Daily Archives: April 23, 2013

America’s Oldest City

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There’s a town in New England called Jamestown or Jonestown or something like that. It has signs proclaiming it to be America’s first town. But it’s not even close to that. Not even remotely close.

Let’s start with America’s actual oldest town, and work back from there. It’s hard to say for sure, but the Acoma Pueblo is probably the oldest burg in the US where people still live. It launched around the year 1000, give or take. That’s a bunch of years before any European mofo visited our shores. These days, Acoma is a kind-of-crappy little town on I-40, but that crappy little town is the oldest still-occuipied settlement in North America. Truly, America’s oldest city. A little reverence is due when you drive through.

The Taos pueblo has been continuously occupied since long before Europeans tripped over the continent on the way to India. This isn’t a matter of who was here first; there is a condo complex in North America dating to the time of William the Conqueror. It’s still occupied, largely unchanged. It’s still condo, but the covenants are a bitch.

So, OK, the claim by Jamestown that they’re the oldest burgh on the continent is clearly delusional. But what do we care about those crazy aboriginals? What really matters is when Europeans built themselves a town.

Only, the Spanish were building towns in North America for a full century before the English set timid toe to shore in North America. Santa Fe was a going concern by the time the Pilgrims staggered ashore.

That leaves Jamestown as the oldest settlement in North America founded by people who speak English. Which, you know, is really the seminal moment in world exploration. I’d be proud if I lived there. Really.

Thanks!

Lost Opportunity

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A while back I drove through a wind farm to visit a particularly smart friend of mine. I noted on the way that many of the turbines were still, and brought it up with Enrico Fermi (that’s not his actual name).

“Big problem with wind,” Enrico said, “is that it doesn’t blow when you really need it.”

I accepted it at the time, but today I say ‘fie’. Fie! Spin those turbines. If the power’s not needed immediately, it can be stored. Use the power to pump water back up to the reservoir behind a dam. That’s quality energy storage.

There’s a reservoir south of where I live, large and flat with a modest power-generation station at the end. It’s always windy there. If there were windmills local, set to pump water back up into the reservoir, then that modest power station would be able to put out a little more. It wouldn’t matter if the wind blew when no one cared, the power would be stored for later.

The reservoirs behind dams are our nation’s batteries, and they’re rechargeable. Mostly we rely on the sun to move water back upstream, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push the process a little bit.

Thanks!