Another Worry
Deep enough to hold the combined water in all the other Great
Lakes and with a surface area as large as South Carolina, Lake Superior's size
has lent it an aura of invulnerability. But the mighty Superior is losing water
and getting warmer, worrying those who live near its shores, scientists and
companies that rely on the lake for business.
The changes to the lake could be signs of climate change, although scientists
aren't sure.
Superior's level is at its lowest point in eight decades and will set a record
this fall if, as expected, it dips three more inches. Meanwhile, the average
water temperature has surged 4.5 degrees since 1979, significantly above the
2.7-degree rise in the region's air temperature during the same period.
That's no small deal for a freshwater sea that was created from glacial melt as
the Ice Age ended and remains chilly in all seasons.
A weather buoy on the western side recently recorded an "amazing" 75 degrees,
"as warm a surface temperature as we've ever seen in this lake," said Jay
Austin, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth's Large
Lakes Observatory.
Water levels also have receded on the other Great Lakes since the late 1990s.
But the suddenness and severity of Superior's changes worry many in the region.
Shorelines are dozens of yards wider than usual, giving sunbathers wider beaches
but also exposing mucky bottomlands and rotting vegetation.
On a recent day, Dan Arsenault, a 32-year-old lifelong resident of Sault Ste.
Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, watched his two young daughters play in mud
on the southeastern coast where water was waist deep only a few years ago. A
floatation rope that previously designated the swimming area now rests on moist
ground.
"This is the lowest I've ever seen it," said Arsenault.
Superior still has a lot of water. Its average depth is 483 feet and it reaches
1,332 feet at the deepest point. Erie, the shallowest Great Lake, is 210 feet at
its deepest and averages only 62 feet. Lake Michigan averages 279 feet and is
925 feet at its deepest.
Yet along Superior's shores, boats can't reach many mooring sites and marina
operators are begging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dredge shallow
harbors. Ferry service between Grand Portage, Minn., and Isle Royale National
Park was scaled back because one of the company's boats couldn't dock.
Sally Zabelka has turned away boaters wanting to dock at Chippewa Landing marina
in the eastern Upper Peninsula, where not long ago 27-foot vessels easily made
their way up the channel from the lake's Brimley Bay. "In essence, our dock is
useless this year," she said.
Another worry: As the bay heats up, the perch, walleye and smallmouth bass that
have lured anglers to her campground and tackle shop are migrating to cooler
waters in the open lake.
Low water has cost the shipping industry millions of dollars. Vessels are
carrying lighter loads of iron ore and coal to avoid running aground in shallow
channels.
Puffing on a pipe in a Grand Marais pub, retiree Ted Sietsema voiced a suspicion
not uncommon in the villages along Superior's southern shoreline: The government
is diverting the water to places with more people and political influence —
along Lakes Huron and Michigan and even the Sun Belt, via the Mississippi River.
"Don't give me that global warming stuff," Sietsema said. "That water is going
west. That big aquifer out there is empty but they can still water the desert.
It's got to be coming from somewhere."
That theory doesn't hold water, said Scott Thieme, hydraulics and hydrology
chief with the Corps of Engineers district office in Detroit. Water does exit
Lake Superior through locks, power plants and gates on the St. Marys River, but
in amounts strictly regulated under a 1909 pact with Canada.
The actual forces at work, while mysterious, are not the stuff of spy novels, he
said.
Precipitation has tapered off across the upper Great Lakes since the 1970s and
is nearly 6 inches below normal in the Superior watershed the past year. Water
evaporation rates are up sharply because mild winters have shrunk the winter ice
cap — just as climate change computer models predict for the next half-century.
Yet those models also envision more precipitation as global warming sets in,
said Brent Lofgren, a physical scientist with the Great Lakes Environmental
Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor. Instead there's drought, suggesting other
factors.
Cynthia Sellinger, the lab's deputy director, said she suspects a contributing
factor could be residual effects of El Nino, the warming of equatorial Pacific
waters that produced warmer winters in the late 1990s, just as the lakes began
receding.
Austin, the Minnesota-Duluth professor, said he's concerned about the effects
the warmer water could have.
"It's just not clear what the ultimate result will be as we turn the knob up,"
he said. "It could be great for fisheries or fisheries could crash."
China has banned crude and insensitive slogans promoting the
country's 'one-child' family planning policy, such as "Raise fewer babies but
more piggies," which have stoked anger in rural areas, state media said Sunday.
China's 28-year-old family planning policy limits most urban couples to just one
child and allows some families in the countryside to have a second child if
their first is a girl.
Critics say that has led to forced abortions and sterilizations and a
dangerously imbalanced sex ratio due to the traditional preference for male
heirs, which has prompted countless families to abort female fetuses in hopes of
getting boys.
The policy continues to engender anger and resentment, especially among farmers
in the countryside, because of the sometimes brutal methods used to enforce it,
such as heavy fines and the seizure of property. Local authorities themselves
face demotions, criticism or the loss of jobs if they fail to hit population
targets.
The National Population and Family Planning Commission said it was striking
insensitive slogans promoting the policy in order to dispel the impression the
government was "simply forcing people to give up having more babies, causing
misunderstanding (of) the policy and even tarnishing the image of the
government," the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Xinhua said uncouth slogans also threatened to undermine China's efforts to keep
the population under control. It paraphrased the family planning commission as
saying such "low-quality slogans" could lead to "public complaint and
resentment."
Among the slogans that were forbidden were "One more baby means one more tomb"
and "Houses toppled, cows confiscated, if abortion demand rejected." Such
slogans are often found painted on roadside buildings in rural areas.
The planning commission issued a list of 190 acceptable slogans, such as "Mother
earth is too tired to sustain more children" and "Both boys and girls are
parents' hearts."
The government contends the one-child policy has helped prevent at least 300
million births — about the size of the U.S. population — and aided China's rapid
economic development.
But it has also been the cause of recent protests.
In May, thousands of farmers in southern Guangxi province rioted to protest
fines they said were imposed "arbitrarily and brutally" against people who had
more children than allowed under the policy, state media reported. Authorities
detained 28 people after the incident.
Media reports said all public servants in the province's Bobai county had been
ordered to collect fines from people who violated the policy. If violators
failed to pay within three days, their homes would be demolished and their
belongings seized.
One villager said some fees were as high as $1,300 — an unmanageable amount for
an area where most annual incomes were only $130.
JERUSALEM - An 8-year-old Israeli boy spent six hours floating
in the Dead Sea alone at night after his father left him there by accident
during a family trip, police said Sunday.
They said they would not press charges against the errant parent
The Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth and one of Israel's most popular tourist
attractions, has an abnormally high salt concentration that allows swimmers to
float on the surface.
Rescue workers said the boy, Shneur Zalman Friedman, from Jerusalem, was in the
sea with his father and two brothers on Thursday evening when currents swept him
away from shore, without anyone else noticing.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the family was part of a large group
visiting a beach reserved for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men — who do not bathe in
the presence of women — away from main public areas.
His father left the water with other members of the group and only noticed the
boy was missing as darkness fell, Rosenberg said.
A major search by police helicopters and volunteers in motorboats finally found
Friedman about 2 miles from the shore early Friday after six hours in the
strong-smelling, corrosive water, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav of the Zaka rescue
organization said.
The boy was dehydrated and frightened but otherwise healthy, he said. Friedman
told his rescuers he remained calm throughout the ordeal, saying prayers and
thinking about his school friends as he floated in the darkness.
"The boy said that he didn't try to swim, he just drifted with the current,"
Rosenfeld said.
The mineral-laden waters of the Dead Sea helped keep the boy afloat but could
have choked him had he panicked and swallowed large quantities, said Omer Cohen
of the Megilot volunteer rescue unit.
After hours of fruitless searching, workers had all but given up hope of finding
the boy alive.
"We thought we were looking for a body," Cohen said. "We were surprised to find
the boy alive and well,"
New Mexico Magazine has a monthly compilation of stories about Americans who don't know that New Mexico is a U.S. state. The editor, Walter Lopez, talks with Lynn Neary about the bank tellers, cell phone providers and ticketing agents who tell New Mexicans that they reside in another country.
August 5, 2007
Is Santa Fe Ready for a Makeover?
By HENRY SHUKMAN
A SUNDAY evening in late June. A crowd of well-dressed people is spilling out of
the St. Francis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts in downtown Santa Fe, a
grand adobe building some 90 years old, with monolithic mud towers and tender
curvaceous walls connecting them. The late sun doesn't just gleam on the old
adobe edifice. It's deeper than that. The red and orange that lights up on the
walls, over the heads of the exiting crowd, seems to come from deep within them.
The low light tranforms the scene into a vision.
There's a moment like this almost every evening in Santa Fe, when the light
suddenly transfigures the earthen buildings, the lush cottonwood trees, even the
blacktop and cars. It all becomes luminous and dreamlike. It's as if the light
contains some special MSG of sight, and one can't stop staring. Santa Fe must
have offered this spectacle for the last four centuries, since the Palace of the
Governors was built on the plaza by the Spanish.
That light — the cottonwood-filtered sunlight of the morning, the thick
orange-juicy light of the evening; a light that matches other famed atmospheres,
such as Venice's gauzy haze or Provence's luminosity — is one reason why Santa
Fe seems to exert such power over both the people who live there and the ones
who return year after year. Powerful, too, is the pull of its history, a history
that is solidified in the mud of its buildings and that seems almost palpable,
like some slow-moving river that cuts through the center of the city. Yet around
town, there is a sense of change. People are talking about a New Santa Fe.
The Rail Runner commuter train is coming, linking Santa Fe directly to downtown
Albuquerque in an hour and a quarter. A huge new $100 million commercial center,
the Railyard, is being built downtown, a rival hub to the plaza in
contemporary-industrial steel and glass. Tax incentives have greatly enhanced
the film industry in New Mexico, and much of the post-production is centered
around Santa Fe. The celebrated Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta is now
represented not only by the Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College
of Santa Fe but also by the Zocalo, an extraordinary condominium development
spilling down a hillside north of town. And in 2005, Santa Fe was designated
America's first Unesco Creative City, a global acknowledgment of its place at
the forefront not just of folk art, crafts and design, but in new media too.
The old and the new: Can a 400-year-old city change? Do its inhabitants want it
to? How much can a tourist town that lives off its heritage welcome change?
On a quiet street on the east side of Santa Fe, among the ochre and rose of the
traditional adobe homes, there's one discreet house whose lines are sharper than
most, whose stucco is a shade grayer. What you can see of it from the road is an
intriguing blend of the masses and layering of traditional Indian pueblos, with
a contemporary starkness. You wouldn't imagine that it — and its architect, Trey
Jordan — had been at the center of an ugly controversy since it was built two
and a half years ago. Vandalized, covered in graffiti, discussed at Historic
Design Review Board meetings, the house — and a few others of his around town —
have made Mr. Jordan both a bête noire of the traditionalists, who would like to
see nothing but old-fashioned Santa Fe-style houses going up in historic
districts, and a mascot of those who think it's time the city allowed in a
breath of change. These days, both parties seem to be winning.
Ever since the 1920's when Santa Fe's Pueblo Revival style, with its adobe
walls, viga beams, molded corners and kiva fireplaces, was established and
codified, the city has appeared to be one of the best-preserved in the United
States. Devotees of its mud architecture, of this southwestern Timbuktu, speak
of a native style risen from the earth itself. But the city's look was actually
a deliberate concoction, brewed up by the city elders in the 1910s. The railway
had bypassed Santa Fe in the 1870's, and the city watched with a tinge of green
in its eyes as Taos became a magnet for the arts in the early 20th century.
The leading citizens decided it was time to start promoting the state capital. A
museum was needed, and a distinctive architectural style, something exotic.
First they considered going Alhambra, but after the Scottish Rite Temple went up
in 1911 as the first example of the new look — bright pink with moorish arches —
they rethought things (mercifully, some say) and went adobe instead.
Their foresight was inspired. Almost a century on, the city they helped design
and midwife remains one of the best-loved in America. It has only 75,000
inhabitants but its renown is global. For many decades it has been, and remains,
a dynamo of American art and culture. O'Keeffe, Willa Cather, Bob Dylan, Bruce
Nauman, Susan Rothenberg, Cormac McCarthy — the roll call of arts greats who
have spent time there is disproportionate for such a far-flung desert oasis. In
the '80s and '90s, Santa Fe Style, a repackaging of the original Pueblo Revival,
became one of the most celebrated design looks on the continent. With success
like this, who would want anything to change?
Some don't. Many don't. The Historic Board has done an admirable job over the
decades of maintaining a consistent look for Santa Fe, but behind its adobe
walls, and behind some newer walls made of glass, steel and concrete, there is
undeniably a new, and perhaps more sophisticated, more internationally aware
cultural center emerging.
For over a century, Santa Fe and northern New Mexico have been a place of
healing, a land of the cure. First it was tuberculosis; while Texas and
California closed their borders to consumptives, New Mexico welcomed them. Then
when Mabel Dodge Luhan moved to Taos in 1916, the area became a focus of New
Thought, of artists and thinkers who felt called to develop antidotes to the
malaise of modern civilization. Urban-refugee hippies congregated in the '60s.
It has long been a city for seekers and dreamers wanting to heal the
dissatisfactions of consumerist life.
The old days of Santa Fe when one beloved local artist had a billboard up on the
highway trumpeting his own brilliance — “Tommy Macaione, New Star of the
Art-World Firmament” — are surely gone. A particular Southwestern brand of
bohemianism — part Bob Dylan, part van Gogh, part Ken Kesey — is probably dying
out. But as Jan Morris commented 20 years ago, beneath the touristic veneer of
Santa Fe there has long been a dedicated community of serious sun-cured artists,
who work hard and have little to do with the tourist town. And it continues to
attract exceptional talent. Mr. Jordan's modernist-Pueblo architecture; the
cuisine of chefs like Nelli Maltezos; the jewelry of Denise Betesh; the
Nobel-stuffed think tank and research center at the Santa Fe Institute.
I've been coming for nearly 15 years, and while the ancient fabric of this old
American city still exerts its powerful magnetism, there is clearly a more
contemporary city coming to the fore too, one that is arguably more connected to
the rest of America, and indeed the world. It's manifest in art, in design, and
even in cuisine. The fact that northern New Mexico has long been a center of
innovative green building is also now bringing it into greater prominence as a
design hub. What was once crazy hippie solar architecture (“biotecture,” as
Michael Reynolds, the Earthship pioneer, calls it) is becoming mainstream
thinking on sustainable design. While the hippie-hacienda-ism best seen in
ceramic-encrusted bermed homes may still be a fringe look, its principles of
green living are not.
It only takes a stroll around the center to see it happening.
SITE Santa Fe, an installation center that pulls in site-specific art from
around the world, has been an anchor in Santa Fe's status as an art hub since it
was founded in 1995. Located a mile or two west of Canyon Road, the city's
traditional art thoroughfare, it has also become the cornerstone of a new colony
of art galleries that seem altogether more serious ventures in contemporary art
than the cowboy-and-Indian art and the irony-free kitsch that still dominate
much of Canyon Road. (Though there are exceptions even there, such as the new
Gallery Moda, which has a formidable collection of post-war prints by American
artists, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Wayne Thiebaud and Robert
Motherwell among them.)
Because of the Railyard development happening around it, which includes a large
public park, SITE will soon become a kind of museum-in-the-park, a fact that
delights its current director, Laura Heon. One oddity of Santa Fe's art scene is
that although big-name artists live here, and big collectors have homes here,
the galleries are mostly regional in what they offer. SITE is an exception:
internationally renowned, yet until recently, comparatively unrecognized in its
hometown.
Not far up Old Pecos Trail, CCA, the Center for Contemporary Arts, is committed
to elevating contemporary regional art to a national level. It's currently
undergoing major reconstruction. A derelict World War II tank garage next door
is being turned into the Muñoz Waxman Gallery, overlooked by a glass mezzanine;
the James Turrell “SkySpace” in the grounds — said to be the first he ever
built, 21 years ago — will soon be reopened to the public.
Even the city's food has felt the shock of the new. Aqua Santa, under the
guidance of the Slow Food wizard Brian Knox, continues to fill up night after
night with the great and the good. For close to a century now the city has had a
sprinkling of notable artists and writers, but there seems to be a new and more
visible concentration of celebrities here these days. On that Sunday night in
June, for example, when a crowd of 400 attended a V-Day reading in the St.
Francis Auditorium presided over by Eve Ensler (of “Vagina Monologues” fame), a
number of people wended their way afterward through the narrow downtown streets
to Aqua Santa, where a reception was held on its leafy patio. Amid the crowd
sipping Gruet sparkling wine (from a New Mexican vineyard run by an old French
Champagne family) various stars could be glimpsed: Ali McGraw, Jane Fonda, Joe
Wilson and Valerie Plame (who recently moved there in a blaze of local
publicity) and Val Kilmer. The wealth of second-homers was also in sparkling
evidence.
Ristra restaurant has a gleaming new bar that wouldn't feel out of place in
SoHo; La Mancha, the restaurant at the Galisteo Inn south of town, has settled
down after a couple of uncertain years with a strong new chef, Kim Müller,
formerly of the Compound; La Boca, a new tapas house in downtown, offers
contemporary reinventions of traditional Spanish cuisine; and 10 miles south of
town at the train station in Lamy, which saw many luminaries pass through —
Jung, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley, Stieglitz — a 1950 dining car of the Atlantic
Coast Line Railroad has been resurrected for breakfast and lunch.
Meanwhile Trattoria Nostrani continues its meteoric rise in American gastronomy,
now recognised as one of the 50 best restaurants in the country by Gourmet
magazine. Its chef, Nelli Maltezos, recently rolled out her summer menu, a
sequence of dishes that seem to float to the table from some culinary Olympus, a
mountainside up which many a $40 entree elsewhere labors with effort. The Inn of
the Anasazi's restaurant has a new chef, Martin Rios, who grew up in Santa Fe
before training under French chefs in New York City and France. He calls his
cooking contemporary global, but his expertise is fundamentally French. From the
new terrace on the street you can watch a sublime New Mexican sunset cast its
spell over downtown.
After decades of careful preservation, Santa Fe is beginning to offer sure proof
that the old and new can coexist. As Gov. Bill Richardson puts it, “Unesco
recognized Santa Fe as a Creative City not for the things it makes; it
recognized Santa Fe for the way it lives.”
“Thousands of people attend Midnight Mass at the Basilica de Santa Fe on
Christmas Eve, a ceremony that's accompanied by a traditional Native American
sign language interpreter,” the governor said. “The world's next-generation
genome sequencers are being installed just a few miles from the Palace of the
Governors built by the Spanish almost 400 years ago, the nation's oldest public
building. One son in a family learns their centuries-old tradition of weaving,
the daughter does advanced physics research up the hill.”
You can still go there to get away from it all. But if you want to go there to
bask in some of the most beautiful light on the continent without leaving the
rest of the world behind, you can. Who could ask for more?
VISITOR INFORMATION
WHAT TO SEE
SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta; 505-989-1199; www.sitesantafe.org; closed
Mondays and Tuesdays; $10 entry, $5 for students and 60 or older, but free on
Fridays). The current show, a dismembered trailer home by the Austrian Hans
Schabus, is an intriguing new take on the West.
CCA: Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail; 505-982-1338;
www.ccasantafe.org). The inaugural show in the new tank-warehouse gallery,
“Chopped, Chromed, Customized,” opening Aug. 25, will feature lowrider-inspired
art.
James Kelly Contemporary (1601 Paseo de Peralta; 505-989-1601;
www.jameskelly.com). The current exhibition is a much-praised, much-debated show
by Sherrie Levine (plain plywood boards a dominant feature).
G. Coles-Christensen Rug Merchants (125 West San Francisco Street; 505-986-6089;
www.therugmerchants.com). The store, run by Gary Coles-Christensen, is stuffed
with thousands of gorgeous kilims, gabbehs and antique carpets from across the
world.
WHERE TO EAT
All prices are for two without wine or tip.
Aqua Santa (451 West Alameda Street; 505-982-6297). Among the offerings are
truffle-infused halibut with chard, and endlessly braised shepherd's lamb; and
they have a good supply of wonderful Domaine Tempier Bandol rosé. Lunch
Wednesday through Friday, about $40 to $60; dinner Tuesday through Saturday,
about $90.
La Boca (72 West Marcy Street; 505-982-3433; www.labocasantafe.com). On the
current menu are grilled artichokes with Spanish goat cheese, orange zest and
mint, and ginger grilled shrimp with Moroccan spiced yogurt. Lunch Monday
through Saturday, $30 to $50; dinner daily, $50 to $100, with a limited tapas
menu from 3 to 5:30 Monday through Saturday afternoons.
Inn of the Anasazi (113 Washington Avenue; 505-988-3030;
www.innoftheanasazi.com). Highlights include chilled avocado soup with
chipotle-glazed prawn, Colorado lamb chops and semi-boned quail with foie gras
brioche. Daily, lunch $45 to $60; dinner $90 to $140.
La Mancha (Galisteo Inn, 9 La Vega Road, Galisteo; 505-466-8200;
www.galisteoinn.com). A small dining room in a lovely 300-year-old hacienda inn,
surrounded by lawns, giant cottonwoods and grazing llamas. Dinner Wednesday
through Saturday, $50 to $100; Sunday brunch, $20 to $40.
Lamy Station Café (505-466-1904; www.lamystationcafe.com). A railroad dining car
restored by Michael Gintert and Sam Latkin, full of chunky original
stainless-steel features. They're not in the market for Michelin stars, but Mr.
Gintert's huckleberry barbecue sauce has been featured on the Food Network.
Breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Saturday and brunch on Sunday, $18 to $32.
Ristra (548 Agua Fria Street; 505-982-8608; www.ristrarestaurant.com). The
restaurant has achiote grilled elk tenderloin and tempura squash blossom with
Boursin cheese and red chili beurre blanc. Dinner $75 to $110.
Trattoria Nostrani (304 Johnson Street; 505-983-3800;
www.trattorianostrani.com). The summer menu includes savory crepe with crab,
spinach and egg and marinated swordfish with smoked prosciutto salad with wild
dandelions. Watch out for the ruthlessly enforced no-scent policy; there have
been reports even of octogenarians summarily dismissed for a dab of Chanel.
Dinner Monday through Saturday $135 to $180.
WHERE TO STAY
Inn of the Anasazi (113 Washington Avenue; reservations, 800-688-8100;
www.innoftheanasazi.com). A few steps from the plaza, this is generally reckoned
to be the best in town. Rates for doubles currently start at $349.
The Inn of the Five Graces (150 East DeVargas Street; 505-992-0957;
www.fivegraces.com). Hidden away down a back street a short walk from the plaza,
and incorporating a favorite old restaurant and bar, the Pink Adobe, this is a
sumptuous, somewhat eccentric hideaway. Suites from $385.
Garretts Desert Inn (311 Old Santa Fe Trail; 800-888-2145; www.
garrettsdesertinn.com). The best things about this place are that it's right in
downtown, and great value; the worst is that it actually charges hotel guests to
park during the day, even though it's a motel. Incredible, but true. Doubles
from $109 through October.
Santa Fe Sage Inn (725 Cerrillos Road; 505-982-5952; www.santafesageinn.com).
About as nice as a motel can be, and a very short drive from downtown, this is
very conveniently located for the Railyard and SITE Santa Fe. Doubles from $85.
