The day started with a beautiful walk. Dark, misting gently, a little early at Starbucks (they don't open until 5). Michael, a regular, explained in some detail how he's studying happiness... learning all he can before he begins to grow his prospering machine-tool company. He thinks happy people, or people who think of themselves as happy, will make the best employees. His job is to find those happy people. We talked a bit about the Bhutanese GHP, or the measure of national Gross Happiness Product. Imagine if our GNP was GHP? Susan suggested The Art of Happiness, A Handbook for Living, by the Dalai Lama. The jacket says, "Nearly every time you see him, he's laughing or at least smiling. And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling". It's true, I think... despite a remarkably difficult and frustrating career, he does convince his audience that happiness is inevitable and that "the very motion of our lives is toward happiness". I think Michael will enjoy the book.
Then home for some breakfast (a quarter of a strawberry/blueberry pie!), a quick trip over to Elder to deliver Lyle to school, and... here's where it gets fun!... a journey to the Radiation Center on the OSU campus. Yes, fun! My poster says, on one side: Kill the OSU Nuke! and on the other side, Before It Kills Us! It was cold to be out there, and lonely... until the cops started doing their drive-by stuff. It took about 5 minutes for the first one to show up. An Oregon State Police guy in one of those nasty black growling muscle cars. He drove by at minimum speed, eyeing me and my potential to be a pain in the ass... mid-block he grabbed his mike and had a chat with somebody. Turn around, slowly slowly past me again. The nuke building is a 60s-era nondescript building directly across 35th St. from the EPA Oregon headquarters. Not much to look at. With a sidewalk running the full length of the south side, parking on the east, parking on the north, and 35th on the west. I was just pacing slowly, turning my sign for the traffic to see both sides, eyeing the cop. He drove off. Five minutes, another cop... this one from the campus police. Slowly slowly, talking on the radio, down to the corner, around again, slowly slowly past me again. Meanwhile, I'm speeding up a bit... too cold to be so slow. Sure enough, here comes another cop... full uniform, including hat, but in an unmarked car. Maybe this is why nukes are so expensive? A few people showed up for work, all on bikes (this is, after all, Corvallis). They read my sign and went inside. I lasted a bit more than an hour... then decided it was too cold to continue. I needed hot coffee, which I had hoped one of the cops would bring me... alas, they didn't think of it. Bummer.
You might ask why I was out there wasting my time. Good point. It's the ethics of the thing... the fact that the nuclear-reaction process, the heating of all that water to make electricity, leaves behind a waste that will be potentially deadly for thousands of years! What kind of legacy is that to leave for the next few hundreds of human generations? And they will have no choice in the matter. If they do not deal with our nuclear waste properly, they will die. They will rot. This is the reason we (Susan, Liv, Heidi and I) were at the Peach Bottom Atomic Station on April 7, 1988 to protest the re-starting of the two nuclear reactors located there... just 23 miles east of our farm in Norrisville. Those two reactors, by the way, were the same design, and roughly the same vintage, as the troublesome plants in Japan today. Anyway, we spent a day carrying the protest signs, and we went home, and they fired up the nukes. Ack!
An aside on the OSU nuke: A week ago I made two public-records requests... one for a copy of the building permit issued to OSU for housing the nuke (a fairly new technology in the early 60s, and one that must have confounded the Building Code guys in the city offices), and the other for a copy of the final sign-off papers on the completed building. No response yet from the city... but they're on deadline, and must respond this week. Ha!
The afternoon was warm (56!) and sunny, so we hiked the Old Growth trail just north of us in the Coast Range foothills. An afternoon devoted to Green... green mosses, green ferns, green trees, green leaves on the few spring wildflowers blooming this early. Ya just gotta love the greens of spring!
Kirk
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