Liz Writes Life 7-24-19

July 24, 2019

Liz Writes Life

POW

It should be an interesting Scott Valley Protect Our Water meeting this coming Thursday, July 25, 2019, at the Fort Jones Community Center. Time is 7 p.m. Patrick Jones is lined-up to speak. He is running for the Dist. 1 Assembly seat. I know he is pro-2^nd Amendment, because he is involved in his family’s “Jones Fort” gun business in Redding. It will be kinda ironic for him to speak at a meeting in Fort Jones – yep. Patrick will take questions from the audience and is ready to discuss a variety of issues.

Erin Ryan, staff for Dist. 1 Congressman Doug LaMalfa, will also attend to give us updates on happenings in WA. D.C. Unfortunately, Kirk Andrus, our Siskiyou Co. District Attorney, let me know he can’t attend. He is needed as a Boy Scout leader for a Mt. Shasta Troop’s annual summer camp. Kirk sent his apologies and hopes to participate in a POW meeting soon.

Also, Richard Marshall, chairman of Siskiyou Water Users Assoc., will share his discussion with the Klamath Compact Commission.

Garden

With these typical hot summer temps, I am unofficially claiming the “dog days of summer” are here. I don’t know who officially makes the claim, so I checked out “dog days of summer” on the internet. Apparently, the rising of the star system “Sirius” in July was noticed by ancient Greek and Roman astrologers. They connected the rising Sirius with the hot days, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs and bad luck. Some ancients also believed the Sirius system sent extra heat down to earth. And, for some reason, the Sirius star had been named the “dog star”. Sirius has definitely risen in 2019.

One thing about the “dog days of summer” is that the vegetable and flower plants grow really well – as long as they get plenty of water. This week my lavender phlox started blooming. I love their fragrance. Also the Echinacea or cone flowers are also starting to spread their drooping, stiff pink petals with the orange middle; and a short, small crop of California poppies are blooming along the fence.

Pumpkins are growing on the vines and, luckily, I found someone who was happy to get last week’s zucchini. Whew! The cucumber plants look really good, but two of the three small cucs I picked to eat were bitter toward the vine-end. They started out sweet at the blossom end. Every morning, they are irrigated. I hope they grow out of it as I need to make several quarts of dill pickles. The volunteer dill plants are four-feet tall and are ready to use.

Challenges

Like most folks, I enjoyed re-learning about the Apollo 11 moon landing as the 50^th anniversary was celebrated last week. I had forgotten there were five additional Apollo missions that landed 10 more astronauts on the moon. I knew it was President John F. Kennedy, who challenged the United States people claiming we could do hard things, but I didn’t realize how much the following U.S. President, Lyndon B. Johnson, truly believed in the need for space travel.

Yep, last week, I watched several shows and read some pretty detailed articles about the Apollo missions. I gained a much greater appreciation of the accomplishment. I was a young teen and remember watching Walter Cronkite on CBS news as he narrated the amazing feat. My grandmother was living with us at the time. She was born in 1888 – the horse and buggy age. She told me once that she couldn’t understand how electricity worked and powered lights, so humans landing on the moon were totally out of her understanding.

I can’t imagine the many things that had to be created, invented and experimented for space travel. Many things did go wrong, while developing the space program, and yet good old hard work, determination, ingenuity and that competition with the Soviet Union saw the advances and success. One article said more than 400,000 people worked to put astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins into space for that July 1969 mission.

Now, I want to mention the huge, gigantic achievement of the Transcontinental Railroad that, ironically, occurred exactly 100 years previous to the moon landing – on May 10, 1869. Uniting the East and West areas of the United States with a train track was also considered impossible. Yet, there were businessmen and engineers who believed. (Yes, some major players were pushed by greed.)

The idea was put to Congress during the Civil War. As you can imagine, there was no money for such an undertaking. Yet, by 1862, young Theodore Judah had surveyed a route through the Sierra Nevada Mts. and wealthy Sacramento merchants formed the Central Pacific Railroad.

The Railroad Act of 1864 doubled land subsidies, but with the war still raging little track was laid. After much discussion (in Congress and elsewhere) Omaha, Nebraska became the starting point for the Union Pacific Railroad and after the Civil War ended the work of laying track began in earnest.

Earlier this month, I visited the Golden Spike National Park at Promontory, Utah and witnessed a re-enactment of the two famous train engines meeting. Utah made a big deal on May 10^th of this year, because it was the 150^th anniversary of the golden spike ceremony that completed the transcontinental track.

A short video explained the difficulty of building tunnels and traversing the Sierra Nevada Mts. Civil War veterans – soldiers from both sides – needed work after the war, so they added to the tremendous amount of laborers. The Union Pacific also utilized Irish, German and Italian immigrants, ex-slaves and American Indians – 8,000 to 10,000 in all.

Since this was after the gold rush and silver boom, Central Pacific Railroad hired several thousand Chinese, who became the backbone of its work force. Over 1,776 miles of desert, rivers and mountains were crossed as the Central Pacific laid 690 miles of track and the Union Pacific laid 1,086.

 Another piece of irony is that about 10 miles from Promontory, where the transcontinental feat was celebrated in 1869, is a company that builds space rocket engines. Its engines were utilized in the Apollo missions 100 years after the driving of the final railroad spike.

Ever forward. Facing challenges. Doing the hard things. Making mistakes, fixing them and forging ahead. As Americans we have an incredible legacy and, yes, future achievements a wait!

Liz Bowen began writing ranch and farm news, published in newspapers, in 1976. She is a native of Siskiyou County and lives near Callahan. Columns from the past year can be found at: lizwriteslife.blogspot.com. Call her at 530-467-3515.

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