Who's Driving

by Mary Odden

  Lacking the key to absolute truth, and abysmally short of ancestors who come to me in dreams or in the voting booth, I think of participating in our democracy less like choosing the Packers over the Vikings and more like a journey with Dorothy on the road to OZ.

  You have a vague idea of what you want—the emerald city—or a gas pipeline—or affordable health care—or a balanced budget—or whatever. But it’s evil flying monkeys, Lions, Tigers, and Bears all the way.

  At the end, there’s a guy pulling levers behind a curtain and then you don’t get exactly what you wanted in the way you wanted it, and you have to hop into a balloon filled with hot air to get home.

  The dog is the big hero, of course, for tugging the curtain back to expose the charlatan guy at the levers. And the guy behind him. And the guy behind him.

  In that story, you have to change your mind a lot about what is really happening and who is telling the truth.

  You end up chewing on your own tail and dropping burning straw all over the place—not to mention freezing up because you’ve run out of oil.

  And then there’s Dorothy—she’s a bona fide hero for going out in the storm to save her dog. She’s so brave she took a journey with a bunch of creatures even a Libertarian would regard as strange.

  Bravo, Dorothy! I love that story.

  HAARP BEAMS UP

  Last week, the physicists and electrical engineers who built HAARP were as close to giddy excitement as reserved, scientific-types ever get. Actually, that’s pretty giddy.

  Never mind months of long work days and frustrating moments when an expensive electronic component experiences “infant mortality” seconds after you switch it on. Never mind that the world’s scientific community and the nation’s military research centers have been clamoring at the door to start using the most powerful and versatile ionospheric research instrument (IRI) on the planet.

  Every mechanical, electrical, and electronic system that supports the primary instrument had to be tested and commissioned for full operation during this last five months. The 132 new transmitters and their 132 towers, joining the 48 sets operational during the “Development Phase” (DP) of HAARP, had to be “woken up” and calibrated with all the other units of the array. Two weeks ago, at 30 below, HAARP employees were climbing antenna towers and replacing the very last components, tweaking the last electrical connections.

  Electrical engineer Jay Scrimshaw has been assembling the 31 acre antenna array that is the business end of the IRI and bringing its transmitters online for three and a half years. With a degree and a quarter of a century of experience in the physics of electronics and radio waves, Jay says completing this instrument for the scientific community has been stressful, exciting, and satisfying.

  He says, “Everything here is custom, a highly calibrated research instrument with many idiosyncrasies. There is nothing like it. And I want to be here to make sure the knowledge of how to take care of it is passed on.”

  Gakona, Alaska, is close enough to the top of the earth to peer along those magnetic flux tube lines which bend down at the poles, and, from a physicist’s point of view, make the earth a lot more like an electrically charged, layered onion than a blue-green rock floating in space.

  HAARP physicist Rob Jacobsen expresses this in vivid language: “Yes, we look at the earth as a rock. But all the planets fly though the wind produced by the sun, and the sun chucks out about a billion tons a day of electrons and ions. Huge magnetic fields are floating through the entire solar system, and the planets with magnetic fields interact with the solar wind. When this wind flows around the earth, you get a tremendous structure out there, which if you’ve seen with other than just the narrow visible band, you’ve seen a very different thing.”

  The development period between 1996 and 2006 had proved that the IRI instrument would be able to replicate, in a very small area far above the installation, some of the surprising effects of solar radiation and solar wind on the ionosphere. The ionosphere is that region of plasma between 50 and 120 miles above the earth’s surface that absorbs radiation and reflects radio communications.

  Those naturally-occurring solar effects hold the secrets of improved or more secure radio communications, of “looking” into hundreds of meters of ice to find the rocky topography of a Mt. Wrangell’s volcanic caldera, or into Greenland or Antarctica. They might allow intelligence agencies to look at underground military facilities, or companies to look into the earth to find oil and gas.

  In the ionosphere, there are things that “just shouldn’t happen” but do anyway, as when a VHF radio transmission between airplanes over a Russian airport rolls clear and sharp into a radio set in New York, or a beam of energy which should weaken and dissipate between Alaska and New Zealand bounces in much stronger instead, along a magnetic flux tube which follows the earth’s magnetic field. A solar geomagnetic storm that hits the ionosphere can knock out major communications and navigation systems, even as it fills the northern sky with exquisite color.

  People who want to know why these things happen, and possibly how to employ the effects, come from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Stanford University, MIT, Cornell, the US Office of Naval Research, the US Air Force Research Laboratory, Tokyo University, and many other institutions around the world. They reserve operational time on the IRI—seconds, minutes, or hours—in which to engage their particular experiments. They are the “customers” of HAARP.

  Customers with experiments to run on the IRI make application to the HAARP Science Committee, made up of representatives from the major research universities, the government, and the owner and operator of the facility, the US Air Force. The Science Committee hands out IRI appointments based on the best use of the instrument. At the time of each experiment, HAARP generates the particular wave-forms each experiment requires.

  This is very exacting work, says Jacobsen: “Because when you are looking at radio wave movement, they travel at the speed of light, a foot per nano-second, so it’s very important, if you are looking at effects, to know precisely when it started and stopped, and precisely what it was doing at every point of time.”

  A period of operation for the IRI is called a “campaign,” in which scheduled experiments follow each other in tight succession. During the development phase, HAARP averaged 120 ten-hour campaign days a year. In its finished configuration, the site could operate more than 200 days per year, limited by the preparation and maintenance times required around the campaigns.

  There are several other instruments like the IRI around the globe. What makes the HAARP IRI the most versatile and powerful ionospheric heater at this final stage of development is its radiated power and its ability to “steer” energy through variations of phase and modulated power.

  Scrimshaw says, “Think of our energy as going straight up, but we have the ability to tip, because of the phased array. The antennas do not move, but the electrons move in such a fashion that we can tip the beam. So we have more power, a larger frequency range, beam steering capabilities, and we can modulate more than these other sites.”

  The science being conducted at HAARP may someday help to answer questions about the earth’s magnetic field—such as why we still have one when other planets don’t—and the properties of the ionosphere, but it cannot affect the weather or make holes in the ozone layer.

  Its effect on the ionosphere is both small and temporary, and there is no impact produced by HAARP on the protective qualities of the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, the changes in the gas/plasma in the volume studied are only perceptible because of the sensitivity of the instruments being used to observe the effects.

  The HAARP site goes to great lengths to play safe in its Alaskan neighborhood, yet there is a stubborn public perception of the “danger” of the site because of its military security and the highly technical science it conducts. It doesn’t help that the FAA had designated HAARP as a “controlled firing zone,” simply because they didn’t have a map classification for the more
benign kinds of activities the site actually features.

  HAARP scientists and employees have a certain amount of fun with their persistent notoriety as a place of dangerous radiation and cosmic death rays, those immortal features in internet descriptions of HAARP. Nick Begich’s Angels Don’t Play this HAARP, published in 1995, helps keep the fear in spin.

  In fact, it is thanks to Begich and his conspiracy-theory take on HAARP science that the five gigantic locomotive/submarine generators that provide the stand-alone power for the IRI are affectionately known as “the Angels.” To make it official, each one has its own name plate: “Angel 1,” “Angel 2,” and so on. Similar inside humor has christened the HAARP control room “The Death Star” and the office area “The Dark Side.”

  Education, that four-syllable word, is ever the cure for paranoia. Jay Scrimshaw is a “HAARP Education Outreach Program” guy, a volunteer position he says he eagerly took on “to help people understand what the instruments do, so they can appreciate what projects like this are providing to science and the society.” One of the collateral benefits is that in addition to tuning big antennas, he’s been tutoring and teaching every level of college math to students at the local college.

  [In 2016, University of Alaska Fairbanks purchased the HAARP site from the U.S. government and is now managing scientific campaigns at the site.]

  MY NEIGHBOR THE (CUTE) NEADERTHAL

  Somebody said “All politics are local.” But a lot of local people don’t believe that.

  Some people only pop out of their log cabin cuckoo clocks to consider politics during a big election year. We were incredulous when the media reported less Alaskans had voted in 2008 than 2004, then gratified to learn that someone had forgotten the 310,000 absentee ballots, 1/3 of the total, that were counted after the election. If we counted all the ballots together, it was the highest turnout of Alaska people voting in relation to the number of registered voters—ever.

  Well, that’s a relief. At least we weren’t napping.

  Now I’d like to challenge all those people who woke up to consider Joe the Plumber on the national scene to stay awake for the somewhat more local Jane the Board Member and John the Volunteer.

  Plenty of people like the idea of Democracy (note capital “D”) but don’t want to step in it.

  Local politics and organizations engage us with people we know. Participation is hard work, which is probably why history teachers often stick with the text book and don’t get students down into nuts and bolts of local and state government. Alaska’s “Close-up” program for high school students offers a huge payoff in understanding for our future voters and leaders. Local elections need volunteers. Boards and committees need members.

  “Local” has a lot of flavors. I once had a five-minute conversation with Sarah Palin about the Copper Basin, in which she told me she thought the people here were “cute.”

  I am not sure it gives people a lot of credit when you think they are “cute,” but it’s probably better than thinking the people next door are Neanderthals and wondering how they lurched into the gene pool.

  Local people do fight over property lines and dog poop. Feeling fashionably cynical about any such wrangling, we let our neighbors go to meetings and make silly rules while we stay home and do a little arm chair quarterbacking.

  I’d like to draw a different portrait of us “locals.”

  I sat in on the local fish and game advisory committee meeting last night, where eleven people with eleven opinions chewed over a possible requirement to leave moose meat on the bone until the hunter gets it out of the field, plus other possible requirements designed to make sure wild meat is not wasted. Some said yes, some no. Most everyone had good reasons and good reasoning.

  At these meetings they go on talking, trying to get at better management of the game populations and management of the people who hunt. They talk for hours and hours. Nobody goes home before eleven, and sometimes it’s midnight. Not always but sometimes, they come up with a course of action they think fish and game management ought to take.

  Anybody can go to the advisory committee meetings and express their ideas. Some persons on the committee represent particular local communities. Regular meetings take place twice a year, sometimes more when there is a Board of Game Meeting coming up that will affect our nearby units. When that happens, ideas come in for our committee from all around the state.

  The advisory committee does not decide anything, but they can hammer out a proposal that they may elevate to the official Alaska Board of Game or Board of Fish.

  Proposals come into those big boards from advisory committees all over the state, plus the agencies, Native groups, State Troopers, and various advocacy groups. People come to the BOG and BOF and argue their points of view on the proposals. The big boards then set the rules—season dates, hunts, bag limits, hunter requirements and so on.

  It’s an elegant and messy system where people who have a stake in the outcomes get to help shape the creation of the rules. A lot of people in our state don’t even know that this system exists.

  Rules about guns, antlers, hunting and fishing areas, sex and age of game, limits on fish—all these have the power to raise tornadoes of scorn and anger without once causing the stormer to investigate how the rule was made. Or show up at a local meeting.

  Of course this is what passes for entertainment on dark winter nights around here, to make judgments about a “bad law” or “stupid regulation,” while also despising the people who proposed and wrote these things into existence. Without ever showing up.

  On the same dark winter nights, there are people from all around the valley who drive icy roads to listen to and be patient with people they may or may not agree with. They try to hammer out the nuts and bolts of what may work better this year with moose, with caribou, with salmon, and with hunters.

  It’s not just fish and game. There are local advisory school boards and district school boards. There are people who go out to take care of house fires, medical emergencies, even the garbage. They show up, and they have to decide things, often things that affect us. We can help them or not.

  They are the “cute” people I admire most.

  ORGANIZATION CHARTS

  I like to think of myself as a helpful person and not grandiose in any way, so let me reinvent society, okay? Let’s start with the venerable organization chart. Every agency, every club, every business has one. The bosses and the policy makers’ positions are at the top, then there are lines drawn down to boxes with the titles of people who are next in charge and so on, with power and responsibility diminishing the farther you descend toward the bottom.

  What the business or organization wants to accomplish—say, make a better whoosit gadget or help someone understand and apply for a house mortgage, or explain the rules and write the permits for subsistence red salmon—those goals are in fact invisible in an organization chart.

  In fact, the people who serve the purpose of the organization, who serve the land and its people most directly—folks in the field offices—dangle down so far on the bottom of the organization chart that they are nearly invisible. The implication and sometimes the effect is that they are insignificant.

  What if we turned all organization charts into bulls eyes—with the primary goal of the organization in a big circle in the center? The goal or mission should be stated there in the middle most prominently, maybe something kind of like the sign Sherry Sparks puts in front of her place at every school board meeting, which says “Is it Good for Kids?”

  The primary names around that bulls eye would belong to those folks who serve the customers or members of the public most directly. These are the people that dangle and dribble at the end of the long lines of authority on the normal organization chart. These are the people who look up your land status for you or help you find a job. They are the people who keep the McCarthy road open. They serve you directly.

  These workers presently look so insignificant that they are the first
people who get fired when we want to “reduce the size of state government.” They can be snipped off the ends of the chart as easily as pruning a trailing ivy. Of course they are the people who work in rural Alaska.

  In this new bulls eye organization chart I am proposing they would be harder to get rid of because they would be in the middle—where we could see what they do for us.

  The next circle out from the middle would list the people who make it possible for those primary people to do their jobs.

  And the next circle out would be the names and positions of the people who make it possible for those people to do their jobs. And the next circle out—you get the idea.

  Finally, of course, on the outside of our circle, would be the names of the CEOs and Presidents whose importance, now visible at last, is that they enable the primary mission of the organization to take place. Those men and women are out there to guide the show, but the people who make eye contact and fix the machines are there in the middle of the work, getting it done.

  GUNS ’N NOSES

  Sometimes I think we will self-destruct out of sheer gullibility, especially since we have become just barely literate enough to read our email and Facebook messages but not smart enough to investigate their truth value or significance. We are way not wise enough to keep our fingers off the “forward” button.

  As the evangelical minister Rick Warren says, political division easily jumps to hatred: “All of a sudden, the guy you disagree with is evil, and you demonize him.”

  Gun rights, in particular, threaten to make us rural folks caricatures of ourselves by inspiring quick fear whenever we perceive a threat to a prized and primal part of our lives—our ability to feed and defend ourselves.

  Never mind the not inconsiderable support of the U.S. Supreme Court which in 2008 confirmed for the first time in our history that the right to bear arms is an individual right.