rate for new and outstanding balance transfers is increasing and will use the Variable Rate formula with a margin of 11.72 points” yielding an annual percentage rate (as of Feb. 2009) of 15.72%. New and outstanding purchase balances will have the same rate, and the rate for cash advances will go to 25.74%.

They calculate this rate by using the highest US Prime Rate over the preceding 3 months, as published in the Money Rates section of the Wall Street Journal. Can anyone say, “The odds always favor the house”?

Yes, banks perform a service. They must make a profit. But this is far beyond a fair profit. Banks now levy multiple charges, at least one on every stage of a transaction. Businesses pay a percentage of each transaction for the credit card processing. Every credit card user pays interest on amounts owed, sometimes even when paying the balance off in full each month. There are big late fees. Some banks (Chase, for one) have started charging a monthly maintenance fee for “processing payment and statements” [Wisebread blog].

Our local credit union issues us a VISA debit card, with no fees unless we get cash advances from an unaffiliated ATM. The credit union covers overdrafts (checks) for us by charging a line of credit so that we never will pay a bounced check fee. The credit union was not part of this reckless orgy of greed on the part of financial institutions, which has caused our economic crisis, and for which we ordinary folk are paying at every turn: taxpayer bailouts to the institutions who profited, massive unemployment, foreclosures, blighted lives as families become homeless and food pantries empty their shelves to gobsmacked crowds of the nouveau poor.

Screw the banks. Use cash, join your local credit union (credit union membership is now usually based on locality; you don’t need to work for a school, a certain corporation, or belong to a certain union, to join). And if you close an account or credit card, be sure to let the bank know exactly why. We are already paying plenty for their dishonesty and incompetence.

“Bank of America helps build strong communities by creating opportunities for people — including customers, shareholders and associates — to fulfill their dreams.”
Kenneth D. Lewis
Chairman, CEO and President 1

“Infectious” vs. “contagious”

Just because we’re all hearing about H1N1 flu, and these terms are being used a lot, here’s the difference:

Infectious

1. A disease capable of being transmitted from person to person, with or without actual contact.
2. Syn: infective
3. Denoting a disease due to the action of a microorganism.

Contagious

Relating to contagion; communicable or transmissible by contact with the sick or their fresh secretions or excretions.
[from Stedman’s online Medical Dictionary]

Anthrax, for example, is infectious but not contagious. It is caused by a microorganism, the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, but it’s not “communicable or transmissible by contact with the sick or their fresh secretions or excretions”. People most often get anthrax from contact with infected hides or other animal products, and from soil where the hardy spores of the bacterium can remain for decades after being deposited by infected animals. [Such spore formation is known in only a few bacteria.]

There’s some confusion inherent in these terms because it seems that the “contact with the sick or their fresh secretions or excretions” part only applies to sick humans. You might get rabies from breathing in droplets of the saliva of an infected animal, but that is not considered to be contagion. As near as I can tell, anyway. So, since a human being with rabies doesn’t infect others, the disease is considered non-contagious.

An important factor in any contagious disease is how easily it is transmitted from one person to another. You can’t get HIV from touching the skin of an infected person, but influenza and the common cold can be transmitted that way. Shake hands with someone who just sneezed into his or her hand, and the bacteria are on your hand; when you touch your mouth, nose or eyes, the microorganisms can enter your system. TB is contagious, as is leprosy, but they are not transmitted by brief casual contact.

Right now the question about H1N1 flu is, how contagious is it? And then, how fatal is it? Influenzas mutate rapidly so the virus which seems to have originated in Mexico may be changing to something different as it spreads. Hence the reluctance of medical officials to make predictions about what is in store for the world with this disease.

An early warning system for health threats: the invaluable work of ProMED

ProMED Mail is one of the most important information resources on the net, and most of us have never heard of it. It’s an email list which describes itself as a “global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of infectious diseases and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health, including those in animals and in plants grown for food or animal feed”.

Unlike the official clearinghouses run by WHO and CDC, ProMED is, in its own words, “open to all sources” and its reports are freely available to us all. ProMED was first to raise concern about the aggressive respiratory disease spreading in China in 2003, which became known as SARS. Before the Chinese authorities had permitted their officials to report the disease to WHO, Catherine Strommen, an elementary school teacher in Fremont, California, spotted a post in an international teachers’ chat room from a concerned teacher in China describing “an illness that started like a cold, but killed its victims in days”.

Alarmed, Strommen emailed an old neighbor and friend, Stephen Cunnion, M.D., a retired Navy physician and epidemiologist who now lived in Maryland. A practical, no-nonsense man, Cunnion started searching the web. With no success, he tried a new tack—sending an email to ProMED-mail, a global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infections and toxins. After quoting Strommen’s missive, he asked: “Does anyone know anything about this problem?”

The tiny ProMED staff conducted its own web search. It, too, came up empty-handed. On February 10, it sent out to tens of thousands of subscribers a posting headed: “PNEUMONIA – CHINA (GUANGDONG): RFI,” or Request for Information.

Thus did the world first learn of SARS, the new and deadly infection that would kill 774 people and infect 8,000 in 27 countries.

From an article by Madeline Drexler in The Journal of Life Sciences.

H1N1 Reports (Swine-avian-human Influenza A)

To keep up on H1N1 flu [I agree with the pig farmers, “swine flu” sounds like your big risk is getting it from pigs and pork, not human sneezes and handshakes] check the ProMED main page. While all the media is now frothing over with “news” about this disease, some of it sounds as reliable as alien abduction accounts. ProMED is timely and scientifically accurate but understandable by non-biologists. It includes valuable, and interesting, commentary on reports and questions: “this has been reported, but here’s what we don’t know, or here are local factors that must be considered in evaluating it”.

What ProMED does

ProMED is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases which began in 1994. It does not simply print whatever comes in—this is an extremely well-moderated list. A group of specialists checks and filters the reports, seeks more information from local sources and other experts, and provides judicious commentary. This group also “scans newspapers, the internet, health department and government alerts, and other information sources for inklings that an infectious disease, perhaps not yet reported widely, is threatening animal, plant and/or human health.”

I think I first signed up to receive the digests back when “mad cow disease” was emerging, and have since used ProMED to follow diseases such as anthrax and Ebola.
A topic of interest to me recently concerns outbreaks of measles and mumps in Western nations due to falling rates of vaccination. And as a former zookeeper I keep up on diseases of wildlife and zoo animals, including the fungal disease threatening whole populations of wild bats in the Eastern US. ProMED also covers plant diseases (mostly of crops).

All of this, infectious diseases of humans, wildlife, and crops, is of greatly increased urgency because climate change, global transport, and destruction of wild areas all lead to the spread of familiar diseases to new locales and the emergence of “new” diseases previously only found in remote wild areas. With regard to contaminants and toxins, governments are unable to deal with this effectively due to the political power of corporations and lack f oversight in producing countries. ProMED can’t make your food and furniture non-toxic, but it can sound alarms that might otherwise be silenced.References to a topic’s prior appearances on the list are attached to current reports, and archives are easy to access. Editions in French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish are now available.

“Each posting is limited to 25 KB bandwidth—to ensure that it slips through an old-fashioned dial-up modem in the most remote areas of the world (where new infectious threats tend to smolder). ‘We use technology that was state-of-the-art in 1994. We use email—plain-text email at that. We don’t use fancy fonts,’ Madoff says. ‘The power of the Internet is its ubiquity and speed; it’s not necessarily in all the neat things you can do.’ [from Drexler's article cited above]

You can subscribe here.

Toxins and contaminants

ProMED also collects, evaluates, and disseminates reports of health problems related to toxins and contamination of food and medicines. These can be quite unusual. For example, the case of the toxic leather sofas in Britain:

Photo: Effect on leg of reaction to toxic chemical contained in sofas. From BBC.

A judge [in the UK] is expected to order several retailers to pay millions of
pounds to people who suffered burns and rashes from faulty leather
sofas….

More than 1600 people claim to have been affected by the problem. Tens
of thousands more people could have burns not yet traced to sofas.
The High Street stores, along with 11 others, may have to pay more
than 10 million pounds [USD 14.3 million] in compensation and legal
costs, the shoppers’ lawyers say. They claim that makes it “the
largest group compensation claim ever seen in British Courts.”

The sofas, which were manufactured in China, were packed with sachets
of an anti-mould chemical called dimethyl fumarate to stop them from
going moldy during storage in humid conditions.

Commonly known as DMF, the toxic, fine white powder has been used by
some manufacturers to protect leather goods like furniture and shoes
from mold. Even very small amounts can be harmful.

One sofa customer, who is well aware of the health problems caused by
her purchase, is a customer who bought a leather sofa suite from
Argos in April 2007. Almost a year later, she started to notice a
rash developing on her arms and legs. After a few weeks, her skin
started flaking off. She says the irritation was so bad, she was off
work for 2 months. This customer was seen by more than a dozen
doctors, who couldn’t work out what was causing the rash.

She said: “It was very, very painful; I couldn’t sleep at night; I
couldn’t walk about; I couldn’t drive; every time I did walk about,
the skin would fall off, and I would leave a trail of it, therefore,
I couldn’t go to work.”

Reliable histories of outbreaks/events

ProMED doesn’t just present breaking news and requests for additional reports; it frequently publishes very useful summaries of what’s been learned, and what action governmental agencies have taken. For example, “Melamine contaminated food products – Worldwide ex China” and “Prion disease Update 2009 (01)” (Mad Cow Disease and its human infectious disease, the fatal “variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease”.

Supporting ProMED

Believe it or not, ProMED is supported by individuals, with not a penny of funding from any government. That means they are independent (remember the movie Jaws, where the city council wants to suppress news of the shark attacks?) and fast to react. They sift a lot of news from all sorts of sources, put out calls for more information, and disseminate news in a responsible way.

If the work of this group seems like something you’d like to support, here’s your chance. They’re having a brief Spring fundraising campaign. To quote their email,

Your gift funds quick information every day – The economical, low-tech computer programs we use enable us to speed ProMED to your mailboxes, to post it online where anyone can find it, , and to provide the administrative services (accounting, office space, cell phone connections, etc.) required to support a small, agile worldwide enterprise.

ProMED-mail reaches over 50,000 public health officials, students, journalists, agricultural specialists, infectious disease professionals and others around the globe. Because it is free, subscribers in more than 187 countries have an equal opportunity to know when a disease outbreak occurs — and can spring into action when necessary to prevent or minimize its spread.

If the Spring campaign is past, here’s the main donations page.