The Driveway Is Coated

I would have gotten the seal coat on in a solid five hours. Unfortunately the block of time had a two-hour crack in the middle. Once again I’d underestimated how much material I’d need, and went back to the suburban big box for three buckets of sealer. I would have rather gone to River-Lake Hardware, two local guys who’ve been at the same address on East Lake Street since before Barbara and I hit town. They were the ones who sent me to the ‘burbs, and I have to admit that stocking as much petroleum product as I used (twenty-four gallons of asphalt and additives in various proportions) would take too much space in that little, old-fashioned hardware store.

The numbers favor shopping locally when you can. The 3/50 Project says that sixty-eight bucks out of every hundred spent stay in the community when you spend locally, but only forty-three when you buy from a national chain. Beyond that, I’d say that keeping the local economy healthy has other advantages. Multiple local competitors mean you’re not at the mercy of a home office that might mothball a store that wasn’t sending enough cash back home. One store out of many closes, and you can shop across the street; the local big box shuts and supplying your project or dressing your kids gets more involved. Family businesses model commerce for children. Once, long ago, I read that millionaires were more likely to have been the children of family businesses, restaurants, taxicabs, etc. Not that I approve of concentrated wealth, but we’re a commercial species, and business is an art.

Barbara had taken the car, so I got on the train, grabbed the care, and picked up three more buckets of seal coat. I almost got it all covered with two, but had to grudgingly pry open the last pail for less than ten square feet.

In a can’t-learn-less moment, I saw that the salt I’d put in some of the cracks had risen through the tar to whiten spots on my clean, flat, black surface. I have a couple of other reservations about my job, but they’re more like questions. I’m pleased and curious to see how the driveway fares this winter.

And Barbara told me I’m brave.

Not Enough Bugs

It doesn’t seem like a good year for insects. I’ve only counted seven butterflies in the garden, in spite of having a nice crop of purple coneflower, as well as gallardia, zinnia, and prairie star. The cricket chorus, which begins around the end of July, was a little late this year, and seems less robust than usual. I’m used to hearing a loud, pulsing drone, which may be a certain kind of bug’s song, but which I think of as different crickets’ harmonizing. Against the background of the chorus, I listen, as I lay me down to sleep, to two or three neaby soloists. This year the drone is practically faint, and there’s less nearby chirruping.

Barbara, who is one of those people who is attractive, or at least more noticeable, to mosquitos, says she hasn’t been bitten much this year. No cloud without a silver lining, but I still wonder if the insects are suffering. It was a dry spring, so skeeter hatches were fewer and smaller. What influences butterfly and cricket proliferation? Being an environmental paranoiac, or at least alert to possibility, I have to wonder, have we pushed the envelope too hard. On the other hand, populations rise and fall. When I used to hang out in the woods, I thought some years were good fox years, or quail years, some lean. In the mid-nineties, turkeys, which I’d never seen in those parts before, began to appear. Succession happens without our interference, but we are actors on the ecological stage.

How do I know, and how do I know what to do about fewer insects, whatever my species part in their decline might be. They’re pollinators and prey for birds, whose welfare also sffects me.

I got all the major cracks in the driveway filled. I feel like I cut corners. I didn’t cover the places where earlier seal coats had split into alligator patterns, and I could have smoothed out places where there’s a lot of aggregate showing. Instead, I stopped when I ran out of filler. I found a few places where I’d left roots, and I went ahead and covered the dry woody things. The next step is to squeegee the seal coating itself over everything tomorrow. I’m curious to see how that goes, and I’m curious to see how my job stands up to the coming winter.

Beach Tar On My Feet

Here’s a still life for you. The tubs and the jugs are both crack filler, the tubs about three and a third gallons and the jugs just under a gallon. Nine and a third gallons of goo, poured or troweled into driveway cracks, with maybe as much again still needing to find a home. Somebody who’s done this chore before is going, “Just how big is your driveway, and how long did you let it go?”

Twelve hundred square feet. A long time.

I thought when I started this chore that just the three jugs would do it. I went back to the suburban, big-box this morning for more, and I thought that would be enough. Nuh-huh. Some of the seams between drive and outbuildings (garage and shed) are fist width. I’m going back this evening.

The goo in the jugs is asphalt, clay, plastic, and water. It comes out of the jug darker than either, and of a color somewhere between the Chicago River at Michigan Avenue, and the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau. It dries to that nice, shiny tar black. The stuff in the tubs looks like the same formula, and the colors are the same, except that the manufacturer has added sand and it doesn’t get shiny.

The tubbed stuff gets my vote. You have to trowel it, and it doesn’t spread as smoothly, but the sand adds bulk, and I’ve got seams and holes I’d never fill from the jugs.

Will I ever finish this chore? The next trip is my last. I’m not going back. Still, Barbara says this would cost us three grand or better if we got somebody else to do it.

Step On A Crack...

I finally got the weeds pulled from the cracks, and used the hose for a little hydraulic mining and final clean up. The pavement got nice and clean. My feet were bare, and whenever I felt a piece of grit underfoot, my inner nag would go off about tracks on its nice clean floor. Three boxes of salt, and the brine from three jars of moldy pickles went into the cracks -- low-tech herbicide. I await dry pavement before filling cracks with the gooey residue of Carboniferous-Period ferns.

I wish I had carried the Wild Edibles field guide as I weeded. I’d murder a plant, and wonder, "What the heck was that?" Then I’d think, I can’t interrupt to go look it up. The plant I’m most curious about came in clumps, with lots of slender stalks growing from fat, tender roots. Those were impossible to pull. Each one of those, boy, left part of itself behind.

I finished almost in time for Democracy Now. Caught up during “For the 64th Time: No More Nuclear War,” Daniel Ellsberg, Frida Berrigan, and Pervez Hoodbhoy, commemorating the 64th anniversary of the nuclear destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Saturday, Secretary of State Clinton said that the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement wasn’t conditional on India’s signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the Agreement, India says it will keep its civil and military nuclear facilities separate and place all its civilian reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The US will transfer technology and expertise, to India, and help out financially.

India has at least forty nuclear weapons, and no more than 110. It tested its first in 1974. It has begun a fleet of nuclear submarines. Pakistan is its chief rival, although India and China have a history, and look out for certain neighbors to its west.

Can a society keep its military and civilian nukes separate? If nothing else, there’s social feedback, with both sides conditioning people’s images of themselves as nuclear players, for good or bad. Civilian and military engineers will know each other at university, and instructors will have both in the same classes.

There were cities devastated by conventional weapons during World War II -- Tokyo and Dresden most notably -- but those firestorms took fleets of bombers and lots of bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki each suffered from a single weapon, dropped from one B-29. Nuclear weapons are attractive because they make total destruction economical.

On the civilian side, nuclear power promises to keep us rich and fat after oil, and reduce greenhouse gases. The net energy of any alternative to fossil fuels is less than what the thing produces. It takes energy to build a power plant, deliver fuel, monitor the thing, and -- in the case of nuclear power -- keep it safe for longer than Homo s. has existed so far. Maybe nuclear pays, but the margin is smaller than you think. Besides, if we use new technology to prolong the current orgy of television and internal combustion, we will never grow up, never fully realize the potential of the gray stuff behind our eyes, our birthright. Conservation, radical conservation, will spare us the energy cost of building many of any kind of energy source, and preserve more liberty. (There is another point of view that tempts me, but I don't have the vocabulary to evaluate it, yet. It's exponent here, Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, believes that nuclear power and genetically modified crops are compassionately necessary, maybe critical to human survival.)

The Beacon apples are ripe and abundant, with a big grape harvest hard on its heels. We're starting to pick and preserve.

Pulling Weeds

I’m lying on my belly in the alley. Our driveway is the dirty slope on the left. I’ve been pulling lots of weeds, for my sins, preparatory to filling the cracks they're in and seal-coating the driveway. I mentioned this in my Post-Apocalyptic Salad blog. What you’re looking at is dirt that collected where the driveway asphalt is lower than the alley concrete. You can see some of the vegetative devastation, too. Weeds, feel the wrath of Tom! Two alleys make a tee here, which explains how I can be on my belly in the alley and looking across another alley at somebody else's garage door.

It’s probably criminal abuse of tools, but the best thing I’ve discovered for yanking weeds out of cracks is a pair of needle-nosed pliers. I also use a screwdriver and a putty knife to scrape and pry. I tried my fingers, and wound up leaving a lot of root below grade. Fire from a propane torch was likewise useless: tops blackened, but there was plenty of juice only nanometers below. Ancient herbivores were browsing weeds long before hominids started chipping flint and laying asphalt, so weeds have adapted, and I expect new growth, even through seal coat, from tissue left behind. Gretchen, fellow scullery volunteer at Open Arms of Minnesota, suggested salting the cracks, and I may so do before applying petroleum products.

Something interesting I’ve discovered is that purslane, for all its above-ground branches, has but a single root, only a few short hairs wisping from it. A small white carrot.

I’ve thought about dentistry as I’ve worked, and I’ve thought about cancer surgery, but only a little, recognizing that there are similarities between weeding the driveway and removing decay or treasonous cells from a body. I dig in and try to get all of the offensive growth. In case I miss something, I leave a little poison (salt) behind to thwart new growth.

I’ve also thought about succession. Cracks appear in rock/asphalt for whatever reason. Winter moisture freezes in the cracks and enlarges them. Soil and seeds drift into the cracks. One plant makes things congenial for another. Some make the environment cozy for animals, ants mostly in the driveway. Animals plant more seeds. Maybe it’s coincidence, but there was a pretty messy mix of purslane, quack grass, eensey-teensey ants, and a couple of other things where I took the picture. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of some permaculturists I met who kept getting volunteer raspberries next to their hazelnuts.

Interesting as all of this may be, I'd rather have questions. Answers make me too comfortable, and I haven't come up with many questions. So far only, "Should I add the soil in the picture to my garden? Does the city salt the alleys? (Maybe not; I've never seen them do it; nobody's speeding there; I've fallen nether bits-over-teakettle on slick ice under fresh snow; I'll call.) If it does salt the alleys, is the salt still in the dirt?"

Post-Apocalyptic Salad

The green stuff in the picture is purslane. My Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern and Central North America recommends chopping it up and adding it to salads. It’s not bad, but there wouldn’t be a major flavor or texture contrast, and it would take a lot of the stuff to bulk the salad up. Peterson also says you can grind flour from the seeds. Somebody must have tried it, maybe Roger Tory Peterson himself, but the flowers are tiny, so the seeds must be microscopic.

I’m going to seal-coat the driveway, so I’ve been cleaning the cracks in the asphalt. This was such a good specimen, I had to snap the picture. The book is about a quarter century old, so not up-to-date, but still true. I don't know whose the skull is. I found it in Illinois' oak-hickory woods.

There’s a Sufi story (and there are probably as many Sufi stories as there are rabbi stories) about a man who starved to death because it never occurred to him to eat his dog. We may be eating a lot of purslane soon (lamb’s quarters is another common alley green, and it’s supposed to be among the most nutritious). I’ve been eyeballing the squirrels, too.