Observations on Denver

Some years we have Rockies' ticket package. We did last year, but we didn't go to a single game for a variety of reasons.  Work was the big one, but then, about this time just a year ago, I was under the knife for the second time as well.

We went to the Orioles game on September 1.

The choice of the date was not my own, September 1 is the opening day of blue grouse and dove season, but I didn't complain about it.  A young member of the family loves the Orioles and that's why it was chosen.  When you get old, as I am, you yield in favor of younger family members, so I did, without complaining.  You also learn, hopefully, not to complain where in former days you might have.

It was a great game.

I've been to Denver several times since my surgery, but they were all hit and run type of deals for work.  In and out, with no time to spare. This is the first time I've lingered in the Mile High City for awhile, and the first time over a weekend for a long while.  Therefore some observations, I guess.

It was hot.  "Unseasonably hot" is what I'm hearing.  I'm not a fan of hot.  As Wyoming has already been chilly in the morning, and I couldn't find my Rockies jersey, I wore a light flannel shirt.  I don't really feel comfortable in just wearing a t-shit in that setting anymore, so I when I got hot, right away, before the game, I went and bought a jersey.  Now I have two.

I can't wear my old New York Yankees pull on jersey anymore.  I'm too big and its too small.  My Sox jersey is messing a button.

It's really weird to think that at least into the 1940s people dressed pretty formally at baseball games.  Men were in jacket and tie, something you'd never see now.

We were there on Sunday.

Holy Ghost is, in my view, the most beautiful church in the region and the most beautiful one I've ever been in.  We went to Mass early Sunday morning.  It's stunning and it never fails to impress me with its beauty.  

A beautiful church really adds something to worship, and a sense of the Divine.

Not a new impression, but the street people problem is out of control.

I don't know what can be done to help these people.  Some, you can tell, are now so organically messed up that they'll never really recover.  

In various places, when approached for money by somebody on a street, I'll give them some.  But not in Denver.  The people on the streets are so messed up I know where that money is going.  Something needs to be done to help them, but I have no idea what it would be.

The day before I went down I read that the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) had taken over two apartments in Aurora.  Looking it up, it's apparently true, and they're using them for sex trafficking.

The greater Denver area, fwiw, has never been all that nice, in spite of what people might say. I recall going down in the 1980s, when I was an undergrad at UW, and parts of were really rough then.  16th Street was just starting to develop.  The area around LoDo was really really rough.  I can recall walking from an off street towards 16th past a really rough looking bar mid morning when a prostitute came spilling out of it, probably just getting off work.  The Episcopal Cathedral, St. John in the Wilderness, had lots of broken windows, broken by rocks thrown into them from the street.  Colorado Blvd in the region of what is now Martin Luther King Blvd was as complete red light district full of XXX movie theaters.  Lo Do was a no/go zone.

Coors Field really cleaned up a lot of that, and much of downtown Denver has really gentrified.  16th Street, however, is a drug flop house as is much of downtown Denver.  The legalization of marijuana, COVID, and a highly tolerant city council has created an enormous problem.

Anyhow, I don't go into Aurora much, but I don't really recall it being really nice.  I recall my father, who had experience with Denver going back to the 1930s, mentioning it had never been nice.

We had a big breakfast at Sam's No. 3.  It's a great cafe.  A real urban one, which probably makes it surprising that I'll go there, but it is great.

At the game, I had a hot dog.  I usually have "brots", rather than dogs, if I have your classic small sausage on a bun.  I'd forgotten, accordingly, what real dogs taste like.  I like them, but I don't like them as much as brots.

Converse Chuck Taylors are comfortable for sitting at a game, but not for hiking around a city.  Like my baseball jerseys, I like Chuck Taylors but given my line of work and my off time avocations, which I unfortunately seem to be able to engage in less and less, I have little call to actually wear them.

Regarding clothing, while I hesitated to post it, a lot of young women in urban settings don't dress decently when dressing casually.  I don't mean "dress up" either. Perhaps because it was hot, a lot of them had on "summer clothes" which showed way more skin, and other things, than is decent, in my view.  For that matter, coming out of a hotel a barista was coming in wearing a t-shirt who had chosen to omit undergarments and was showing, well, through.  I almost turned to my daughter who was with me and thanked her for not dressing like so much of what I was seeing, but I didn't.

On that, some of the younger women were clearly with a parent. Why would you let a child, even if not a child any longer, go out dressed like that?

I'm not really proud of noticing and I didn't glare or stare, but frankly with so much on display its impossible not to notice anything.  I'm old, but not dead, and there's way too much on display, certainly way more than is the case up here in the rude hinterlands.  A Christian should have custody of their eyes but I'd rather other folks make it easy to exercise.

Also on display were vast numbers of tattoos, some artful and some really bad.  Having a bad tattoo has to be a bummer.

I was reminded of how much I don't like country music.  My wife and daughter do, so we listed to one of the XM Radio satellite radio channels on the way down.  I never listen to contemporary country music, although over the years I've gotten to where I like some of the older stuff.

Anyhow, I was surprised by how much country music is just devoted to getting drunk.  It's weird.

A fair amount is devoted to bad decisions, particularly with alcohol and women.  Some has gotten inappropriate towards women in general.  One of the songs on the way down I heard was Country Girl, which involves alcohol, and also the lyrics "shake it for me, girl".  I've been around country people, including country girls, my entire life and I've never seen a country girl shaking whatever for anyone.  Indeed, I've always been impressed by how almost everyone who lives in the sticks knows how to swing dance and tends to wear, usually, a fair amount of clothing, even in the summer.

End of a Legend? Sports Illustrated lays off its entire staff.

That's correct.  Just months shy of its 70th Anniversary, SI laid off everyone after failing to pay its licensing fees to the magazine's parent company.

Where I learned of the sad news:

Friday, January 19, 2024

Sports Illustrated, 1954-2024

That's a shame.

Print magazines are rapidly becoming dinosaurs, as we all know.  Many of the greats, such as The New Republic, Time or Newsweek, aren't what they once were. For that matter, many don't print at all.  Newsweek, for instance, does not.

Sic transit glori mundi.

My father subscribed to it.  It came to the house, along with Time, Newsweek, People, Life and Look (when there was a Look).  After we perused them, they went down to his office.  I loved Time and Newsweek (People is trash) and I recall pretty vividly observing South Vietnam's fall as I read them, at 12 years old.

I always looked through Sports Illustrated when I was young, although I think the infamous swimsuit issue, which is and was soft pornography, didn't seem to make an appearance at the house, or the office either.  

It was, and is, a great magazine, covering every sport imaginable.

Wyoming teams appeared on the cover more than once.

As an adult, I lost interest in the magazine, although remained a great one when I occasionally viewed it.  A college friend of mine took up giving me their swimsuit calendar every year for a while when I was a college student, with the great model of that era being Kathy Ireland, who had the Kate Upton role of her era.  Interestingly, both Ireland and Upton are devout Christians (Upton has a cross tattoo on her hand), which given their swimsuit issue role is a bit of a surprise, but perhaps no more than the fact that I had those calendars on my walls during those years, and certainly wouldn't now.

As noted, save for its annual descent into cheesecake, it was a great magazine.

Until now, it appears.

Lex Anteinternet: Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry. A Timely Rerun

I ran this back in 2017.  It was clear where things were headed then:

Lex Anteinternet: Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry:     

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

  
Me, third from right, when I thought I had a career in geology, and probably in coal.

There is a lot of speculation about a revival in the future of coal around here.  I'm skeptical.  This doesn't mean that I come from the outside where coal is simply a freakish oddity.  No, I'm pretty familiar with coal. . . personally.  At one time, coal, I thought, would fuel my career. When other students in the UW geology department of the early 1980s were planning on becoming petroleum geologist, I focused on coal, which wasn't suffering. . . at first, the way oil then was.  Of course, it came to, and I went from the geology department into under employment so my plan failed.

The irony of that is that my choice on coal as a focus was intentional.  I could see the handwriting on the wall in regards to employment in the oil industry.  Others seemingly couldn't, or having entered onto that set of railroad tracks they just couldn't get off.  Coal, on the other hand, was doing fine in the early 1980s. . . at first.  There were coal mines operating at that time which aren't now.  Indeed, there was an underground coal mine in Hanna, a continuation of a situation that had existed well into the early 20th Century.

Well, that didn't work out the way I'd panned and by 1985, when I approached graduation from the University of Wyoming, after five years of effort (five was typical for geologist, that was five full semesters) I graduated into being an . . . .artilleryman.

Yup.  Artillery. The rescuer of my economic fortunes.

I'd joined the National Guard right out of high school and was still in it in 1985 when I graduated.  The Guard basically employed me on a semi full time basis for a year while I tired to find a job.  I couldn't, of course, so I ended up going back to school to obtain a JD.  Indeed, relating back to the Guard, I've felt guilty ever since as I let my enlistment expire in 1986 just before I went back to law school as I believed all the propaganda I'd heard about how hard law school is.  Hah!  It's nothing compared to obtaining a bachelors in geology. 

  

My main employer, right after receiving my bachelor's degree.

Anyhow, in that period of time between my general geology studies at Casper College (during which I really picked up a love of geomorphogy) and my graduation, the first time, at the University of Wyoming by which time I'd picked up a focus on coal, I learned a lot about coal.  At the same time I nearly obtained enough credits for a BA in history, which perhaps reflects a natural interest that reflects itself back here.

 So, perhaps in some ways, I'm uniquely suited to ponder the long decline of coal.   Or at least I have.

And indeed the path of coal, and its long slow decline, is highly relevant to where we find ourselves now.  Lots of people in the coal states believe that the election of Donald Trump is going to revive the fortunes of coal.  Here in Wyoming quite a few people are so acclimated to coal paying the bills that they can't imagine anything else.  Indeed, just this past weekend I was at a public event, wearing my shabby (truly) Carhartt coat and my Stormy Kromer cap, probably looking like a guy who had shoveled a lot of coal (and indeed I have shoveled a little) and was accosted by a person sitting under a banner proclaiming something about a "return" to liberty and the Constitution who started off on a speech about would I like to sign a petition in opposition to any kind of new taxes.  No, I won't sign that as I just don't see coal being able to pay the Wyoming freight in the future anymore.  Maybe some other mineral or minerals can, but coal isn't going to be able to the way it once did (and besides, I'd be unlikely to sign anyway as I tend to find that people are always opposed to new taxes but not bothered by demanding that the things taxes pay for are really good).

I think the path of coal, being familiar with it, might be best illustrated by a few rough dates and illustrations.  Its something that should be considered.

So let's start around 1900.  That was a world fueled by coal (and by wood).  Sure, kerosene was around, and it had replaced whale oil to a large extent.  I have around here a draft post, now months and months old, building on a George F. Will column that noted:

In many ways, the world of 1870 was more medieval than modern. Three necessities — food, clothing, shelter — absorbed almost all consumer spending. No household was wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power from steam engines, water wheels and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, complicated urban sanitation. Window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and the dinner table. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to 10 times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote 36 tons of it. Few children were in school after age 12.

As I will note, I don't dispute the details that Will recites here, but I do doubt the "more medieval than modern assertion in a major way.  Indeed, some of these things argue, I think, the other way around and I think that misstates the nature of the Medieval world.

But noting what Will states about lights, we note what he said, and further note that it was accurate.

• "No household was wired for electricity"

This is quite true.

• "Flickering light came from candles and whale oil,"

Whale oil chandelier, photo from the Library of Congress.  Up until the Will entry, I'd never even considered there being such a thing as a whale oil chandelier.

And so, in many places it did.  But coal fueled a lot of other things.

But let's consider coal in 1900.

It fueled the ships.

 USS Ohio, approximately 1898, as the USS Maine, which sank in a coal explosion in 1898, is in the background.

It fueled the trains, the only significant interstate transportation that existed.

New Your central yard, about 1907.

It heated the homes, where wood did not.

And it fueled industry, particularly the steel industry.

Blat furnace, about 1905.

And then things began to change.

It really started with navies in some ways, although some might argue that it started with hydroelectric.  We'll start with navies.

Navies had been powered by sail up until the mid 19th Century but already by the time of the American Civil War that was changing.  The U.S. Navy may have had its grandest ships under sail during that war, but coal fired wheels were being introduced even then.   And the scary smoke belching squat "monitors"  that signaled the end of the age of sail were coal (and perhaps wood) burning beasts.  Slow, hardly seaworthy, but iron clad.  It was pretty clear by 1865 that the age of militarized wind was ending.

And indeed the Naval reformation that occurred after the American Civil War is incredibly stunning.  Everything about navies soon changed.  By the 1890s every major navy in the world was building ships that look odd to our eyes, but which still look familiar .  Big guns on big ships powered by coal replaced sailing vessels, and the general purpose yeoman sailor was replaced by the specialist.  At about this time, in fact, the U.S. Navy started to switching from a navy drawing its recruits mostly from port towns, and which was in fact an integrated navy, to one which was segregated which drew its recruits from the interior of the country.  A wood and sail navy required men who had grown up near, or even on ships, and who knew the ins and outs of sail. That was a multi ethnic, polyglot group of men who in some way resembled the men in every port town around the world more than they did the men in the interior of their own countries.  It's  no accident that the first Congressional Medal of Honor to go to a foreign born serviceman went to a sailor, in action during the American Civil War fighting a naval battle in. . . . .Japan.

The naval battle in Shimonoseki Straits where an English sailor serving on board the USS Wyoming won a Congressional Medal of Honor.  Note that these ships already featured coal fire steam, in addition to sail.

While there was a sail and steam age, i.e., an age that combined both, for navies it wouldn't last long. For commercial shipping it lasted longer, and indeed the age of sail itself lingered on until after World War Two, amazingly enough, in some usages.  But for big ships, coal fired boilers were the norm before the turn of the century.  Sail lingered, but only lingered.

And so we entered the coal fired world. The degree to which coal fired everything, almost, is stunning.  If we take the world of 1900 heavy long distance transportation of all types was coal fired.  Trains and ships, that is.  Local transportation was seeing the beginnings of the Petroleum Age, but only the beginnings.  Locally, it was very much a horse oriented world, and indeed the railroads themselves caused a massive boom in heavy hauler horses around the turn of the prior century which gave us the really big draft horses, rather than farms as we so often imagine.  Something had to hault hat weight from the railhead to the warehouse.

And heat was going the way of coal. Coal fired, well fires, heated homes all around the country everywhere.  Boilers for apartment buildings, furnaces in homes.  Wood remained, but it was coal that was the oncoming fuel.

A World War One vintage poster of the United States Fuel Administration.  This period poster nicely illustrates how coal fit in.  Homeowners were being urged to buy coal early in the year.  That coal wasn't delivered, in this poster, by a truck, but rather by a dump wagon drawn by heavy draft horses.  Given the light dress of the laborer and the depiction of foliage the poster must have been released during the summer.

It is, in short, impossible to overestimate the importance of coal around 1900.  It was called King Coal for a reason.

But things were beginning to slowly change.

For one thing, petroleum was creeping in.  Not in a massive way, but in a way that was clearly predictable.  George Will spoke of whale oil lamps, but by the second half of the 20th Century kerosene lanterns were very common and their advantages very obvious.  Following in their wake came gas lanterns and by necessity, piping for natural gas.  It wasn't long after that in which the first gas stoves were introduced. Already by the early 20th Century, therefore, there was gas lighting and gas stoves.  

And gasoline was already making its appearance in the internal combustion engine by 1900.

Very early internal combustion engine.

We've dealt with automobiles elsewhere, but we've become so acclimated to them that we rarely think of their history.  Automobiles were a 19th Century invention, albeit a very late 19th Century invention, not a 20th Century one.  That doesn't mean that they replaced the horse right away, that would hardly be true, but they do go back aways.  And they were not, and we should not pretend, that they were any sort of a threat to coal at first.  Not at all.  Cars, trucks and motorcycles were competition for the horse, not the train and certainly not the ship or even the barge.

Truck waiting in line with big long line of coal wagons, some time prior to World War One.

Which takes us back to ships.

And, more specifically, the Royal Navy.

For decades, indeed centuries, the world's biggest and best navy was the Royal Navy.  This does not mean, however, that there was ever a day in which some other navy wasn't contending with the Royal Navy for that position.  And given that, the British basically engaged in a naval arms race that lasted well over a century.  And that mean that it needed to always be on the alert for a technological advantage.

And coal had given one.  Steam meant that large steel ships were able to be constructed, fired by coal fueled boilers.  They had two significant disadvantages however.

Smoke and spontaneous ignition.

Let's talk about smoke first, the disadvantage that was always there.

Their smoke was visible all the way over the edge of the horizon.

This is something that people who are more familiar with ships of the World War Two era don't instantly recall about earlier steel ships, but coal fires smoke and hence coal fired boilers likewise smoke, or rather the coal fires smoke

 The Great White Fleet, and great clouds of black smoke, December 16, 1907.

Prior to the advent of air reconnaissance and radar the spotting of enemy fleets, or for that matter friendly forces, was done by the naked eye.  And it was a matter of absolutely vital concern.  In the vastness of the ocean ships at sea had always scoured the horizon for signs of enemy ships, and even clues that seem slight to landlubbers were picked up by trained sailors.  Sailors looked, in prior eras, for sails and masts on the horizon, with the assistance of spyglasses.  By the time of dreadnoughts, however, they were looking for the faintest hints of smoke, and coal fired boilers provided plenty of it.  Teams of sailors searched the horizon with massive binoculars looking for that wisp of smoke, which was often more than a wisp.

The next danger was rarer, but not so rare as to not be a serious problem.  Spontaneous combustion.

Coal has a well known propensity to self heat and to make it worse, the better the coal grade the bigger the problem.  Exposed to air and moisture coal begins to engage in an exothermic reaction and can relatively easily self heat to the point where it ignites.  Moreover, as it self heats and heads towards ignition it drives off highly flammable hydrocarbon gases. Indeed, heating coal intentionally in a controlled environment is a means of producing those gases and has sometimes been thought of as a method of producing them, although its never proven to be an efficient means of doing so.

Coal is so prone to spontaneous combustion that coal self ignition is a natural phenomenon.  It simply happens where coal gets exposed to sufficient oxygen and moisture. Anyone who has ever spent any time in an open pit coal mine has seen coal simply burning on its own, as I have.

There are ways to combat this, of course, but the problem is uniquely acute for ships.  Ships must store coal in large bunkers and must taken on a lot of coal at certain points.  Ships are wet by their very nature. So any coal burning ship has, at some point, a lot of coal with just enough oxygen and moisture to create a problem.

This proved to be a real problem for ships and of course there were extreme catastrophic occurrences, the most famous of which is the explosion of the USS Maine.  The Maine is an extreme example of what could occur, but any coal burning ship could experience what the Maine did.  Basically, in the case of the USS Maine, the coal self ignited and the coal bunkers had sufficient liberated gas to create a massive explosion.  Not quite as dangerous, but still a huge problem, a simple self ignition of the coal without an explosion was a disaster, quite obviously, of the first rate requiring sailors to put the coal fire out under extreme danger.

Coal's detriments on ships would have had to be accepted, and indeed they were, but for the existence of alternatives.  Indeed, coal survived as a naval fuel for an appreciably longer time than a person might actually suppose, so impressive were its advantages in general.  Measures were taken in ship design to try to combat the dangers, such as having the coal bunkers placed near outside ship's hulls such that the coolness of the water would translate to them, and placing sailors bunks along the bunker's walls so that the sailors could tell if heat was building, but the dangers were real and known. Also known was that there was an alternative, oil.

By the turn of the century naval designers were aware that oil could be used to heat boilers just as coal could, and they began to study it in earnest.  Indeed, not only could it be used, but it had numerous advantages.

Unlike coal, petroleum oil for ships fuel did not result in much smoke.  It resulted in some, but not anything like that which coal put out.  The smoke from a single ship was much less visible and suffice it to say the smoke from a fleet of ships was greatly reduced.  Again, there was smoke, but not smoke like that put out by coal fired boilers.  Indeed, it was so much reduced that to a large degree detection of ships over the horizon by the naked eye was approaching becoming a think of the past.

And petroleum does not spontaneously self ignite.  A big vat of petroleum can sit around forever and never touch itself off.  This does not mean, of course, that its free from danger.  It isn't.  But some of the dangers it poses were already posed by coal, but in lesser degrees.  Petroleum burns more freely than coal by quite some measure and once it ignites putting it out is extremely difficult.  Sparks, other fires, etc., all pose increased dangers for petroleum over bunkered coal, but they existed to some degree for bunkered coal already.

And petroleum is more efficient and easier to use for ships.  Coal was basically stoked by hand, a dirty laborious job.  But petroleum wasn't.  Petroleum burning boilers were fueled by what amounts to a plumbing system involving a greater level of technical know how but less physical labor.  And oil had double the thermal content of coal making it a far more efficient fuel which required less refueling.  And on refueling, ships fueled with oil can be refueled at sea.  Ships fueled with coal cannot be.  Indeed, the maintenance of coaling stations in the remote parts of the globe was a critical factor in naval planning prior to the introduction of oil.

Which isn't to say that there weren't some unique problems associated with petroleum for ship.

For one thing, the fact that it spreads out when leaked and can more easily ignite meant that petroleum added a unique and added horror for a stricken ship.  Coal fired ships that were simply damaged and sinking were unlikely to cause a horrific sea top fire.  Petroleum ships are very likely to do that.  And the risk of a munitions caused explosion is increased with petroleum fueled ships.  A torpedo into a coal bunker might blow a coal fired ship to bits with an explosion or might just sink it.  With a petroleum fueled ship the risk of an explosion in such a situation is increased as is the risk that oil on the water will catch on fire or otherwise kill survivors.

A huge factor, however, was supply.

By odd coincidence all of the major naval powers, save for Japan, had more than adequate domestic supplies of coal.  Some had very good supplies of coal, such as the United States, United Kingdom and Imperial Germany, within their own borders.  Japan nearly did in that it obtained it from territories it controlled on the Asian mainland, although that did make its supply more tenuous. At any rate all of the big naval powers of the pre World War One world had coal supplies that htey controlled.  That's a big war fighting consideration.  Of the naval powers of that era, in contrast, only the United States and Imperial Russia had proven petroleum sources they controlled, and Imperial Russia had proven it self to be a second rate naval power during the Russo Japanese War.

Switching from coal to oil did not occur in the Royal Navy, or any navy, all at once. The decision was made somewhat haltingly and it was an expensive proposition to convert an entire navy to oil.  Britain started to convert prior to World War One but it didn't complete the process until after the war.  Still, its decision to start constructing capitol ships as oil burners in 1912 was a huge step for a nation that had the world's largest navy but which had no domestic oil production at all.  The United States followed suit almost immediately, with its first large ship to be converted to oil, the USS Cheyenne, undergoing that process in 1913.

 The USS Cheyenne in 1916 while it was a submarine tender.  The Cheyenne was the first oil burning ship in the U.S. Navy, following the lead that the British had started.

The USS Cheyenne was illustrative of something else that was going on, however, that being the increased presence of heavy internal combustion engines for various uses.  The USS Cheyenne had been built as a monitor, a type of proto battleship (and had been named the USS Wyoming originally) but after its conversion to oil it would become a submarine tender in a few short years.  Submarines of the era were light vessels and, like a lot of light naval fighting ships ,they were diesels.  Marine diesel engines were replacing boilers completely in lighter vessels and of course diesel fuel is a type of oil.

Diesels in that application show that industrial diesel engines had arrived.

By World War Two every navy in the world was an oil burning, not a coal burning, navy.  And it wasn't just navies.  Merchant ships had followed in the navies' wakes.  They were now oil burning too for the most part.  Coal at sea had died.

 Giant marine diesel engine circa 1920.

The demise of coal at sea did not equate, of course, with the universal demise of coal, and this is very important to keep in mind.  Entering into the period of history we've been discussing, roughly 1900 to 1920, coal may have lost its crown at sea, but it remained hugely important, arguably increasingly important, elsewhere.  It continued to be the fuel of heavy transportation, IE., for trains, it continued to heat homes and it fired an ever growing  number of power plants.  Indeed that last application can't be overstated as in this same period the Western world was electrifying.  So whatever position it may have lost on the waves it was likely more than making it up on land.

Still, the trend line had been set.

And it would next show itself with transportation.

At least according to one source written in 1912 coal fueled 9/10s of all locomotive engines at that time.  The other 1/10th would have been fired by wood or, yes,  oil.

This photograph will appear again in a series of photographs on the centennial of their having been first taken, in January 1917, but these teenagers are stealing coal from a rail yard.  They are probably taking it home for heating fuel or are selling it to Bostonian's who probably knew darned well these kids had taken it illegally from the yards.  For that matter, the railroad likely knew they were taking it too.  Even today, decades after the end of the use of coal for locomotives the paths of old railways can be found by the coal ash and coal that the trains dropped as they passed by.  I've walked the path of the old UP here and there down by Laramie doing that.

Wood, I should  note, may seem strange for a locomotive engine of that era, but it really shouldn't.  The goal of any fuel used in a locomotive engine is to produce steam and burning wood will produce steam.  Wood isn't an efficient fuel for that but it was a common one very early on.  Most locomotives were switched to coal after the Civil War, assuming that they were not burning it already, but where wood was locally plentiful and the engine had a local use, as for a small engine associated with a timbering operation, wood was kept in use.  

Indeed, as a total aside, during World War One some small German engines were made that burned trash.  Coal is a military fuel, Germany's (and Poland's) coal is very good, but as a military fuel conservation was the rule of the day.

At any rate, in 1912 less than 1/10th of all steam engines were burning oil, but what is telling there is that some were.  So here too a trend line had started.

In following years more and more steam engines became oil burning engines.  The reasons may not be entirely clear and are somewhat subtle, but some of them have been touched upon already above.  Oil is a more efficient fuel. Not so much so, however, that all locomotives were switched to it. The famous Union Pacific Big Boys, for example, were coal burning to the end.

Union Pacific Big Boy. These were coal burning their entire career.

What did the coal burning locomotive in, in the end, or more properly the steam engine in, was the diesel.

Diesel engine, 1985, outside of Laramie Wyoming.

Diesels Electric trains proved to be a better and more efficient option for train engines in the end. Contrary to what some may think these locomotives do not work like a diesel truck in that the engine does not power the drive wheels. Rather the diesels are big generators and the trains are essentially electric.   By the same token, in the proper settings, trains run from overhead electric lines.  Either way, this type of engine did in the steam engine.

Now then, looking at it, we see that coal went from the main fuel for ships and trains to a remnant fuel for both in a fifty year period. Hardly overnight, but clearly observable.  A person living in the era, if they cared to notice the trend, would have noticed.  Certainly, for example, if you lived in Rawlins Wyoming and looked out towards the Union Pacific Railroad yard over the course of an average life, if you'd lived in this period, you would have seen it gone from a busy smoky and sooty yard to one which had only the blue haze of diesel fuel above it.  And given that Rawlins is just seven miles from Sinclair, where a refinery is located, but also is surrounded by coal deposits and actually had its origin as a coaling location for the Union Pacific, the change would have been pretty obvious.  If you worked in the big underground mines in Hanna you might actually be slightly worried.

Which isn't to say that coal stopped being used.  Not hardly.  It was still heating homes all over, including in Wyoming, and it still was the fuel for power plants.

Let's turn to domestic coal use, as we haven't really touched on that much.

 

Lennox "Torrid Zone" coal furnace

Now, as we've seen above, coal was a basic heating fuel early in the 20th Century, having replaced wood in that role to a large extent.  During World War One Americans were urged to stock up on heating coal early, which meant filling their coal rooms full during the summer rather than waiting until winter.  Coal soot was such a prominent part of big city life that it came to be an accepted part, even contributing to the legendary concept that London was foggy.  It wasn't so much foggy as it was sooty.  This use of coal continued on for a very long time, and indeed here in Wyoming, which switched to gas early, people still ordered coal for heating fuel at least as late as the 1940s. 

 

Coal furnaces in the Library of Congress, 1900.  Shoot, and Washington D. C. isn't even all that cold.

But over time this changed to where heating oil, yes another use of petroleum oil and natural gas began to replace coal.  By the 1970s at least the price of heating oil became a major factor in annual fuel price concerns, but nobody really thought much of coal for the same purpose.  You can still buy a coal furnace today, if you are so inclined, but very few people do.  So yet another use of coal yielded to petroleum. And here, over time, petroleum has yielded to natural gas and electrical generation.

 Workman converting coal furnace to oil during World War Two.  Oil was more plentiful and efficient which sparked a government move to convert home heating to oil

Of course electrical generation also became a major use of coal in the early 20th Century, and it remains one today.  But, as has been seen from the trend line above, coal isn't the only option, and here too its a declining one.  While oil did make an appearance in the electrical generation field oil powered power plants are more or less a thing of the past and coal has outlasted them.  There are no oil fired power plants left in the United States and less than a dozen major ones left on Earth.  They're yielding, however, to natural gas, which powers quite a few power plants and which as been replacing coal.  And there are other means of generations electrical power, including wind power which now is cheaper than other forms of electrical generations in some regions of the United States.

 

Dave Johnston Power Plant, 2015.  U.S. Government photograph. 

Okay, so what's the point of this? Well, just this.  Coal has been on a long, slow, decline for over a century.  It isn't that it doesn't work, it's that it can't compete economically with other fuels that do the same thing in an increasing range of uses.  Only in terms of coking for steel production is it indispensable.  Indeed, perhaps signalling an international increase in manufacturing, high grade coal for coking has experienced a sharp recovery in recent months. That doesn't do anything locally, however, as our coal is Bituminous Coal, not Anthracite, and therefore can't be used for coking.

This isn't the view of some green fanatic world view.  It's dollars and cents, and coal producing regions, such as Wyoming, have to consider this. Without a way to address coal's defects, and soon, its diminished share of the fuel market will be considerably smaller irrespective of any environmental or regulatory concerns.  It's been a long trend running back over a century.

A few Veterans Day Comments.

Somewhere in Korea.

I wasn't going to post on Veterans Day at all, in part because the overblown hero worship that's been attached to it for some time is really starting to bug me. But then, I've been owly recently anyhow.  

But, as predictable (every year the number of posts on this site goes up, this year no exception, which is why I’m considering not posting at all in December) I changed my mind.  A few random comments.

Were you in the Army?

My new associate asked me this the other day, as I have the photograph of my basic training platoon up on my office wall.

Funny, I'm so used to it being there, I never notice it.

Military service, regular and reserve, was routine when I was young. Not everyone had it by any means, but lots of people do.

And this was even more so for my parents.  My father was in the Air Force, his brother in the Army.  My other uncles in the World War Two Navy and Canadian Army, and post-war Navy.  The guys my father ate lunch with every day had all been in the service.

Not so much anymore.

November 7, 1983: Able Archer 83, a Close Call

An item from Uncle Mike's fine blog.

I was in the National Guard at the time. Little did we realize how close we'd come to serving in a short, sharp, and probably nuclear war.

As odd as it may sound, I actually had predicted a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact at about this time, a predication that didn't come true, but my reasoning was sound.

Reagan became President in 1981 and as soon as his first military budgets started to take effect, things really were noticeable in the Guard.  New equipment, better field training, etc.  The Warsaw Pact took note of that and started building up to counter it.

Able Archer, like Team Spirit, and Reforger were all part of the training regime of the time.  It was no secret that the Warsaw Pact was trying to respond to it all.  In the end, that spending brought them down. They couldn't afford it.

A lesson there to a country that's spending like crazy right now and just got economically downgraded.

Anyhow, my prediction nearly came true with Able Archer, but not for the reason I thought this would happen. I thought it would happen as the Warsaw Pact, or rather the USSR, would reason that it only had so much time while it had military superiority in which to act.

This was a view, I'd note, that was reinforced by playing the military hex and counter war games based on a NATO/Warsaw Pact war.  It was pretty clear that it was really hard for NATO to win a conventional one.

Or so it seemed.

We vastly overrated the Red Army and Soviet military equipment, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated.

Funny, at the same time I recall being assigned A Republic of Grass in college which suggested we surrender to the Soviets before a war broke out.

A note on Reagan

When Reagan was President, I wasn't sure what to make of him.  As a Guardsman, we were all grateful for the new equipment and attitude.  Carter's military had been a sad sort of thing, as exemplified, perhaps, by the failed attempt to mount a raid to free the Iranian embassy hostages.

But it seemed like we were messing around in Central America an awful lot, which I wasn't sure what to make of. In retrospect, it's clear that the Cold War was being played out there in proxy.

When Reagan was president, I was a university student.  It seems to be forgotten now, but most university students weren't big Reagan fans.  As noted, I wasn't an opponent, but I wasn't a fan.  My father was convinced that Reagan had Alzheimer's which, in fact, he did.

On Reagan and Carter, it's interesting to note that Carter was an Annapolis graduate. Reagan had more of a military career than his opponents claimed, having been a pre-war cavalry reserve officer, but his wartime role was in the branch of the military that made films. That was honorable enough, but Reagan introduced the snappy salute to servicemen which stuck after that, and which I don't like.  Presidents saluting servicemen seems really odd, particularly when we get Presidents who've never been in the military.

Anyhow, most of my conservative friends love and admire Reagan.  I still am not so sure about him.  I can see where he made course corrections at the time which were vital.  It was under Reagan, really, that the country got back on its feet after the Vietnam War.  And Reagan introduced the brief period of Buckleyite conservatism, which I like, to the government.

He also, however, started the populist smudge which is now a roaring flame by using the Southern Strategy to win, and that's having dire effects.  And frankly, I'm not impressed with the starving of the government economically that came in at that time.

On this Veterans Day, don't thank those who served, but ponder those who didn't.

This sounds harsh, but I'm not kidding.

Most veterans don't really want to be thanked for serving.  Truth be known, a lot of us served for reasons that weren't all that noble or were mixed.  Paying for university was in my mind, for example.

Having said that, in my adult years I've known a few people who avoided serving in the military when there was a time of need. Some of them have real reason of conscience and can and do defend it, on the rare occasions it comes up.

In contrast, we have people who sort of hero worship the military, or who are public figures thanking it, about whom there are real questions.

Donald Trump sent out his thanks today, but he avoided the Vietnam draft on a medical profile.  That's never been adequately answered, and in private comments he disdains those who served in the military, which fits right in with his epic level of being self impressed.  Biden had draft deferments too, I'd note.

There are real reasons for deferments, but what gets me here is the co-opting of valor, or the bestowing of it on people who don't deserve it.  People don't claim that Biden is some sort of hero. But you can find completely absurd illustrations of Trump as a military figure.  I don't really see Trump voluntarily serving in any war at any time, and had he lived during the Revolution, I sure don't see him as some sort of Continental Army officer.

So, while it's rude, for at least some thanking veterans "for their service", an appropriate response is "why didn't you serve?".

The real purpose of the day

The real purpose of this day is to remember the dead and badly wounded.  That's about it.

Lots of people serve during time of peace in one way or another. We don't deserve your thanks.  Yes, I'm sure that I'm personally responsible for keeping the Red Horde at bay, but I didn't get hurt serving.  Truth be known, I benefitted from it personally in all sorts of ways, a lot of which are deeply personal.  The service formed a lot of my psychology on certain things in a permanent way, all of which are ways in which I'm glad that it did. 

A lot goes into a person's personality, some of it more significant than others, and I do have more significant ones. The service was, however, a significant one.  Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I had not gotten out of the Guard when I did, also for a selection of personal reasons.

So I owe the service thanks. The country doesn't really owe me any. But people whose lives were permanently altered or last? Well, that's a different matter.

Today In Wyoming's History: Buckle your seatbelts Laramie, it's going to be a bumpy ride. The Coldest Case In Laramie.

Today In Wyoming's History: Buckle your seatbelts Laramie, it's going to be a ...:

Buckle your seatbelts Laramie, it's going to be a bumpy ride. The Coldest Case In Laramie.

Laramie, Spring 1986.

Kim Barker, a journalist who is best known for her book on Afghanistan, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, is coming out with a podcast on a 1985 unsolved murder in Laramie.  Moreover, Barker was apparently a high school student at the time.

And she doesn't like the city of her alma mater at all.  Of it, in the promotions for this podcast, she's stated:

"I've always remembered it as a mean town. Uncommonly mean. A place of jagged edges and cold people. Where the wind blew so hard it actually whipped pebbles at you." 

Wow.

And there's more:

I don't like crime books, but oddly I do like some crime/mystery podcasts.  I'm not sure why the difference, and as I'm a Wyomingite and a former resident of Laramie, I'll listen to the podcast.

But frankly, I’m already jaded, and it's due to statements like this:

It was an emblem of her time in Laramie, a town that stood out as the meanest place she’d ever lived in. 

Really, you've been to Afghanistan, and Laramie is the meanest place you've lived in?

Hmmm. . . .  This is, shall we say, uncommonly crappy.  And frankly, this discredits this writer.

I've lived in Laramie twice.

All together, I guess, I've lived in Casper, Laramie, and Lawton (Ft. Sill) Oklahoma.  I've been to nearly every town and city in Wyoming, and I've ranged as far as Port Arthur, Texas to Central Alaska, Seoul, South Korea to Montreal.

The author may recall it that way, but if she does, it says more about her life at the time than Laramie.

And indeed, I suspect that's it.

If you listen to the trailer, you hear a string. . . dare I say it, of teenage girl complaints, preserved for decades, probably because she exited the state soon after high school, like so many Wyomingites do.  I can't verify that, as her biography is hard to find.  Her biography on her website starts with her being a reporter, as if she was born into the South East Asian news bureau she first worked for.  A little digging brings up a source from Central Asia, which her reporting is associated with, and it notes that its very difficult to find information on her.  It does say, however, that she grew up in Billings, Montana and grew up with her father.  Nothing seems to be known about her mother.  She's a graduate of Norwestern University, which supports that she probably graduated from high school in Laramie and then took off, never to look back.  How long did she live there is an open question, and what brought her father there is another.  Having said all of that, teenage girls being relocated isn't something they're generally keen on, and Billings is a bigger city than Laramie.  I have yet to meet anyone who didn't like Billings.

Now, I didn't go to high school in Laramie, but I was in Laramie at the time that Barker was, and these events occurred.  1985 is apparently the critical date, and I was at UW at the time.  I very vaguely recall this event occurring, and didn't at first.  I vaguely recall one of the things about Laramie that Barker mentions in her introduction, which was the male athlete branding.  What I recall is that there was a local scandal regarding that, and it certainly wasn't approved by anyone.

A lot of her miscellaneous complaints, however, are really petty and any high school anywhere in the United States, save perhaps for private ones, might be able to have similar stories said about it.  Boys being sent out to fight if they engaged in fighting within the school wasn't that uncommon in the 80s.  I don't recall it happening at my high school, outside of the C Club Fights, but I do recall it from junior high, in the 1970s, and experienced it myself.  I don't regard it as an act of barbarism, although I woudln't approve of it.  As noted, I recall this branding story, which was a scandal and not approved of, but today an equally appalling thing goes on all over the United States with the tattooing of children for various reasons, including minors, in spite of its illegality.  Certainly college sports teams feature this frequently, and I'd wager many high school athletes experience a similar example of tribalism.

What's really upsetting, however, is the assertion that Laramie was, and is, "mean".

When I went to Laramie in 1983 for the first time, I didn't look forward to it.  I found the town alien at first and strange.  I probably would have found any place I went to under those circumstances to be like that.  I was from Central Wyoming and had lived there my entire life, save for a short stint at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.  But by the time I graduated in 1986, I had acclimated to it and there were parts of living in Albany County I really liked.  I was back down there a year later, this time not dreading it, and as a graduate student I was pretty comfortable in the town.

I also wasn't a teenager being dislocated from the place I grew up in.

In my last couple of years of undergraduate studies, and in all of my graduate years, I was pretty comfortable with the city.  I knew the places and things there, and had friends there.  In the summers, and I spent a couple there, it was a really nice place in particular to live.

And let's be honest.  Just as the land of high school angst might seem awful, the land you are in when you are young usually isn't.

If I had any complaints, at that time, it was about housing and prices.  Housing was always a crisis for a student, and a lot of the places I lived were not very nice.  Some were pretty bad.  And prices locally were really high, it seemed to us.  Local merchants complained about students shopping in Ft. Collins, but we did that as it was cheaper than shopping in Laramie.

The weather in Laramie is another thing.  It's 7,000 feet high, in the Rockies, and therefore it can be cold and snowy. The highway closes a lot.  In the early 1980s, it was really cold and snowy, with temperatures down below 0 quite regular.  Interestingly, by the late 1980s this was less the case.  And it does have wind, but ten everyplace from El Paso to the Arctic Circle is pretty windy.  Wyoming weather can be a trial for some people, particularly those who are not from here.

Which gets, I guess, to this.  A Colorado colleague notes that you have to be tougher just to live in the state.  You do.  Being from here makes you that way.  As the line in the film Wind River puts it, in an exchange between the characters:

Jane Banner: Shouldn't we wait for back up?

Ben: This isn't the land of waiting for back up. This is the land of you're on your own.

And that can be true.  If you aren't at least somewhat self-reliant, this may not be the place for you.

The further you get away from Laramie, the more this can be true.  Laramie is the most "liberal" city in regular Wyoming, surpassed in that regard only by Jackson.  Albany County nearly always sends at least one Democrat to the legislature.  If there's left wing social legislation pending, there's a good chance it comes out of Albany County.  Albany County is the only county in the state, outside of Teton, where all the things that drive the social right nuts are openly exhibited, due to the University of Wyoming.  In real terms, about 1/3d of the city's population are students at any one time, and a lot of those who are not students are employed by the University of Wyoming.

When I graduated from law school, I noted that a lot of students who passed through the College of Law stayed there if they could.  That says something about the town. Several good friends of mine over the years who are lawyers stayed there, including ones that had come there from other Wyoming locations.  Even a few of my non law school friends worked and lived there for a time, although none of them do any longer.

And in the years since I lived there the influence of Ft. Collins has come in, with downtown establishments mimicking those that are fifty miles to the south.  I've known people who retired and left the town, but I also have known people who retired to it.

It's not mean.

But the whole world is mean to some teenagers, with their limited experience and exaggerated sensibilities.  Some people keep that perception for the rest of their lives.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. Accidental Legal Muse.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303

 

Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.

Eh?

Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four  years old.  How could this be?

Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.

From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty.  Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps.  He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one.  It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.

Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure.  Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate.  He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.

What's that have to do with law school?

Well, this.

In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class.  I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon.  I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.

That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.

Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort.  I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy.  I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.

Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound.  Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.

Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".

The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"?  That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer.  I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned.  It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.

And hence the seed was planted.

Forty years ago right now I was between my junior and senior years of high school trying to decide what I was going to do for a living.

I knew that I was going to college after high school, and for that matter, I knew that I was going in the fall.  I only had half days my senior year, so I had registered for the community college to get a jump start on my college "career".

My old high school, prior to renovations, at night.  Up until my last year of high school I'd been on the swim team and saw a lot of the building from this prospective as we had early, early morning practices and evening practices too.

In 1980 I wasn't sure what that career would really consist of.

Earlier, when I was in grade school and junior high, I'd thought I wanted to join the Army and have a military career.  Even by junior high, however, that desire was somewhat waning and by the time I had entered high school, and the immediate post school world became more real, that desire was rapidly diminishing.  I still thought of entering the service, but probably following graduating from college and maybe not for a career.  Indeed, at that time my immediate plan was to go to UW and join Army ROTC, although I'd avoid JrROTC in high school.   The loose thought, at the time, was that I'd major in wildlife biology and after a stint in the Army, I'd either get out and get into the Wyoming Game & Fish Department or make a twenty year career of the Army and then do that.

I didn't do either of those things.

In 1980 I knew that what I wanted was an outdoor life.

What I really loved was hunting, fishing and being out in nature.  I didn't want to be indoors.  I didn't at that time even know how to tie a tie, and as my high school graduation the following year would show, I was in the class of people who were so unfamiliar with formal clothes that I couldn't wear them and look unnatural. 

Next month will be the 30th anniversary of my admission to the bar.  I've worked indoors now for thirty years.

How did that happen?

It's weird looking back as even now that's really not apparent. 

What I do know is that I changed my views on attending UW in the fall by August of 1981.  I went down to the orientation and didn't like it, so I enrolled at Casper College instead.  I enrolled, moreover, as a geology student as my father had related to me how there were a lot of guys around with wildlife management degrees who didn't find work, and I didn't want that to happen.  My plan then was to do two years at CC and then go down to US and I still planned on enrolling in ROTC. 

Me as a geology student.  I'm one of those people in the photo.

However, the same summer I enlisted in the National Guard for a six year term of enlistment. That really wouldn't have kept me from joining ROTC but by the time I went down to UW two years later I knew that I really didn't want an Army career.  It wasn't that I didn't like the National Guard, I did.  It's that I didn't need to be an Army officer to know what being an Army officer was like, and that I had no interest in that as a career.  The Guard served me really well in a lot of ways, that being one of them.

Geology was my choice as it was still outdoors.  Living in a state in which extractive industries are such a big deal, it seemed like a safe employment choice. But the bust cycle was setting in even by the time I was getting ready to graduate from CC and it was fully in by the time I was ready to graduate at UW.

Geology building class room, 1986.

Law school as an option first occurred to me as a suggestion from a CC professor.  I didn't know it at the time, but the professor, a history professor, was a licensed lawyer.  I was surprised by it as I conceived of studying law as being really difficult and lawyers as being really smart, but I did toy with the idea a bit.  In part I did that as my father was a professional and an outdoorsman and so were a lot of his friends.  I was also worrying, by that point , how employable I was going to be. And I knew, by that point, that getting a job in geology meant going on to grad school and I had real personal doubts about whether I'd be able to get in, and if I did, whether I'd be able to make it through, geology grad school.

Frankly, I could have on both points, but at that point in time I labored under the burden of scholastic myths more than reality.  When I did take the geology GRE I did really well and in retrospect the worries were self created.  The same year I took those I took the LSAT, not really expecting to do well, but I did.  I told myself that if I got into law school, and I only applied to one, I'd go.  I did, so I did.

M110 howitzer.  I was an artilleryman.

I didn't know any lawyers personally when I went to law school and I never bothered to ask them anything about what being a lawyer was like. That was an odd way to go about that, I guess, but then in the thirty years of doing this, I've only been asked what practicing law was like by young people perhaps two or three times.  Indeed, of younger people I remotely know whom I know to be interested in the law, none of them have asked me nor, to my knowledge, any other lawyer.

But then I never asked any game wardens what being a game warden was like.  In later years, when speaking to them, a couple of them have related a daily life much different than I would have anticipated.  And for that matter I never spoke to any geologist either.  I had spoken to soldiers, however, just because in those days it seemed like most men had been in the service.

And so, thirty years, thousands of depositions, lots of trials, and countless office hours later, here I am.

Is there a moral to this story?  I don't know that there is, other than like the they sing in Truckin:

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me
Other times, I can barely see
Lately, it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been 

Or maybe that's just lame.

It's funny how we get where we are going sometimes without realizing that we're getting there, and when we get there, we're not only a lot further along than we realize, but it'd be pretty hard to get back.

Amen, amen, I say to you,j when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

John  21:18.

None of this, I suspect, is uncommon.

Brunton Compass

Brunton Pocket Transit, folded for carrying.

This is a Brunton Pocket Transit.  Probably most people who know of them just think of them as the Brunton Compass.  It's an old, old design, having been first made in 1894, although the patent date on the compass references 1896.  I'd be curious to know when  they really started to be common, if we can consider a specialized instrument like this as ever having been common.

I ran across my Brunton compass recently as, for some reason, I'd taken it out of the carrier this fall in order to use it for something.  At this point, I frankly don't know what that something was, as I very rarely use it anymore.  I have a nice Garmin GPS with the topographic map software loaded into it, and I use that now, even though its a model that's now discontinued, and the last software up data makes it a little slow

Brunton Pocket Transit, opened for use in the geologists fashion.

I sure remember getting the compass, however.  It was in 1986, during my last year at the University of Wyoming, when I was a geology student. We had to buy them for our summer field course, which took us all over Albany and Carbon counties, mapping, and all the way down to New Mexico, where we did field work, as well.  At that time, having a compass of this type was an absolute necessity, and they saw 100% employment by geologists who did field work.  I'm told that at one time, graduates of the mining engineering school at the Colorado School of Mines could be identified by the short brim Stetsons they all acquired upon doing their field work (back in the sensible headgear days).  If so, graduates of any geology program anywhere could be identified by the fact that they all owned Brunton compasses.

Brunton compass opened up with mirror facing to catch the sight, in the fashion used by geologists in the field.

The reason for this wasn't fashion, it was necessity.  The compass is a precision instrument, and the official name of "transit" is accurate.  A transit is a surveying instrument, and so is a Brunton compass.  Extremely precise, the location of about anything can be accurately determined by triangulation or even just flat out using it in concert with a drawing compass (the plastic device) and a topographic map.  But we made topographic and geologic maps with them, which requires not only the compass, but more work.

Compass opened, showing the interior device for measuring angles, for determining elevation.  This one is not set, as the level clearly shows.

The reason that the compass can do this is that it not only features the typical magnetic compass feature, but it also has the ability to sight elevations with the use of an internal scale.  And when set on a Jacob's staff, a pole of a known size, distance on the ground may be measured over any sort of terrain while using that feature, with the compass attached to it, while the mapper walks over the ground.  A marvelous instrument.

My first exposure to this instrument didn't come in a geology class, however.  It came at Ft. Sill Oklahoma.  The Brunton Pocket Transit, to soldiers, is known as the artillery compass, and that's where I first learned how to use it, in basic training.

Compass set to site in the Army fashion.

I was actually surprised to learn, while a geology student, that my old friend the Brunton Compass, was used as a geologist's tool.  I just thought it was a marvelously precise Army compass.  Adapting to geology use was, therefore, very easy, even though the Army uses the sights differently.

Compass set to sight in the Army fashion.

Artillerymen used the compass as it is so much more precise than the conventional infantry compass, and artillery needs to be spotted accurately.  Even so, we never used it to the same degree of precision that geologists did.

Combined geology use and artillery use made me glad to have one, even when it turned out that I was never going to be a field geologist, that occupation having entered one of its cyclical slumps at that point in time at which I graduated from the University of Wyoming.  It's just been a field companion since then, which I used for many years when out in the sticks.

But not so much lately. As noted, I've gone to the GPS, although I was a late adapter of that technology.  Indeed, I hadn't looked at the compass for quite some time.

In looking at it, and then determining to post, I thought that it was probably a thing of the past now, but I see that this is one of those many things to which Yeoman's Second Law of History apply, they're still being made today. And they're still pretty pricey, although all in all I actually think they aren't as expensive in real terms now as they used to be.  Indeed, my recollection on this may be inaccurate, but I think the Classic model with the Aluminum body is now cheaper than the plastic cased variant shown in these photos.  It pleases me, frankly, so see that such a useful item is still in use.

I don't know if they're still in Army use or not, but I did learn the following, thanks to Gordon Rottman who sent me the text from his book on World War Two equipment:

M1 and M2 compasses with M19 carrying case This sophisticated compass was based on the William Ainsworth & Sons-made D. W. Brunton’s Pocket Transit dating back to 1894, but adopted by the Army in 1918. The M1 designation was assigned in the 1930s. The “artillery compass” combined a highly accurate surveyor’s compass with a clinometer (for measuring vertical angles and slopes), tubular horizontal level, and circular bubble plumb (vertical level). The circular level was for leveling the instrument before the azimuth values were read and the tubular level for measuring horizontal angles. There was an angle-of-site mechanism and an azimuth scale adjuster assembly making this a complex instrument requiring specialized training. It was used by artillery forward observers. It had a dustproof and moisture proof, dark OD-painted brass case (smooth or crinkled finish), squarish in shape with rounded corners, 2-3/4 x 3in and 1-1/8in thick; 5-7/8in long when  opened exclusive of the sights. A mirror was fitted inside the lid with a black sighting wire. The mirror also proved useful for shaving. There was a black folding front sight on the lid’s top edge. On the rear was a black hinged rear sight holder with a folding sight on top. The compass card was black with white markings. The M1 compass was graduated in degrees only and was phased out before the war by the M2 graduated in mils. M1s may have seen limited use. The mil scales was graduated at 20-mil intervals with 10-mil intermediate tick marks divided into 1-mil ticks. The angle of sight scale was graduated in mils in the same manner, 1200-0-1200 mils. On the compass card, north was indicated by a star and the other cardinal directions by W, S, and E. The radium-painted white end of the needle indicated north. The light brown leather M19 case had a rigid rounded pocket with a snap-secured lid and a trousers belt loop on the back. The rigid dark OD  plastic case (10543560) is post-WWII. Today it is known as the “M2 unmounted magnetic compass.” 0.5-b.

Pretty impressive.  Showing that the test of a tool is its usefulness, not its age.