All posts by Don Gayton

Bringing the Wind Home

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Marcellus Jacobs

Back in 1984 I was assessing agricultural land in southern Saskatchewan. This was the beginning of the era of “suitcase farming,” where operators left their rural homes and moved to nearby cities. My work often took me by these abandoned farmsteads. Passing one, I noticed a curious rusty metal box in a refuse pile. It turned out to be the electrical control box for a wind turbine. Previously I had worked for Saskatchewan’s short-lived Office of Energy Conservation, and wind-powered electric generation had been an area of interest. So I took the box home with me.

Long story short, the box subsequently gathered dust over the course of a couple of decades and a couple of moves, until a basement water leak meant I had to move a bunch of stored stuff. There it was, long forgotten but suddenly a very tangible artifact.

Electrical control box
Electrical control box
Jacobs Wind Electric Co. label
Jacobs Wind Electric Co. label

The control box is an integral part of the Jacobs Wind Electric Plant, Model 25, producing 40 watts of DC power. The Jacobs story actually starts in 1922, on an isolated farm in Vida, Montana. Just to orient you, Vida is south of Wolf Point, Montana, which is directly south of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan. Young Marcellus Jacobs and his brother Joe are playing around with primitive wind generator designs, hoping to provide some electric power to their farm home. (In the 1920’s, large American cities had electricity, but rural electrification for places like eastern Montana was still years away.) Marcellus had learned to fly, so they had access to two-bladed airplane propellers, but they soon discovered that a two-blade design created too much vibration, so they created a three-blade design, which went on to become the standard for wind electric generation.

Marcellus and Joe started a small factory in Vida, producing and selling wind turbines, towers,  control boxes and storage batteries to farms in the area. Much of the demand came from the desire for access to radio programming. The Jacobs boys created a wonderful newspaper ad that showed their mother Ida ironing with an electric iron while she listened to the radio with a headset. The Jacobs company became quite successful and in the late 1920’s, they moved it to Minneapolis, to be closer to parts suppliers. 

In the late 1930’s, rural electrification became a federal priority in the US, and interest in home-based windpower generation dropped off dramatically. However, this was not the case on the Canadian prairies, which had plenty of wind, and did not connect to the electrical grid until, in some cases, the 1950s. So literally hundreds of used Jacobs wind plants migrated from the American midwest to rural Canadian communities like Melita, Manitoba, Peebles, Saskatchewan, and Milk River, Alberta.  Hence the origin of my rusty Jacobs control box. 

The rediscovery of the control box in the basement prompted an exploration of an equally dusty file cabinet, for my old files on wind power. In the cabinet I found a 1985 letter addressed to me from Marcellus Jacobs, answering my request for more information on the company’s history. There is a fine line between personal archival discovery and forgetfulness. 

The Jacobs plants did set the gold standard for wind electric generation. Not only did they innovate the three-blade design, Marcellus and Joe also solved two fundamental problems with wind turbines; controlling overspeeds in strong winds, and keeping internal bearings lubricated. Jacobs Wind Electric Company is the oldest renewable energy company in the US. Marcellus’ son Joe maintains a company website at https://www.jacobswind.net/

The Bubba Demographic

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I have had my suspicions all along, but the Convoy has forced us to acknowledge it: Canada has Bubbas. Not just a few, but a whole demographic. The Bubbas are anti-vaxxers, they are comfortable with falsehoods, they are racist and their conception of personal rights and freedoms extends no further than their own selfish selves.

Certainly part of the motivation for the Convoy was sheer exhaustion: after two long years, we are all exhausted. The Convoy says “we’re done with Covid.” Unfortunately, Covid ain’t done with us, yet.

It is a sad commentary that the 10,000 Bubbas who assembled in Ottawa for a weekend have gotten far more press than the 10,000 and more Canadian health workers who have put their lives on the line every day for two years, caring for vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.

I guess we can thank the pandemic for exposing the Bubba demographic, for bringing it right out into the open. As we move forward, as a people and as a country, we must examine how this demographic came to be. Three institutions mightdeserve special scrutiny: families, our educational system, and social media. 

There will always be lone Bubbas, but Canada is too good a country to accept and resign itself to an entire Bubba demographic.  

What a disaster has been perpetrated on to our Canadian flag. Prior to the Convoy’s arrival in Ottawa, seeing a flag was a pleasant, patriotic reminder of this great country we are privileged to live in. Now, post-Convoy, whenever I see a flag, particularly one on a vehicle, my eyes instantly narrow to slits and I grind my teeth, knowing the toxic message it conveys.   

We Canadians have a job to do. We have to take our national flag back from the Bubbas, carefully decontaminate it, and restore its true meaning: the symbol of a country whose people care about each other, and the truth.

The Kelowna Savanna

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Premier Gordon Campbell at the 6 billion tree planting ceremony.

The gentle curve of the hillside draws me forward. Maybe it’s a guy thing, being attracted to curves, but with each step I see more of this grassland, and more of Okanagan Lake’s northern reach. Then come subtle ecological changes, as the hill’s aspect gently shifts from southwest to northwest. Here I am, just twenty blocks from Kelowna’s downtown, on a remnant piece of Okanagan sublime: Knox Mountain Park. As I start down the trail, I’m on a dry and rocky southwest face. I see sagebrush and cactus, reminders of our biological connection to the Great Basin of distant Utah and Nevada. Then further along this curving footpath is the signature Okanagan landscape trinity; delicate bluebunch wheatgrass, arrowleaf balsamroot in full flower, and the statuesque ponderosa pine. Still further along the footpath, as the land shifts around to a northwest aspect, I see the hallmarks of a cooler, more northerly flora: rough fescue, rose, and snowberry. Here a tiny but outrageous shootingstar commands me: get on my knees to honor its royal purple. 

I am at pains to face away from the City on my dawdling walk. The lake beside me is completely still. If I stick to certain trails, I can avoid seeing the sprawling suburbs that surround the Park.  A trailside sign informs me of the City of Kelowna’s Official Flower: the arrowleaf balsamroot. I do hope City officials are aware of this vast irony: naming balsamroot the official flower while doing their level best to eradicate its habitat.

A friend of mine is working on what she calls the “Okanagan Esthetic.” She’s got a tough job. Hard to visualize a local spirit of place when we can zip down Highway 97 at 110 kilometers an hour, pass row on row of identical suburbs and chain big-box stores, while Boeing 737s shuttle overhead, and our car radios blares the latest American pop song. But I am convinced that a true local esthetic is possible. Bunchgrass, balsamroot and ponderosa pine would certainly be a part of it. Along with pinot gris and merlot. 

The landscape pulls me along, and I allow myself the distractions of botanical identification, knowing all along that the most important view is not at the species, but at the ecosystem level. Or perhaps at the artistic level. Maybe the person best equipped to understand the subtleties of Knox Mountain is the landscape painter.

Psychologists say humans, if given the choice, overwhelmingly prefer the intermediate landscape–scattered trees in grassland—rather than closed forest or open grassland. And this is what we have on Knox Mountain: the intermediate landscape, Okanagan savanna. But for how long, I worry.  The absence of recent fire here, on a landscape that demands it: too many juvenile trees are sprouting up on this dry mountainside. We have extirpated the frequent, light, housekeeping fires that Indigenous folks formerly used to keep grass and trees in that savanna balance. 

Finished with my walk, I’m back at the viewpoint by the parking lot, a good place to think about an Okanagan Esthetic, with the Valley’s biggest city in front of you, and a wonderful remnant piece of Valley habitat behind. Okanagan Mountain Park in the distance triggers memories of Firestorm 2003.  Rough fescue and shootingstar behind me; several good coffee shops, a great independent bookstore, and Ballet Kelowna in front. A magnificent but overstressed lake to my right, a four-lane commercial strip to my left. Raw materials for an esthetic.

This viewpoint is a dry and bony rock outcrop. It hosts a small bronze plaque commemorating the six billionth tree planted in BC, spaded in by a former Premier. The tree seedling soon died a drought-stricken death, leaving a patch of bare dirt next to the plaque. Tree planting has a long and honorable tradition in this Province, but no self-respecting tree planter would ever put a seedling in such an inappropriate spot. I’m sure the Premier meant well, and it was a good photo op, but ecologically misguided. He should have planted arrowleaf balsamroot instead.

small bronze plaque commemorating the six billionth tree planted in BC, spaded in by a former Premier

Homage to Jane

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Jane Jacobs
American-born Canadian social and urban activist & author Jane Jacobs (1916 – 2006), with a sign around her neck that reads ‘Conscience is the Ultimate Weapon,’ attends a boycott at Public School (P.S. 41) (at 116 West 11th Street), New York, New York, February 3, 1964. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

I don’t remember precisely when I encountered Jane. I would have been an impressionable young hippie at the time. Many of those youthful impressions have faded, but not those from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which I first read at some point in the late 1960’s. As a young ecologist I had not given urban planning a second thought, until I read Jacobs’ book. It was a revelation. She showed me that cities function like living organisms, and that urban planning is the reciprocal, or the flip side, of ecology. Her precepts of mixed use, low rise, high density and pedestrian orientation spoke strongly to me, even as a country boy. In my visits to various cities, both in Canada and the US, I naturally gravitated to the neighborhoods that demonstrated those characteristics. That was where I found used bookstores, inexpensive ethnic restaurants, experimental theater and shoe repair. 

We lived for several years in Nelson, BC, a former mining town pasted on a steep mountainside. Nelson has one of the most vibrant and viable main streets of any small town in North America, not because of enlightened urban planning, but because there is simply no room for sprawl. No spaghetti suburbs, no soulless suburban shopping malls. In contrast, the towns in the Okanagan where we live now are on much gentler terrain, and suburban sprawl is the order of the day. Every town, from Osoyoos right through to Armstrong, is busy expanding its footprint. Kelowna, our flagship city, is busy trashing another Jacobs precept, with its downtown high-rise apartments and office towers. 

If you think of it, mixed use, low rise, high density and pedestrian orientation are very similar to ecological principles. In spite of our suburbs, freeways and glass towers we are animals, after all.

Jane Jacobs had no professional credentials as an urban planner, yet she took on the New York establishment and won several key battles that preserved neighborhood life in that city. She and her family moved to Canada in the late Sixties, in opposition to the Vietnam War. We can be proud of that.

We Canadians need another Jane Jacobs, someone who slices through all the self-serving urban planning and developer bafflegab. I do recall a resonant advertising slogan for an upscale housing development on the far outskirts of Kelowna: “Close to Nature, Minutes From Downtown.” That is a totally wrong-headed and unachievable urban dream, yet somehow we delude ourselves and buy into it. 

Our Okanagan towns and cities are stuck in a kind of frontier/capitalist mentality, but I am sensing the very beginnings of a tectonic shift, amplified by climate change concerns. Somewhere out there is a young urbanist revolutionary who will write The Death and Life of BC Interior Towns and Cities. I eagerly await that book.

Vietnam Canada and the Draft 2

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From Fred Danenhower, Summerland BC

My oldest brother drew a lottery number of 29 on his 18th birthday in March of 1968. I was 13, 5’1” and playing sports all the time. As a family we didn’t really have a religion but my father had been raised a Quaker and was a CO during WW2. He served, but as a psychologist in New Jersey, not on the front lines. He was against Vietnam from the beginning, thought Lyndon Johnson was an idiot for escalating the war. My mother was liberal politically, independent, ahead of her time, a working mom with 4 kids. My parents were united, not wanting any of their sons to go to a war they didn’t believe in. At 13 I was aware of Viet Nam and civil rights-they were talked (ranted!) about at the dinner table, but I was still pretty naïve. I can remember canvassing for Eugene McCarthy with a friend of my sister’s, not out any dedication to the cause but because I really liked her. During that time, the thing affecting me most was the assassination of Martin Luther King. Solving the disparity between blacks, minorities and whites took a huge hit and I lived it everyday while going to school. Our Santa Barbara neighborhood was white and wealthy, Milpas St. was black, Delavina St. hispanic, not so well off.

Between March and August of 1968 my mother had decided to go to Canada. Her reasoning was to provide a safe haven if my brother had to leave the US. We two younger sons were going with her. I saw it as a big adventure, we had been to Yellowstone, Banff and Oregon, camping, so I assumed Canada would be more rustic. We would be mountain men, not surfers. Some time at the beginning of August we packed up a 1958 Chevy station wagon with everything the family would need and started north. We visited my grandmother in Oregon, then hit the border at Osoyoos, Wednesday, August 28th. Within 2 hours we were landed immigrants.  My mother had researched job possibilities. Starting at Osoyoos we went north, with the idea of going through the Okanagan, then on to Banff, but she applied for work everywhere along the way. Friday afternoon we landed in Salmon Arm and she was told she could start work Monday morning. We found a motel that rented by the month and were home. I was going into grade 9, could walk to school and in retrospect I must have been a bit of a novelty. By October I did not want to return to California, but I missed my friends. But Canada was a wild, wonderful place. So when the Democratic national convention was on, Kent State happened, Nixon was elected, the Vietnam protests escalated, I was in Salmon Arm, and not really connected to all that. I was accepted easily because of sports. It was fun: I developed a ‘harem’ of girls who all had to be kissed “good morning” at the beginning of every school day. My older brother had a much tougher time fitting in, he was more introverted and a genius. People were intimidated. His motivation for staying in Canada was much more real, he did not want to go to Vietnam. My mother had a similar experience. She didn’t connect with anyone at work, missed her friends, and thought Canada, while beautiful, was backward. The three of us regularly camped at Yard Creek on weekends-a wonderful family time.

In the fall of 1969, my father was diagnosed with cancer. My brother stayed and finished Grade 12 in Salmon Arm, and we moved back to California over Christmas. At this point I was simply not very connected to the US–I was a visitor. My oldest brother was using student deferments to avoid service, so things were okay.  My mother decided she was going to tour Europe in the fall of 1970 (my father was better) and we kids could come if we wanted to. Another adventure! We toured Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and England in 1970/71. From Europe, we flew back to Montreal to avoid the US, and drove across Canada. My brother enrolled at SFU, and I was left with room and board in Salmon Arm. A story: I crashed my bike and tore up my knee, which became infected. I went to the doctor but knew nothing about gov’t provided medical. I walked out of the office with a cleaned up knee, and a lunch bag full of medical supplies. Free. Once again, humbled by the generosity of locals. I finished high school in 1973. I have really fond memories of hitch hiking the Trans-Canada and Highway 97 North, having adventures during those days. One time, I bullshitted a drunk welder coming out of Cache Creek, telling him I had a licence and could drive (he luckily passed out quickly) and made it all the way to Quesnel before leaving the truck on the side of the road. My goal was to see how far I could get on $5. My father died in the summer of 1973. I went on to UBC, and my brother was still at SFU. When I turned 18, I quit crossing the border, we had not registered with Draft Board 100, so we were not registered for the draft and technically illegal. My mother came north for good in 1976, the same year I became a citizen. I went for the citizenship hearing with my girlfriend as a character reference, the judge looked at her, then me, asked “is this your girlfriend?” “Yes” I answered. “Then you must be alright,” he said, and the hearing ended (she was better looking than I was).  

When I reflect on it now, I think I was similar to the girl in the photo at Kent State. I was not paying attention to the US much, as I felt Canadian and was cruising through the teen years, having a great time. My life directed by my parents, my living experiences happening mostly by chance. I have had conversations with friends of my older siblings who went to Vietnam. They describe the horror, some still suffering the effects of PTSD or agent orange, their lives were never the same. Others did amazing things to avoid service, dieting to be underweight, pretending to be crazy to get a dishonorable discharges. 

I am Canadian, incredibly grateful my mother made the effort to move, and that Canada allowed us to come.