* * Celebrating the life of Harry Robertshaw

Harry Hull Robertshaw, Ph.D, died a couple of weeks ago.  His memorial service is tomorrow in Blacksburg.  It is hard for me to piece together the appropriate thoughts about such an interesting, intelligent, and insightful man.  To say that Harry was influential in my life is a hopeless understatement.  From the day I met him, I have always wanted to be more like Harry.

I was a pimply-faced kid from Christiansburg, Virginia when I first met Harry.  I had an inexplicable love for motorcycles.  When I was perhaps 16 years old and still in High School, I began hanging out at a local motocross track where several members of the Virginia Tech Motorcycle Club, who gathered each weekend to practice and race.  High School was awkward for me, and these older guys were more welcoming to me than my own peers.

At that time, Harry was a young Mechanical Engineering professor at Virginia Tech.  My recollection is that he was not standoffish but he was self-assured and followed the beat of a different drummer.  He was a funny guy with an offbeat manner.  He drove a frumpy, unusual car: a Morris Minor.  He raced an unusual motorcycle: a Hodaka Super Rat, with a bright red frame and brighter chrome gas tank.  He never bothered with a set of racks for the motorcycle.  He simply lifted the front and then back wheels of the Hodaka onto the rear bumper of his Morris and strapped it on with some ropes.  Harry was methodical in his training.  Rather than riding around the entire course time after time, he would take a particular section of the course with perhaps three or four intricate turns and would ride that section over and over until he became proficient at it and then he would move to the next.  Everything Harry did, he did well.

I was a mediocre student in high school, listless and directionless.  I had decent grades in the sciences and was always interested in mechanical things.  Harry suggested that I apply to engineering school at Tech and study mechanical engineering.  He said, “Mechanical is a discipline that umbrellas many other fields.  It will give you more opportunities after school.”  And so I did.

With the grades I had, I still don't quite understand how I got accepted at Virginia Tech.  And it is even more mystifying to me that I was able to graduate in the requisite four years.  Tech assigned a faculty advisor to help me make my course decisions, but I quickly asked to be transferred under Harry's tutelage. 

We had many long conversations about a broad range of topics.  These were heady days.  Our nation was still embroiled in a fruitless war in the jungles of Vietnam.  Astonishingly, Richard Nixon was reelected to a second term.  Earth Days were first being celebrated.  Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  The times, they were a’changing.  Harry and I talked about motorcycles, epistemology, philosophy, and the fate of the human species on our imperiled planet.

Harry was living the life that I wanted to learn how to live.  His teaching was important but seemingly everything fascinated him.  Play was always very important, whether it be sailing, whitewater canoeing, distance running, or photography.  His active mind seemed to constantly yearn for nourishment.  But best of all, he had an incredible wit and delightful personality.  He was always fun to be around.

I moved from the New River Valley in 1976 and didn't return until 15 years later in 1981.  We got together some after that, but our meetings were infrequent.  He took me whitewater canoeing on the New River once, but I didn't take to it as he did; I remember being up all that night in pain with swimmer’s ear.  Several years ago, I became aware of his illness, his cancer.  My impression from our conversations during the last few years was not that he was reticent about sharing his condition but that he really didn't know how serious it was.  Maybe he just didn’t want me to know.  I saw him last perhaps a year ago at his house.  He had lost most of his hair but he still seemed to be optimistic about his survival chances.

Two weeks ago, we had dinner with our friends Bill and Susan Huckle.  Harry's name came to in conversation, as they had known him years ago as well.  I made the comment, “I have always adored Harry.  But I know if I don't call him I will never see him again.  He never seems to want to call me.”  Fatefully, I got a note the next day from Bill that Harry had died earlier that day.

Losing a good friend is one of those predictable crises of adult life.  As I read and then reread his obituary, I am obsessed with those bucket-list thoughts.  My soul aches to live as full and interesting a life as did Harry Robertshaw.  Harry was an irreverent, irrepressible man and is an irreplaceable loss.  I mourn his passing profoundly.



* * Considering nuclear energy

For today’s blog entry, I thought I’d tackle a question poised to me on Facebook in response to a thread I’d launched about the wisdom of offshore oil drilling in light of the ongoing spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  I woman I’d known when we were school-kids asked, “What do you think about nuclear energy, Michael?”

As I begin to think through how to formulate a reasonable and logical answer, I have a flashback.  I am sitting in my apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the springtime of 1979.  It is 5:30 in the afternoon and I have just gotten home from work.  I am three years into my employment with Babcock and Wilcox, a nuclear steam system supplier which built many of the working reactors across the United States.  I am listening to National Public Radio.  On the air is the voice of a man that I knew who also lived in Lynchburg.  He is testifying at a congressional hearing about why he thinks the reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania has suffered a partial meltdown.  I am thinking to myself at the time, if there is a serious safety issue with regard to the particular technology I am studying, I don't want to be there when it happens.

I left the nuclear industry not long after that and with it my career in engineering.  Earning my degree in engineering at Virginia Tech was the most difficult intellectual challenge of my life.  However, I never felt that I was very good at it, and I always worried that with the bigger, more complicated engineered systems of the era, I had best leave the calculations and assessments to more capable minds than my own.

That said, while I do not feel that I am an expert in nuclear energy, I certainly have for decades been an informed citizen.

Occasionally, I have been called upon to give lectures about Peak Oil, the point at which the world's oil resource will inevitably reach its maximum in production and began its terminal and inexorable decline.  Often during the question and answer session, someone will say, “You make it sound as if everything is about energy.”  In fact, everything is about energy.  Nothing in our world from the simplest movement to the most complex industrial operation happens without energy.  All life is dictated by the use of it.

Worldwide population surpassed one billion people around 1820 and currently is rocketing towards 7 billion.  This rapid explosion in human population has been propelled by the rapacious consumption of fossil fuel energy.  Coal, oil, and natural gas are endowments of energy that have always been buried beneath the feet of human beings.  However, only within the last 200 years have we consumed them in any meaningful way.

The very survival of the human species is soon to be imperiled by the peaking of fossil fuels.  The hazards of mining, refining, distributing, and consuming these fuels are evident now with the recent accidents in West Virginia (where 29 miners died in a coal mine explosion) and the Gulf of Mexico (where 11 drillers died and a huge oil spill still spews).  I heard an interview this morning with the chairman of BP who, at least for now, claims full responsibility (something Exxon-Mobil has never done when the wreck of the supertanker Valdez fouled the Prince William Sound in Alaska).  If fishing and tourism in the Gulf States is ruined, the claims may bankrupt BP.  (Remember, this was the type of spill that only a couple of months ago would have been considered extremely improbable.)  But the loss cannot be measured in dollars alone.

We pay a significant price for our access to cheap energy.

The question that we as a society seem to be asking ourselves is, “How will we continue to live the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed when our fossil fuels began to decline?”  We have become wedded to rapacious consumption and have made inestimable sacrifices to our energy workers, our communities, and our environment, to keep this system going.

Nuclear power, at first blush, seems to sidestep some of the major issues with fossil fuels.  In particular, uranium seems relatively plentiful and the fission of uranium does not release greenhouse gases.  However, nuclear power carries with it significant environmental issues of its own.  These include but are not limited to:

   Extensive spreading of toxic heavy metals during the mining of uranium

   The production of other toxic substances during the enrichment process 

   The production of quantities of high- and low-level radioactive waste in the disposal or reconstitution of spent nuclear fuels (Some of the byproducts of vision and reprocessing produced some of the most toxic substances known to man and are dangerous for literally thousands of years.)

   The threat of stolen fissile materials and other acts of terrorism

As the Three Mile Island accident showed us 30 years ago and as the recent coal mine and BP disasters have shown us recently, complex systems are always susceptible to failure, occasionally catastrophically. 

Nuclear power plants today are amazingly expensive.  The manager of a nearby coal-fired power plant once told me that his parent company had explored constructing a new two-unit nuclear power plant in Florida.  The cost was to be upwards of $17 billion.  It may be impossible for any public utility to obtain liability insurance for any nuclear power plant due to the enormous risk.  Therefore, that expense may fall to the federal government and ultimately to the taxpayers: us.

Nuclear power is large, complex, centralized, expensive, poisonous and risky.  I believe that we should be pursuing a national strategy of energy which is small, simple, decentralized, inexpensive, benign, and safe.  Above all, I feel that we should be working to dramatically reduce consumption at all levels.

Cheap energy, in particular the low cost of motor fuels, have led to has led to a radical reengineering of virtually every community in America, even since Three Mile Island.  Our downtowns have atrophied, our shopping areas are completely devoted to motoring customers, and our suburban housing developments have overwhelmed more compact living arrangements.  We have lost untold millions of acres of farmland and woodland.  It is time to re-magnetized our communities and reduce our energy footprint dramatically.

Nuclear energy to me represents all of the things we should not be doing in our country.

* * Encountering AT through-hikers

Whenever I can spare the time I go hiking on the Appalachian Trail.  This 2200 mile footpath from Georgia to Maine is at its closest point about 20 miles from my house.

One of my frequent hiking partners is a youngster named Kyle Knight who is a graduate student in aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech.  He got his undergraduate degree at a small college in North Carolina.  His parents apparently are friends with my father’s sister and brother-in-law.  They put him in touch with me because they knew I lived near Virginia Tech.  We hit it off and have been hiking together ever since.  He’s great company; he’s pleasant and intelligent, with impressive insight for someone his age.

On Saturday, Kyle and I took a hike near Catawba.  I chose a section of trail that, although it is in close proximity to the house, I had never hiked before.  The reason I had never done it is that it is a generally low elevation walk and not as spectacular as many of the higher elevations ridgeline walks in the area.  The reasons I chose it this time was because there was a high probability of rain and I wanted to stay lower and because I needed to be home early.

The weather was mostly overcast.  The temperature was cool and pleasant.  A light T-shirt without any additional wrap was comfortable.  The trees were wrapped in new leaves and everything was brilliant green, vibrant and fragrant.

We parked on Mount Tabor Road where there is space for only one car on the wide shoulder where the trail crosses.  The trail immediately ascends a small ridgeline, crests out, and drops down the other side.  We were delighted to find a beautiful creek where there was a small dam and what was evidently a foundation for a long-gone water-powered mill.

We crossed State Route 785 which in Montgomery County is called Catawba Road and in Roanoke County is called Blacksburg Road.  Much of this area is open pastureland with extensive views of this beautiful valley.  We crossed Catawba Creek on a nice foot bridge and ascended the ridgeline of Catawba Mountain to the south, reentering the forest. We walked into a northeasterly direction along the ridge line for a couple more miles before finding a nice place to stop and have lunch.

On our return leg, we encountered several through-hikers on their way to Maine. All were walking alone.  The first was a young man who we watched ascend Catawba Mountain as we were descending.  The purposeful form and speed he exhibited as he strode uphill was truly dramatic.  As he passed, we chatted.  He had been on the trail for two months.  He told us that in the early going, there was a significant amount of snow on the mountains south of and into the Great Smokies. He told us that he typically averaged 2-1/2 miles per hour, although one day in deep snow he only managed to walk 10 miles in 7 hours of hard work.  “I am typically walking anywhere from 18 to 25 miles each day,” he said.  “On a couple of occasions, I have walked 30 miles in a single day.”  I asked him about his pack and what he was carrying.  He said, “Like most through-hikers, I went through a process during the first few weeks of paring down what I was carrying.  My toothbrush is only 3 inches long.  I mailed my raincoat home.  These days, it is warm enough so that if it is raining, you pick your poison.  You either get wet by the rain or you get wet from the inside by your sweat.”  I asked him if he had had any really down days.  He admitted that trudging through drifts of snow was very tedious.  “Still, every day out here on the trail is better than my best days back at work.”

Only moments later, we encountered another gentleman who was intending to walk all the way to Maine.  This man was in his early 60s. His mileages were less impressive than the younger fellow but were impressive nonetheless.

We reached the car and were back in Blacksburg in the early afternoon.  I continued to think about the feats of strength and stamina exhibited by these through-hikers.

Early the following morning, I awoke in my comfortable waterbed, listening to the rain pouring down outside.  As contented as I was, I couldn’t help but envision myself out there on the trail somewhere.

* * Exploring the coal country of far Southwest Virginia

Have I mentioned yet on this blog that I am working on my third book?  I plan to explore Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, the Crooked Road, by motorcycle and write about that experience.  In doing so, I plan to visit many of the music venues and meet and interview many of the fascinating people who live along the way.

I left home Sunday morning for a two-day trip recognizance trip to the Western portion of the Crooked Road and returned home late yesterday.

The Crooked Road is an economic development initiative that was formed about seven years ago to link several communities throughout Southwest Virginia that have demonstrated their interest in preservation of traditional Appalachian mountain music.  From the trail’s eastern terminus in Rocky Mount, it travels through Ferrum, Floyd, Stuart, Meadows of Dan, Hillsville, Galax, Independence, Mouth of Wilson, Damascus, and Abington, where the headquarters office is housed.  From there, the Road swings through Bristol, Hiltons, Gate City, Big Stone Gap, Norton, Wise, Pound, Clintwood, Haysi, and to the western terminus at Breaks Interstate Park on the Kentucky border.

The weather was cool, sunny, and incredibly bright.  Throughout my journey, trees were bursting forth with new leaves.  Roadside redbud trees sported bright pink buds, contrasting with the deep green of the other trees.

During the course of two short days, I noted many stories that will ultimately make their way into my book.  But I will tell just a couple of short stories here as teasers.

Clintwood is the birthplace of bluegrass of Appalachian mountain music legend Dr. Ralph Stanley.  Stanley has been playing music for over 60 years but attained mythical renowned for his version of Oh Death in the movie, Oh Father Where Art Thou.  See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpkdOA1LU5I

He still makes his home near Clintwood and he is well known to virtually every citizen.  His telephone number is literally still in the local telephone book.  At the museum the state of Virginia has dedicated to him, the attendant gave me his number and encouraged me to call him.  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to speak with you.”

That evening, I rented a small cottage near downtown.  The landlord was an intense and fast talking man in his late 50s.  He retired from coal mining in his early 40s and has been successful with several enterprises.  We talked about the recent mining disaster in West Virginia that claimed the lives of 29 miners.  He talked about working in what he called “low coal.”  One seam where he spent several years working was 27 inches thick.  The table at which I currently sit before which I currently sit is 30 inches tall.  What this means is that he spent eight hours per day minimum for at least five days per week working in a space shorter in height than my desktop.  He ran huge, powerful, and expensive equipment, ate his lunch, urinated and defecated, all while lying on his side or his back.  Once he was carried in to the mine lying on his back on a man-trip, he literally crawled anywhere he needed to go on his hands and knees.  He did, and the people like him do, this occupation because they love the work.  They enjoy the camaraderie.  They like the relatively high wage it pays. 

They live with the constant claustrophobia and fear of catastrophic injury or death.  He said, “I actually prefer to work in low coal.  Chunks of rock often dislodge from the ceiling of coal mines.  A 40 pound chunk of rock falling from 5 feet can kill you but seldom is a fall from 27 inches fatal.”

I had dinner alone that evening at a tiny restaurant in town.  It appeared to be locally owned but was previously likely a chain restaurant, with the signature curved plastic booths and expansive picture windows.  One girl in a red uniform stood outside with a scrub-brush and a bucket, painstakingly cleaning the windowsills.  The girl who waited on me was only 16 years old.  She was cute – tall and wafer thin.  The first thing she said was, “What can I get for you, sweetheart?”  I was feeling pretty special until I realized that she called everyone “sweetheart” habitually. 

As I ate, I was reading a book I had brought along about the origin of the English language in America.  Bringing me a refill of Sprite, she asked me what I was reading.  When I told her, she said that she loved to read and would be interested in a book like this.  We talked for several minutes.  Like many young people living in small towns, she was eager for the day when she might be able to depart for perhaps bigger and more prosperous places.  I said, “Don't be too surprised if 20 years later you yearn to come home.  It happened to me and it happens to many people.”  She told me that she was a singer and she liked to play the guitar.  She said, “Dr. Ralph has really put Clintwood on the map for us.  I am proud of the fact that so many people come here to take advantage of the things that we take for granted – the beautiful scenery, and the music.”  She smiled shyly as she spoke.  She wore her dark hair in a bun.  She had a red uniform and was categorically cheerful.  “I had best get to work.  If you need anything at all, you just holler for me, okay sweetheart?!”



* * Mourning the death of 29 West Virginia Coal Miners

29 miners in West Virginia are dead and I’m mad as hell.
When I was working on my book, The Spine of the Virginias, I had the pleasure to meet many current and former coal miners.  To a man (and I could find no women miners), they enjoyed the work and appreciated the profound sense of brotherhood they found working underground.  When you’re hundreds of feet under the mountains of West Virginia, your life depends upon the skill, commitment, and care of others.
Therein lies the rub.  Safety in a coal mine depends upon mutual commitment, which extends beyond the other miners.  Everyone connected with the mine must share that commitment: the miners, the regulators, the inspectors, and the owners.  When everyone is committed to safety and regulations are followed strictly, mines are generally safe places to work.  In this case, although the failures to protect this mine from a terrible explosion seem to be systemic, who could be a better villian than the owner, Massey Coal, and its president Don Blankenship?
Blankenship hates unions, thinks global warming is a farce, rants about atheists and environmentalists, and Tweeted recently that “America doesn’t need Green jobs, but Red, White & Blue ones.”  A friend of mine from the coalfields calls Blankenship “odious.”
The miners I met told me of the potential for fire from the mix of methane and air.  The disturbance of coal inevitably releases methane, although some mines are “gassier” than others.  Too high a concentration of methane isn’t explosive nor is too low a concentration.  However, that “just right” concentration is likely to exist somewhere within every mine unless strict ventilation requirements are followed.
The Upper Big Branch mine, where last week’s explosion occurred, was sited with over 500 safety violations last year alone, twice the prior year.  Yet tragically, none of these brought about the adherence to regulations that would have prevented the explosion and kept these men alive.  
To Massey, penalties are a mere cost of doing business, it would seem.  Massey has earned a reputation of putting production before safety.  Massey's above-the-law approach and disdain for safety and preservation of the environment has been well-chronicled:
*    Massey Energy was responsible for a coal slurry spill in October 2000 in Kentucky, estimated to be 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill and at the time the largest environmental disaster east of the Mississippi.  Massey was warned of and ignored signs of the impoundment’s weaknesses and failed to act.  
*    When a low court jury ruled against them in a fraud case granting $50 million to an opponent, Blankenship took the case to the West Virginia State Supreme Court.  In an expose by ABC news where Blankenship broke a reporter’s camera, Blankenship was found to be palling around with and donating $3.5 million into the campaign of a candidate (West Virginia’s Supreme Court is elected.) who ultimately won election and then didn’t recuse himself in the case, which was overturned in Massey’s favor.  Novelist John Grisham used this case has the basis of his 2008 book, The Appeal.
*    The latest fire in a mine wasn’t Massey’s first.  In January 2006, a fire at the Aracoma mine killed two workers.  A month after this fatal disaster, Blankenship described the explosion as “rare and statistically insignificant.”  Blankenship has often received police escorts to and from meetings with townspeople and relatives of the “statistically insignificant” fatalities in his mines, as they have been known to hurl invectives and even chairs at him.
For most of us, the very thought of being hundreds or even thousands of feet underground is abhorrent.  Visual images of instant or protracted death in the bowels of hell make us question the sanity of anyone who digs the coal “icing” out from within thick layers of rock “cake”.  But the people who do this work provide for the material well-being we enjoy.  They literally keep the lights on for us.  The electrical power that allows the computer upon which I’m now composing this essay and the one upon which you'll read it likely comes from the burning of Appalachian coal.  It is disingenuous to rail against the danger and unsightly aspects of coal mining and burning unless we’re prepared to do without the cheap and reliable electrical power it provides.  However, safety can be achieved if everyone involved is committed.
The deep hollows of Appalachia where coal mining is done have produced a unique brand of human beings.  Many I met fit my stereotype of being deeply religious, pugnacious, rough around the edges, and tough as nails.  They were also kind and eager to share their lifestyle with visitors.  Ironically, they may be the first to rail against “burdensome government regulations” when stringent regulations and strict enforcement may prevent some of the disasters from which they too often suffer.
Our governor, Bob McDonnell, has asked Virginia residents to observe a moment of silence at 3:30 p.m. today to express our solidarity with our brothers and sisters to the northwest. I hope you’ll join he and me in doing so.  When you’re done, I hope you’ll join me in another moment of outrage that things like this continue to happen.
Coal is actively mined not two hours by car from my doorstep.  I encourage readers to visit Pocahontas, Bramwell, Jewel Ridge, Coalwood, War, Welch, Ieager, or Gary rather than Monticello or Appomattox, next time you seek an historic or cultural experience.  After seeing coal country first-hand and meeting the people who live and work there, I never turn on a light or a computer or take a hot shower without thinking about the men who toil underground extracting from the earth the rock that burns.