Build Your House On Solid Ground
for release 10-11-05
Washington D.C.
I guess I'm just not an ocean person. No, clearly I'm not an ocean person. In fact, the ocean is one of the most disagreeable places I've ever experienced. It's uncomfortable.
As I write this, we are at the beach. Doreen loves it. It's her element, she claims. You know, all that power and majesty of nature bullshit. I can't see it.
The place is a fucking nuisance. There's too much wind and too much salt and too much commercialism and then there's that incessant white noise of the waves crashing that makes you have dreams that you have bought a house under the #1 runway of an International airport.
Anybody that chooses to live within fifty miles of a coastline is an idiot. They are just asking for catastrophe or disaster or slow choking mold. I won't point out the obvious and immediate examples of the recent hurricanes which demonstrate that if you live on the Gulf or East Coast, devastation is statistically inevitable.
I can appreciate the awesome power of nature. A good thunderstorm can be a thrill, but I try to stay away from tsunadoes and hurriquakes and earthcanes. Ok, I really do like the ocean. For about fifteen minutes. Then it gets gritty and salty and windy and noisy and otherwise generally annoying. I suppose I'm just a creature of the meadows and the prairies and the mountains.
In the New Testament, Jesus advises us to build our houses upon the rock and not upon the sand. I'm sure that the insurance companies would agree with this. In the past few years there have been a couple of trillion dollars worth of hurricane and flood and mold damage claims filed by people who have built their houses upon the sand.
This country is vast. Why would a reasonable person build a home in a coastal area where the power and majesty of nature will periodically huff and puff and blow your house down? It's statistically inevitable and tempting the statistics is even riskier than tempting the Fates.
Sure, you might be spared the wrath of nature for twenty, thirty years, but as sure as death and taxes, you will be hit by a heart attack or an audit or a hurricane. And the house edge is upped by the fact of global warming. The act of coastal development is as much of a gamble as playing roulette on a floating casino.
When the native Americans inhabited this land, they had better sense than to develop beach front property. They were more connected to the land and to nature. Therefore they knew better than to put their wig-wams in an area where recent history had shown that they could be wiped out by a storm or a natural disaster. They didn't have FEMA or Farmer's Insurance in those days. They built their houses upon the rock.
Everything here at the beach is wet. My Pall Malls are soggy and the paper upon which I write is limp. I see the swells from the storm that is moving up the coast. Nature is powerful. Nature is full of energy. Up and down the beach there is hotel after hotel after condominium stacked up against the surf. And people actually pay to stay in them. And I'm one of the fools.
This beach is being used for frivolous purposes. It should be an energy farm. The waves crash in. Wave after wave, each as powerful as a locomotive.
Wave and tide turbines could harvest this energy practically for free. The same source that powers hurricanes could just as easily power our air-conditioners and automobiles.
As The Poet's Eye has observed many times before, there is no energy crisis, there is an ingenuity crisis. Energy is everywhere. The Universe is made of energy. The sun heats the oceans and the moon pulls the tides. It's all absolutely free. But what use is energy if you can't put a meter on it? It's harder to get a patent on sunlight than it is to get an oil lease. That's why our economy runs on oil and not on the sun or the winds or the tides. They are free.
"Build your house on solid ground
let the rain come down
let the rain come down"
--Barry Gremillion (paraphrasing the Gospel According to Mathew) (click to listen)
