June 10
Now is the time of year for gasoline price increases. It happens every year: demand increases, and several refineries shut down for whatever reason. This year was no exception. Three major refineries in California shut down, one for storm damage, one because of a fire, and one had some kind of a spill. The price of gas has already doubled since January. The news analysts warned us it would. Still, it’s hard to believe.
In the cities, I’m sure mass transit is setting records for ridership. Out here, we have no buses. The only way to town is driving. That means we have to cut our trips down to save money. Every time I go in for work, Sarah goes with me. She buys groceries and runs errands while I work, then comes back and picks me up. Rarely does our timing coincide, so we’ve both taken to carrying library books with us. I’ve read more Robert B. Parker already this year than I did in the last three.
Often I ride my little Kawasaki to the post office and, when necessary, to the bank. It’s eight miles round trip to the PO, sixteen to the bank. I’ve made maybe ten or twelve trips and used less than a gallon of gas so far. And it’s fun, except when the weather is cold.
Sarah thinks we should get a horse. It might make some sense if the price of gas continues to climb. But we have no pasture, and you can’t feed a horse sagebrush and greasewood. That means we’d have to buy hay and grain every month.
I wonder if we can run the cars on something other than gasoline. Can you make ethanol out of Russian thistle? I doubt it. Also known as tumbleweed, the stuff came to the Dakotas in a grain shipment in the 1880s. Now it covers much of the West—a prime example of a noxious weed. It’s so prickly, even the goats won’t eat it. If the stuff had a use, someone would have discovered it by now.
Bill called me today to tell me his son Jeff graduated college. Jeff is twenty-six now, having spent some time in the military after high school to earn money for college.
I still wonder sometimes if I have somehow failed by not having children. Yet at the same time, I am painfully aware of how many problems in the world are caused by too many people. Wealth increases, but population increases too, so that half the population of the world still lives in squalor. Nothing, it seems, can be done for them, because as we prolong life spans, as we improve conditions, they have more children and spread the resources even more thinly than before. I cannot ask someone else to do what I will not do myself. So on moral grounds I feel I should not have children.
But, to be honest, my objection is far more personal: I like silence, and children are anything but silent. Perhaps that’s my selfishness rearing its ugly head. In any case, I made my decision. Sarah is too old now for children, and I am far too old to raise them anyway. Imagine being 65 when they hit puberty! No, childrearing is for the young.
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