Spring is here. I know it will snow some more, and actually hope it does to keep the skiing good. But there’s no mistaking it the season has changed. This has been a rough winter.
The total snow accumulation is really just about normal. I watch the snow stake at Trial Lake on line. Total precipitation for the year is spot on the long-term “normal” line on the graph. The water content of the snow for the year is only about 90 percent of “normal,” whatever normal is supposed to be. After a couple of pretty light winters, reverting to normal was a real jolt.
The abnormal thing about this winter is that it all came at once. Back in December, with balmy temperatures and bare ground, it looked like the odds of the resorts missing Christmas were pretty high. We got lucky, and Christmas turned out to be tolerable skiing. And then came January and February, when it just wouldn’t stop snowing. It was a good old-fashioned Donner-Party chop-up-the-piano-for-firewood kind of winter. I logged over 30 hours on the tractor plowing snow around my place. There was an occasional rescue mission to a couple of neighbors who apparently thought that a $5 plastic snow shovel from the grocery store was going to get them through. If whiskey hadn’t already been invented, this is the kind of winter that would have given birth to its invention. Nobody resorted to cannibalism, but everybody was locking their doors at night.
The skiing has been great all season. It may be the only thing that kept me from crawling under the blanket in the fetal position and waiting for the thaw. Neighbors who don’t ski, snowmobile or find some other recreation in the snow were just plain crabby. By February, the joy of high-horsepower snow removal was waning, and the novelty of shoveling roofs had given way to deep back pain. We’d wave when passing on the highway, but you wanted to keep a safe distance. Conversation was high risk. Cabin fever is a dangerous and unpredictable affliction. It’s best cured by skiing.
Now the cattle are having their calves. The red-winged blackbirds are back. The bald eagles that spent the winter in the dead cottonwood across from my house have moved on. The road in to my house is river of mud in the afternoons. The six-foot windrow of snow on either side keeps it from draining away, so instead there is a stream flowing down the middle of the road, with Class II rapids. It’s not quite deep enough to float a kayak, but close. I can hear my bike calling from the depths of the garage.
I paid $3.75 a gallon for diesel fuel this week, and it’s gone up since then. Gasoline is following it right up, and crude oil is almost $110 a barrel. I don’t pay much attention to what I spend at the grocery store. If I needed to cut back on the food budget, I could eliminate one Deer Valley lunch a week and solve the problem. If I were feeding a family of six, it would matter, but for just me, groceries aren’t a factor in the overall expenses. Still, it was something of a shock to spend $3.79 for a loaf of bread and $2 for a dozen eggs. I understood the liftie’s dilemma when I saw him trying to decide between the Kraft mac and cheese and the cheaper house brand.
The inflation in food prices sort of hit me in one of those short ski-lift conversations. One of the guys on the lift was in the commercial bakery business (I suspect he made Twinkies, but he wasn’t about to say). He said his costs for flour had tripled in the last year. The market for corn is so hot that every farmer with the option has converted land to corn. So the remaining wheat is in short supply and costs more.
The corn is going for ethanol production rather than food. So beef prices are going up to cover the cost of fattening cattle on more expensive corn. In a world where almost anything you buy at the grocery store is packed with high-fructose corn syrup, everything from ketchup to Coke is going up in price. Little by little, it begins to matter and we end up with real inflation. The generic mac and cheese begins to look good.
Ethanol was supposed to lower energy prices, and nobody really predicted that the ethanol frenzy would dislocate the grain markets and push the price of a loaf of bread over three bucks. None of this is working according to plan. The Bush administration’s magic for making a mess of anything it touches continues. It’s a real gift.
So to fix the mess, we’re all going to get rebates. In a couple of months, after we’ve filed our tax returns, IRS will send us all an economy-stimulating check. Most people will get $600, and families will get three or four times that. It’s not chump change. For a lot of people it’s a month’s rent or mortgage payment. The problem is that it’s money the treasury doesn’t have. We’re running huge deficits, so we are actually borrowing the money to make the stimulating rebates, and encouraging people to go spend it on imported crap at Wal-Mart. Genius.
You wonder what would have happened if the same amount of money had been spent with some plan in mind. How about using idled factories in Michigan to build solar water heaters, which would be installed by unemployed construction workers in Florida and other sun-belt states where the housing bust is at its worst and solar water heaters work best. That might have resulted in real employment, real energy conservation, and maybe oil prices under $100 and bread under $3.
Instead, we’re going to run to Wally world and buy a big screen TV made in China.
With leadership like this, it’s amazing we can even keep the lights on in this country.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.