• Tag Archives Hilo

  • Terremoto

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                       Full Wild Moon

    Earthquakes.  Great and terrible.  They fascinate me, as do volcanoes and tsunami.

    As you look at this scale, notice that it goes up logarithmically, not geometrically.  An 8.5 is 5 billion tons of tnt while a 9.0, only .5 higher on the scale is 32 billion tons.)

    Here’s a good Richter scale comparison:

    Richter     TNT for Seismic    Example
    Magnitude      Energy Yield    (approximate)

    -1.5                6 ounces   Breaking a rock on a lab table
    1.0               30 pounds   Large Blast at a Construction Site
    1.5              320 pounds
    2.0                1 ton      Large Quarry or Mine Blast
    2.5              4.6 tons
    3.0               29 tons
    3.5               73 tons
    4.0            1,000 tons     Small Nuclear Weapon
    4.5            5,100 tons     Average Tornado (total energy)
    5.0           32,000 tons
    5.5           80,000 tons     Little Skull Mtn., NV Quake, 1992
    6.0        1 million tons     Double Spring Flat, NV Quake, 1994
    6.5        5 million tons     Northridge, CA Quake, 1994
    7.0       32 million tons     Hyogo-Ken Nanbu, Japan Quake, 1995; Largest Thermonuclear Weapon
    7.5      160 million tons     Landers, CA Quake, 1992
    8.0        1 billion tons     San Francisco, CA Quake, 1906
    8.5        5 billion tons     Anchorage, AK Quake, 1964
    9.0       32 billion tons     Chilean Quake, 1960
    10.0       1 trillion tons     (San-Andreas type fault circling Earth)
    12.0     160 trillion tons     (Fault Earth in half through center,
    OR Earth’s daily receipt of solar energy)
    Plus there is the tsunami:

    The following was a report from today.  Can you imagine what must have been going through their minds, given the devastation from the 1960 tsunami?

    In Hawaii, water began pulling away from shore off Hilo Bay on the Big Island just before noon, exposing reefs and sending dark streaks of muddy, sandy water offshore. Waves later washed over Coconut Island, a small park off Hilo’s coast.

    The tsunami caused a series of surges that were about 20 minutes apart, and the waves arrived later and smaller than originally predicted. The highest wave at Hilo measured 5.5 feet (1.7 meters) high, while Maui saw some as high as 2 meters (6.5 feet).


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  • Litter Mates

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                       Waxing Dark Moon

    A word about litter mates.  Kate and I buy litter mates when we get puppies.  Once in a while we’ve gotten adult dogs given to us by a breeder and we did buy one solitary wolfhound, but otherwise litter mates.  Of our current pack all of the dogs were litter mates.  Hilo and Kona were born 8 years ago from a champion whippet bitch.  Emma and Bridgit (now deceased) we bought 14 years ago from a woman who was line breeding for really fast whippets.  They were both crazy, but they loved each other.

    Rigel and Vega don’t look like litter mates.  Rigel looks like a miniature Irish Wolfhound (miniature at 100 pounds, of vegarigel400course) and Vega looks like, well, Vega.  She’s a giant coon hound with a huge head and a lot of muscle.  Appearances in this case deceive.  These girls have been together since last December when they were born.

    Litter mates have mutual space.  They lie on each other, eat each other’s food, play together.  They retain the bond you might expect from animals who shared a womb, then a mother’s breasts.  The intimacy and trust they display toward each other is so sweet, so innocent and enduring.  We buy them just for this reason, so they will have a partner through life, one they can count on, one their own size in the case of Rigel and Vega.

    These relationships have been part of the magic for Kate and me over the years, an addition to the joy of knowing animals as friends and companions, we also know them as sisters.


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  • Picking Grapes With Hilo

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                       Waxing Blood Moon

    As the sun went down this evening, I picked grapes.  Picking grapes reaches back in time, especially wild grapes, as these are.  It reaches back to our hunter-gatherer past, a past much longer than our post neo-lithic, agricultural and urban  world.  This vine grows here because it can.  Maybe someone planted grapes long ago here, but these small grapes, almost like miniatures, offer themselves in the eons old rhythm of plant reproduction.

    To get at the clusters, all smaller than the palm of my hand, I found it easier if I first removed a covering of vines and leaves that obscured the grapes.  Do these leaves shade the grapes, keep them from desiccating too soon?  Is there some part of the grape’s maturation that requires a cooler, shadier environment?  I don’t know, but the layering of leaves, then grapes up near the main vine, where it crawled across the top of the six foot fence we have toward the road, appears intentional, at least intentional in the way that evolution works through its blind selection of more adaptive characteristics.

    Hilo, our smallest whippet, accompanies me when I work outside.  She hangs around and watches me, wanders off and finds something smelly to rub on her shoulder, watches other animals go by on the road.  Her companionship also reaches back into the  paleolithic when humans and shy wolves began to keep company, fellow predators brought together by the similarity in the game they hunted and the also similar method of hunting in packs.

    This time of year, the early fall, would have been good then too.  The food grows on vines and on trees, on shrubs and certain flowering plants.  Game eats the same food and becomes fat, a rich source of nutrient.  My guess is that there was a certain amount of anxiety, at least in these temperate latitudes, for the older ones in clan would know that winter comes after this time of plenty and that somehow food had to be preserved.

    Kate takes the grapes and turns then into jelly and apple-grape butter.  The act of preservation, though now more sophisticated technologically, was essential back in the days prior to horticulture and agriculture.

    The resonance among these fall related acts and our distant past adds a poignancy mixed with hope to them.  We have done it, we do it, others will do it in the future.  As the wheel turns.


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