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Design Can Save Us
See that giant yellow plane dumping water over San Diego?
Tuesday has brought more harsh, dry wind to fan the fires in Southern California where, as I'm writing this, 300,000 people are out of their homes and 374 square miles are burning. Watching footage of a firefighting plane, I thought about my 77-year-old cousin Lene (pronounced Lah-Nay, although she refused to add an accent, calling it pretentious), who was married to a man obsessed with aircraft design — especially the design of firefighting aircraft.
His dream was to invent the perfect flying fire truck. After coming home from his job at the post office (the pension was too good to give up), he studied things like how fire-high temperatures affect tire pressure variations in landing gear, and how hot it has to be to melt the enamel paint on airplanes. He had plans for a second career after his retirement from civil service, but a heart condition kept him off his feet too much. Fine with him. He never wavered in his passion, paid or not.
When I got Lene on the phone this morning she was in a tizzy over the fires (she has a niece near San Diego and a general, pervasive fear for the fate of all mankind). Between bites of her oat bran bagel, she said, "To be frank with you, I used to think of weather as the factor that determined if I wore a sweater or a coat. Lenny would say, 'No, no no. Weather is the wind, the pressure.' And now I know! This is weather like out of the Bible. This is downright apocalyptic. I'm glad Lenny's not here to see. He'd be out of his mind. He'd be dreaming up a space-plane horsecopter or some whatzit gizmo to rescue my niece's poor horses."
His dream was to invent the perfect flying fire truck. After coming home from his job at the post office (the pension was too good to give up), he studied things like how fire-high temperatures affect tire pressure variations in landing gear, and how hot it has to be to melt the enamel paint on airplanes. He had plans for a second career after his retirement from civil service, but a heart condition kept him off his feet too much. Fine with him. He never wavered in his passion, paid or not.
When I got Lene on the phone this morning she was in a tizzy over the fires (she has a niece near San Diego and a general, pervasive fear for the fate of all mankind). Between bites of her oat bran bagel, she said, "To be frank with you, I used to think of weather as the factor that determined if I wore a sweater or a coat. Lenny would say, 'No, no no. Weather is the wind, the pressure.' And now I know! This is weather like out of the Bible. This is downright apocalyptic. I'm glad Lenny's not here to see. He'd be out of his mind. He'd be dreaming up a space-plane horsecopter or some whatzit gizmo to rescue my niece's poor horses."
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10:08 EDT, 24.Oct.07