PRICE RISES AND TIME SLIPPING

You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away. ~ Paul Simon   

Is it time to travel? Seems so. Many more people have travelled to eat green bean casserole with distant relatives and friends. AAA expected more than 53 million people will travel during this Thanksgiving holiday, the highest single-year increase since 2005. We’re clearly more on the move than last year.

Perhaps high-flying sojourners are attempting to escape increasingly tumultuous, rising prices in their localities. The media and others have been proclaiming inflation as a big, but non-transitory issue facing President Biden.

Indeed, prices facing consumers are elevating. The year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October increased 6.2%, the highest in 30 years. Gasoline prices rose 49.6%, the second-highest increase of any CPI item. Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs’ prices increased 11.9%, that you’ve already witnessed at your grocery’s check-out. Amazon’s prices on more than 20,000 popular items increased 7.5% in October from a year ago.

Are these price surges connected with the president’s increasingly dire poll numbers? Maybe, although it’s by no means conclusive. Time may tell.

Unfortunately, every president including Mr. Biden has few direct means of quickly controlling rising prices of final goods and services. President Biden’s statements that his newly-signed $1.2T of infrastructure expenditures will reduce inflation may be true ultimately, but only after all the bridges, highways, power lines and Amtrak have been revitalized eight years from now. Large-scale infrastructure projects take considerable time to start, and a long time to be completed. Needed infrastructure improvements will not reduce inflation between now and the mid-term elections.

We economists maintain, with fingers crossed behind our backs, that prices are simply a consequence of how market supply and market demand are interacting. When consumer demand increases more than supply, as seems to be happening for a while, prices will rise, as they have been. Alas, economic models are far less definitive about the duration of upward price pressures.

Even as the Federal Reserve and the president maintain such price increases are merely “transitory,” monthly consumer price increases have averaged 8% since April. October’s annualized monthly increase is 10.8%. No wonder inflation is becoming a beyond-transitory issue for the administration.

To show that he’s doing something, the president has ordered that 50 million barrels be sold from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to increase the domestic supply of oil products. He also requested that OPEC increase its production. Nice try Joe, but such efforts at best may have some momentary political benefit, but no substantive market effect for lowering gas prices or inflationary pressures. OPEC predictably declined his request. Fifty million barrels represents just 2 ½ days of total US oil consumption; and a mere 8% of the Reserve (that at some point will need to be replaced at likely higher-per-barrel prices).  

Interestingly, although transportation expenditures’ costs rose 4.5% over the past year, airline fares taxied downward at 4.6%. Maybe these declines, in addition to the public’s strong, pent-up desires to share turkey and tofurkey, spurred the rush into cramped airplane seats.

Nevertheless, a small number of travelers aren’t flying or driving. Nope, they’re following time-slips.

If you aren’t familiar with time-slips, they refer to fleeting, temporal anomalies experienced by individuals. A sort of accidental, serendipitous time travel. Such time crossings are not extended adventures such as Mark Twain described in his pioneering 1889 time-travel novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I enjoyed reading this book last year.

Twain’s popular book portrays Yankee engineer Hank Morgan as he somehow finds himself, after being hit on his head, transported from late 19th-century New England into non-new England during the reign of King Arthur in the 6th-century. The original frontispiece from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is shown below, where a mounted, armored knight with a lance is charging Mr. Morgan up a tree. It describes the considerable period and many adventures that Mr. Morgan experienced in Camelot. His ventures allowed Mark Twain to comment on then-contemporary American society and as well as parody the idea of chivalry and the legend of King Arthur’s Camelot.

Source: Wikipedia

Time travel didn’t stop in the late 1800s. Modern tales of people who have experienced transitory time-slips (time-slippers?) describe them as short excursions back in time at the spot where the person happens to be right before the slippage. Some time-slippers travel far rearward in history, others not so far.

Buckle up for the several time-slip accounts. In July 1996, Frank, an off-duty policeman, walked down a street in central Liverpool, Merseyside, England to shop at Dillon’s Bookshop. As he walked, he noticed the street was now cobbled. It hadn’t been before he started; pedestrians were now wearing clothes appropriate for 40 or so years prior, not 1996 contemporary. He crossed the cobbled street and noticed instead of Dillon’s was a store named Cripps, selling handbags and women’s shoes. Frank saw a woman dressed in 1990s clothes enter Cripps looking perplexed. Suddenly, the whole scene revered back to 1996 and the cobblestones and Cripps disappeared. Frank asked the woman if she’d seen the same strange, time-warped things; she said yes. Frank later found out that a women’s haberdashery called Cripps operated on the Dillon’s bookstore site in the 1950s.

Another time-slipper vividly saw medieval boats sailing on a British river next to the ancient castle he was visiting in Wales, and then suddenly the boats vanished as he returned to the present-day. Two young women were walking up a densely-wooded local hill in northwest England during the summer on a trail they had hiked on many times before. On this hike they saw for the first time an old-fashioned, rough-stone cottage amid the trees that reminded them of a dwelling “from the Middle Ages.” There was smoke wafting out of the chimney and the door began to open as they came closer. They promptly fled down the hill and haven’t seen the ancient cottage ever again on this trail.

These time-slip recountings offer a however brief alternative to our usual linear sense of time. Also, they perhaps bear the idea that time is more than a one-way throughfare to the hereafter.

Perhaps President Biden would wish to time-slip himself back to 1965, when inflation was a trifling 1.6%. And when the Dems enjoyed impressively formidable control of both the House and Senate after Lyndon Johnson’s giant victory over Barry Goldwater. The Dems margin in the 1965 House was +155 representatives; in the Senate it was a 36-senator, filibuster-proof majority margin. Those were the days, sort of.

Here’s to slipping through time as easily and interestingly as possible.

 

 

PARKING REQUIRED

In wilderness is the preservation of the world. ~ Henry David Thoreau   

‘Tis the season. Enjoying open-air parks provides healthful benefits during these pandemic and any other times. This year, after spending much of 2020 sequestered inside, evermore people have decided that enjoying outdoor parks is required, including us. On a regular basis, we go hiking in Tilden Regional Park that beckons several blocks from our home. Tilden is part of the impressive East Bay Regional Park District, which comprises almost 125,000 acres of woodland and trails on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. It is the largest urban regional park district in the US.

Humans have been hiking for as long as we’ve been hunting and gathering, which probably started two million years ago. Otzi, the ancient “ice-man,” died while hiking high in the Austro-Italian Alps about 5300 years ago, 5260 years before the fleece jacket was first worn by alpinists. He must have been quite chilly.

More recently, in 1336 the poet Petrarch recounted that he and his brother hiked and climbed for pleasure to the top of Mt. Ventoux, a 6,200ft mountain in southern France. Millions of people have walked on pilgrimages throughout many centuries in pursuit of moral and/or spiritual quests.

The interest in taking a walk through the countryside for its own sake perhaps became more earnest during the 18th century, possibly associated with the rise of Romanticism which elevated the importance of nature.

When cities significantly grew in the during the late 18th century – early-19th century Industrial Revolution, devastating yellow fever, cholera and diphtheria epidemics closely followed. The miasma theory of disease remained prominent and promulgated that diseases were caused by miasma, a toxic form of "bad air.”

Thus, a popular movement became dedicated to increasing “good air” spaces that could provide better public health and refuge from crowded city surroundings. Park-building was a reasoned response to these terrible diseases. Frederick Law Olmsted, whose first child died of cholera, was a significant proponent of such green spaces. In addition to being a landscape architect, he was a public health official. In 1858, Olmsted designed Central Park in New York City, as well as over 100 other public parks across the US.

Folks who want to a walk through the countryside in the 21st century assume tacitly that their journey usually will be on public land, like Tilden Park. But what is a “park”? It can be many things.

There are 22,493 public city parks in the US, according to most recent information. They provide an impressive array of facilities, including golf courses, dog parks, baseball diamonds, basketball hoops and playgrounds for local residents. Chugach Park, mostly within Anchorage, is the US’s largest city park, covering more than 464,000 acres. 

America’s oldest public city park is the Boston Common. Founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony city bought 50 acres of land from William Blaxton in 1634, allowing families to use it principally as a cow pasture. As folks kept putting additional cows on the common it became overgrazed – a prototypical example of the tragedy of the commons – Colony leaders limited the number of cows to 70 at a time.

Not only cows were using the Common; Ann Hibbins was executed for witchcraft in 1658. Mary Dyer was one of four Quakers hanged in 1660 for defying a law that banned Quakers from the Colony. Genuine park status for the Boston Common arose in 1830, when grazing cows were officially banned and two-legged beings were finally ascendant.

I grew up in Philadelphia, which is home to one of the largest urban parks in the nation. Fairmount Park was developed in 1855 to protect the city’s public water supply and preserve beneficial green spaces within its rapidly-growing industrialization. Fairmount Park is now associated with other Philadelphia parks, including Wissahickon Valley Park. I enjoyed lots of youthful explorations in this park, many with Skeeter, my best buddy. Perhaps the most memorable adventure was the time we found a battered, chrome-plated, one-armed slot-machine of unknown origin lying next to Wissahickon Creek. No, it wasn’t showing 3 aces.

Let’s move up a geographic level and consider state parks. There are over 6,600 public state parks in the US, covering 14 million (M) acres. The oldest state park is claimed by Niagara Falls State Park in NY, established in 1885. However, Georgia’s Indian Springs State Park has been operated since 1825, but did not gain official “state park” status until 1931. Also, in 1864 the federal government ceded Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to be a California state park, which lasted for 26 years. The largest state park in the US is Adirondack Park, founded in 1892. Its 6M acres in northeastern NY include substantial privately-owned inholdings.

The first federal park was created by Congress in 1872 with the Yellowstone National Park Act. Since then, 19 different flavors of federal parks have been created by the National Park Service (NPS), which is part of the Interior Department. Given that the NPS just celebrated its 105th birthday and that there are now 423 federal parks of all types, it’s not that surprising there are so many types. The NPS oversees 84 million acres of land plus over 4 million acres of oceans, lakes and reservoirs. Unlike all the other park types, only Congress can designate a National Park.

These different types of parks include: 63 National Parks, the crown jewel of federal parkdom; 84 National Monuments that are managed by not only by the NPS, but also by the Fish and Wildlife Service (part of the Dept. of Agriculture) and the Bureau of Land Management (part of the Interior Dept.). Among other park types there are 19 National Preserves, 18 National Recreation Areas, including the Golden Gate Recreation Area which was the second most-visited “park” in 2020, and 25 National Battlefields.

The largest US national park is Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve, at 13.2M acres. The largest national park in the world is the Northeast Greenland National Park (NP), created in 1974. This park covers a gigantic 240M acres, which is 2.4x larger than all of California’s bountiful acreage.

We often delight in the notion that the US “invented” the concept of national parks. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated, “There is nothing so American as our national parks.” Although true, it’s mistaken that Yellowstone was the world’s first national park. Nope, 94 years before Yellowstone became a national park, the local Mongolian government of the Qing dynasty created Bogd Khan Uul National Park not far from its capital, Ulaanbaatar. This Park is an impressively distant 9,320 miles from Berkeley. The expanse to Bogd Khan Uul would not even be a medium jaunt plus a few new turns for an Artic Tern, a bird that migrates an Olympian 44,000 miles each year.

Spreading our wings, we recently visited Kings Canyon-Sequoia National Parks in the Sierra Nevada and had a fine time. Sequoia became our second national park in 1890, six days before Yosemite. The picture below of me and our friend Katie shows us on top of the Mark Twain sequoia tree stump in Sequoia NP. That was one huuuuge tree before it was felled in 1891. Slabs of it were sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC and a museum in London to prove that giant sequoias actually existed and weren’t just another “tall tale” from America’s wild west.

Atop the Mark Twain tree stump in Sequoia NP.

Before covid, in 2019 Yosemite had 2.4x as many visitors than Kings Canyon plus Sequoia. It wasn’t always that way; in 1969 Yosemite had only 1.2x as many visitors. The significant increase in Yosemite’s visitors during the past 50 years (93%) has been a conscious NPS policy, requiring substantial investments in human and physical infrastructure. Not all parks’ visitation has grown. Kings Canyon’s 1969 visitation was 1.5x bigger than in 2019. Nevertheless, smaller parks like Kings Canyon and Sequoia that did not receive such added infrastructure are doing fine.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been the most-visited park every year since 1944, with 12.1M visitors in 2020; there were 12.5M visitors in 2019. This summer the NPS is dealing with large upsurges in national park attendance as more folks seek gorgeous outside vistas, illustrated in this picture from Utah’s Arches NP.

Arches NP, July 2021.

No matter what local, state, national or international park you visit, for those who want to gain from having a great time hiking, backpacking, swimming or camping outdoors, I wish you many happy trails.