Lighting Water on Fire, and More Fun in the Panoche
March 14, 2009 at 7:47 pm | Posted in Day to Day | 5 Comments(Please read the first post, “Ghost Town Chemistry,” about my trip to the Panoche.)
We spent the entire day at New Idria, so that meant we got to spend two nights at Mercey Hot Springs (map).
The entryway to the private tubs in the Bathhouse is guarded by a beautiful tiled mosaic.
Mercey Hot Springs was the perfect place for the members of this class to stay, which is great because it is the ONLY public accommodation in the Panoche. Mercey is a remote resort that is both ancient and modern, with nooks and crannies to explore in history, off-the-grid engineering, entrepreneurship, water cures, and abortion secrets of the 1920s.
First, I want to mention coincidentally that the book I brought with me on this trip was Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson. Over and over again during the trip, “mercury” in its various forms came up in conversations. And every time it did, I remembered a scene from the book, which describes Isaac Newton’s alchemy lab. Newton is a character in the book who is like the eccentric college roommate who does drug and chemistry experiments simultaneously. Here: “Read Inside The Book” and you’ll see what I mean. (Seach for “breathing apparatus”.)
Now, about “Mercey.” There is no argument how to pronounce it, but how do you spell it? According to the owner, “Mercey” was spelled that way so that the name of the spring could be trademarked. CalTrans has promised to change the roadsigns, but I bet they have other things to spend their money on.
The Mercey website links to two good stories about itself. “Off the grid spa” is an accurate review of what to expect there. Yes, bring your own meals, flipflops, flashlight, and fill the tank up before you leave town, because you can’t buy anything in the Panoche but cold beer and a sandwich at the Panoche Inn.
The other story describes the resort pretty much as I experienced it, outlines the history of the springs, and how in this corner of California, there is not only no commerce, there’s no infrastructure at all. So Larry Ronneberg and Grazyna Aust are resurrecting this resort from the past, and bringing it into the twenty-first century with wind, solar, and veggie-oil generators, connected to the rest of the world via satellite internet.
Sometime in the 1950s, people stopped drinking the water at hot springs resorts. But for centuries at hot springs the world over visitors didn’t only soak, they took the waters fresh, and brought it home as medicine. In the 1920s and 30s, Mercey water was bottled and sold by a pharmacy, and Larry told us he had been sent seven bottles like the one in the photo that had been found in Los Angeles. They had been buried in the backyard of a house that had been built in the 1970s. Why had they done that? We’ll never know. I drank some Mercey water, it was a little salty. Felt great afterward.
Larry Ronneberg and bottle of La Mercey water
The spring is named after a French sheep farmer named Merci, and the area has long been grazing land for cattle and sheep. (We saw bison on the way to New Idria.) The shepherds knew that when ewes grazed too near the hot springs, they aborted their lambs, so the area was avoided. It follows then, that perhaps there is truth to the story that during the resort’s heyday in the 1920s and 30s, rich girls from LA were driven to Mercey in limos to take the waters and thereby end their pregnancies. Yet another corner of women’s history that is impossible to document.
The bottling house is now the resort office, and where you register to stay in a cabin, rent an camping space, or pay the $5 day fee for wi-fi or birding. Inside are pretty little painted windows, from the 1940s, they say. In the photo, you can see the flag that Sandy brings on his field trips. It’s the official county flag of Santa Cruz county.
The parking lot from the bottling house.
Take a look at the photos on the Mercey website to get a picture of what the resort once looked like, and how it looks now. The best time to visit is in the winter and spring, when the hills are green.
In the last year, I’ve been to both Orr and Wilbur. They are each fine in their individual way. What I like about Mercey is how close it is to Santa Cruz, free wi-fi in my tent, the complete lack of a New Age, and its cheapness. You can make it even more cheap for me by mentioning my name if you stay there. You’ll get a discount, and so will I. Make Mercey Hot Springs your facebook friend, and save even more.
What with the tour of New Idria and all, we didn’t have nearly enough time to loaf around at the spa. But Sunday morning, we got a tour of the water and power system, and a preview of how the resort will evolve, as Larry and Grazyna bring it back to life as a green, well-powered place to spend the weekend doing very little.
Mercey Cabins, from the hill that will contain the next generation of the solar array. The little enclosed area in the center of the photo are the tubs where clothing is optional. Little Panoche valley in the distance.
Now that I’m home, looking through my photos, I see that they probably aren’t of interest to my hundreds of regular readers: the structures Larry is building for the 10kW solar array; trenches; conduit; and the inside of his cable closet, with the power inverters, the batteries, the satellite uplink, the voice-over-IP gear. Those are just things that you’ll have to see for yourself when you go. By the time you get there, he’ll probably have the yurt village set up. So I’ll just close with one last story.
As you approach Mercey from the road, you’ll notice a white thing made of pipes. It is not a musical instrument. They are stand pipes that contain the Mercey’s water as it emerges from the well.
Our class learns everything about how hot water comes to Mercey.
The natural water pressure from the well fills these pipes, whence the water then flows “uphill” to the pool just beyond those Tamarisk trees. This is a common irrigation technique in farming. What is not common to freshwater wells, however, is that the water that emerges from the Mercey well contains dissolved methane. Oh, we asked so many questions about this!
Larry patiently explained every detail. I’ll try to spare you everything I know: as surface water flows down hundreds of feet through the earth in the geologically unique Panoche, it eventually reaches those areas close to bottom of the fractured crust plates, where material from the mantle heats it, and the hot water is forced upwards again, sometimes passing through layers of organic material from seabeds millions of years old. The ancient organics contain carbon and hydrogen, which become methane gas when the water flows upward through it, putting the methane into solution. When the hot water comes to the surface, the methane floats free, like bubbles in champagne. Except, unlike the carbon-dioxide in Veuve, methane can catch on fire. So Larry has devised a way to pull the methane out of the hot water in his spring before it fills the swimming pool. That’s what these pipes do.
And every so often, that methane can be burned off. Like, when you have a class of curious history geeks visiting.
Natural gas
I volunteered to light the match.
Ghost Town Chemistry
March 11, 2009 at 7:13 am | Posted in Day to Day | 4 CommentsTags: New Idria, panoche
Southern San Benito county is a lonely place, and you probably haven’t spent much time there. I never had. But long ago when I was learning analytical chemistry, I saw a display in the Applied Science Building explaining the environmental toxicology work that was being done at an old mercury mine called New Idria. The photographs in the display showed, in vivid reds, that the pollution from the mine was so bad it could be seen with the naked eye. That seemed pretty cool to me, and I had always wanted to visit it. Every chemist loves toxic liquids, explosions, and other dangerous things with a well-understood oxidation pathway.
Twenty-five years later, I got my chance in one of Sandy Lydon’s history field trips offered through Cabrillo Extension, “Ghost Towns, Outlaws, and Hot Springs.”
Sandy wrote:
Geologists know the Panoche. Bikers and birders often go there, and amateur astronomers love it for its clear, dark skies. The landscape is dotted with the remains of failed dreams– abandoned mines and farmsteads and roads that go nowhere. Windows without glass, screen doors swinging in the wind, machinery slowly rusting away. The very place names of the country speak of bandits and outlaws—Tiburcio Vasquez and Joaquin Murrieta sought refuge in the Panoche. Basque sheep ranchers found a welcome here.
First, how do you say it? Panoche: when it’s a noun, say it “panoch” and use three syllables when it’s an adjective : “pa-no-che valley.” The Panoche is geological rubble pile of odd minerals scraped off the Pacific Plate as it plunges under the North American plate, where water, heated by the open wound in the mantle under the San Andreas fault, boils up through the ground like percolating coffee. In this rare geology, some people have been able to make money. But not many.
For example, there are four great mercury deposits found on earth (so far). Almaden, Spain, Idrija, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, New Almaden, California, and New Idria, California.
On the surface, the Panoche is an open land of low hills, streams that cut through flat valleys, and the kind of locals who sometimes make you want to check that your car doors are locked. Sandy says it looks like Mongolia, and he would know.
As far as I could tell, in the Panoche, there’s only only one place to eat, and that’s the Panoche Inn. And there is only one place to get a room, and that’s Mercey Hot Springs. There’s only one disturbing abandoned town, and that’s New Idria (a flickr link to some cool nighttime photos).
History, geology, and the politics of why the BLM land around New Idria is closed can be found on the website created by our guide, Ray Iddings, Jr. : 3Rocks.org. (On that site is an amazing story of early California they call The Sanchez File. Murder and robbery, and drownings and tragedy. The usual Californio story. I haven’t had time to read it yet. )
The tour of New Idria took almost all day, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. (I do admit to playing hooky and holding very un-historical conversations with my classmates.) We toured the old head quarter’s building, which, like all buildings in New Idria, is slowly being vandalized. Currently, people are stripping it of its old-growth cedar walls. I saw one plank that must have been 18 inches wide. That size of tree will never be seen again.
You may want to see a photo of the headquarters, but of course I forgot to take one. I took photos of the clothes line in the back, and the wallpaper. Always looking for the women, I am.
Ray told us of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Like everywhere else, eventually flu came to remote New Idria and killed so many people they were buried in a mass grave. The doctor of the town noticed that people who worked in the “Scotch furnace,” never got sick from the flu. The Scotch furnace was notorious for being unhealthy and where overdoses of mercury vapor were common. The doctor rotated people through the scotch furnace to “take the vapors” so-to-speak and those people didn’t get flu.
As you may know, if you ever played with a broken thermostat as a child (and didn’t die), mercury in its elemental form isn’t as dangerous as you might think. Once it is organically bonded to other things, like, say, small molecules like methyl, it’s deadly. But it is a known medicine in Asia, and the old Western remedy “calomel” included mercury in its ingredients. Chemically, mercury and zinc are cousins, and we all know that zinc can cure colds, or at least if you take zinc lozenges it will make you think you’re getting a cold as long as having a cold would take you. Zinc and Mercury are in the same family on the periodic chart. It is unlikely that any pharma today would do research into this relationship. But there is is probably something anti-viral about mercury.
But is New Idria toxic? Not really.The chemists didn’t find the creeks and dirt to be infected with anything worse than iron oxide. The mercury taillings from 19th century mines which extracted the mercury inefficiently were sent through the furnace by the 20th century miners for their residual product. The mercury was too valuable to be left lying around. The dirt around New Idria is completely saturated with “asbestos” but not the kind that causes lung cancer, just the kind that makes you cough, like any dust would.
Here, the class is learning that if you heat the near end of this tube to 1300 degrees, and spin the crushed cinnabar in it, the mercury boils off, floats up the far end into the distillation tubes, and ends up as elemental mercury liquid bottled into 76 pound flasks. Most mercury at New Idria was shipped to China, via San Juan and Mipitas.
Not sure why, but the drunken vandals and trespassers at New Idria hate the Sierra Club.
So, what did I think of New Idria? The chemistry was very cool, as well as seeing a 100-year-old furnace, riveted because welding hadn’t been invented yet. The ghost town may have been picaresque, at one time. But in the last ten years or so every window is shot out, every wall is pulled off, every door is ripped off its hinges. The history and ownership of New Idria after the mines closed is complicated and sad and stupid and I just don’t want to write about it. The story is told elsewhere. From the stories we heard from our guide, Ray, living in New Idria was like living in any mining town in any state in the union: noisy, remote, violent and a place, god willing, a place to leave. New Idria isn’t polluted by chemical waste, as I thought when I was in college; it’s toxic on a whole other level. There are some who love it, but I hope someone will be able to take a bulldozer to it.
Next Post: “Lighting Water on Fire, and More Fun in the Panoche“
Sazerac
March 11, 2009 at 4:26 am | Posted in Day to Day | 1 CommentI have long wanted to try a real Sazerac cocktail and guess what? I had two tonight at Clouds. One great thing about this particular cocktail is that its goodness keeps on giving. I feel like I’m getting drunker as the evening goes on. So. If that’s true, I’ll try to work on my post about Mercey Hot Springs.
Inauguration: a different view
February 25, 2009 at 3:33 am | Posted in Day to Day | Leave a commentTags: art, obama
My friend Andrew paints events plein air. On January 20, he painted the Inauguration. On his blog you can see a video of him painting there. And his partner Scotty posted a photostream of Andrew painting, and the people watching him paint. I love how people took photos of Andrew painting, as a momento of something memorable for them at the Inauguration. As for me, I liked the photos of the women in fur coats. I never felt out of place in Washington in a fur coat.
Yelapa, Mexico
February 12, 2009 at 5:17 am | Posted in Day to Day | 1 CommentLast week, I vacationed in Yelapa, Mexico. It’s a little town on a beach, beside a river, inaccessible by car. Really. There are no cars there, just mules and horses and cement paths through the jungle and between the houses. But you can get a smoothie with oatmeal an internet cafe.
It was my friend Kite who made this happen for us, using her mileage, and arranging us to stay at the hotel Lagunita, Palapa #1.
The view from Palapa #1 at Lagunita Hotel
Most of my photos look just like the photos you can find on flickr, so I won’t bore you with empty scenics.
beachscape with coconut
I spent many pleasant hours like this:
Or laying on the bed, studying palapa roof construction.
How did they make this?
We laughed alot. Didn’t drink too much. Ate lots of fish.
Not thinking about work
Did you know that Yelapa is where Night of the Iguana was filmed? I haven’t seen the movie, but I did see this iguana on a tree stump. Can you see it? It looks just like a branch.
We walked a few miles up the river to a waterfall. The waterfall was the destination, but like everything else worthwhile, the best part was the journey. We walked past houses and chickens and mules and cows and kids and laundry and it became obvious that we were going back in time, as much as it is possible to go back in time. It occurred to me that this road along a river with shacks and Mexican families living along a road was probably very similar to how a road in Santa Cruz might have been 150 years ago.
Santa Cruz also was a sleepy little seaside Mexican town, accessible only by water, with its fishing and cattle and leather business. Then the gringos discovered it, and got all industrial and brought their way of life to their side of the river, and sent the Mexicans to the other.
I can’t help it. I find my home where ever I go.
The sun sets behind the western mountain in Yelapa
A new home
February 10, 2009 at 6:53 am | Posted in Day to Day | Leave a commentTags: administrivia
I decided to move my blog from its ancient and unsupported blog engine (pmachinehosting.com) to Word Press, which frankly, is a joy to use, comparatively. Stand by while I get DNS to point here instead of there. All my old posts will still be available at tineleyspice.org–at least until I figure out how to move them somewhere else.
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Home Remedy
February 25, 2009 at 4:46 am | Posted in Day to Day, Web Commentary | 3 CommentsA friend of mine has a cold, and I suggested that she go out and buy a vaporizer. I have cured many colds by staying in bed under a mountain of blankets, hanging over the side with a towel funneling the hot steam into my sinuses for hours. I know you’re not supposed to do it that way, but that’s just the risk management lawyers talking.
I thought I’d email her a photograph of these cold-curing appliances, so I googled “vaporizer” and came up with nothing but devices for smoking pot. So I tried adding negative search terms: -marijuana… -smoke … -cannabis… -volcano -herbal… -pyramid…. but I still couldn’t find one photo on the internet of a vaporizer like the kind you allow a child to sit in front of. And this is how language changes.
In related news, Tom Ammiano introduced a marijuana decriminalization bill to the Assembly today. In addition for all the usual arguments for decriminalization, he wants to legalize it so that we can tax it. $1 billion more tax dollars for California. Maybe this will work this time. Fresno Bee editorial writer Dan Walters, who I remember as being a pretty conservative guy, supports the bill. The Chron and Merc haven’t published any stories on it yet.
And to think what it would do for tourism! The Santa Cruz chamber should really jump on this. If we could get gay marriage, and taxed, legal pot in California, maybe we could fund education like we did when we taxed property.