Tide Status: It's Complicated

A few years ago, a colleague described her dismay when she learned that many of her undergraduate students did not know about tides. Most of them grew up within a few miles of the ocean, yet many did not realize that the seas rise and fall by a few feet twice each day. It was not that they were uncertain of the details; they really had no idea that tides are a thing.

One of the benefits of taking up rowing whaleboats has been that my own understanding and awareness of the coastal environment has greatly increased. I have started paying much closer attention to wind speed and direction, for example, and have learned some of the patterns of movement of other boats.

Yet the more I have learned about tides, the more I find I do not know. The harbor where we do most of our rowing is at the mouth of the Acushnet River -- where a small stream merges with the Atlantic Ocean. The interaction of currents and tides is complicated, and very important for understanding the behavior of our boats!

As I started to look into the relationship between tides and currents, I found that NOAA's maintains a series of FAQ pages on just that subject. I was particularly interested in the relationship between high and low tides and slack tides.

NOAA also offers a basic primer on tides -- Our Restless Tides methodically explains all of the factors that influence the timing and elevation of tides, from the sun and the moon to the orbits and declinations of each, as well as the shape of the ocean floor and the viscosity of water itself. It is fascinating to me that anybody understands all of these factors in as much detail as the folks at NOAA clearly do. They even know how much time is needed to develop a reliable record of tides in order to make local predictions: 18.6 years. Not 15, not 20, but 18.6!

All of which brings me to this map. The two markers -- less than 8 miles apart -- are located near the points where tides are calculated for the east and west ends of the Cape Cod Canal -- the world's largest sea-level canal (no locks). The locations are not precise -- the coordinates given on US Harbors are actually nearby points on land, but the locations are fine for making the point at this scale.


And the point is that since the entire canal is at sea level, water does not flow from one end to the other. In fact, prior to the canal's construction, small streams flowed from a point somewhere in the middle downward toward what are now the endpoints.

Several years ago, I was at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers visitor center on the canal, where a former student happened to be a ranger. (Actually, the COE operates two visitors centers -- the one on the southeast side has more maritime information and navigational toys.) I asked him why the tide charts showed very different times at the two ends of the canal. The main reason has to do with sea floor topography, and the differences are so great in this area because the continental shelf is so much wider on the east side than on the west, and tides are affected as they cross this relatively shallow water.

The differences can be seen on today's (August 7, 2016) tidal chart as rendered by U.S. Harbors, a handy site for coastal information.

2021 Addendum 

I have long been curious about the two rivers (mentioned above) that were joined to create the Cape Cod Canal. As mentioned in the history section of the Cape Cod Canal entry on Wikipedia, these were the Manomet and Scusset Rivers -- indigenous names that are still used in other features in the region. I finally got curious enough to seek out a map! 

1891 map: Old Maps.com

I chose to show this 1891 map because it shows a very early segment of the Canal at the eastern end, but both rivers largely still intact. It is part of a series of maps depicting the area from 1753 (when the Manomet was called Herring Run on English maps) through 1917, when the Canal was complete.

Lagniappe -- Coffee Connection

It turns out that all of this is relevant to my favorite subject: coffee. My friend Byron was already known for making the best coffee in the world (literally: he won a world-wide Cup of Excellence) when he decided to involve the moon in his coffee production. Like most coffee experts, he was already carefully managing the sunlight on his shade-grown coffee, but he wondered if the moon's influence on water inside the coffee plant could in turn influence flavor. By concentrating sugars in the fruit, it turns out, it could do exactly this. Now his family is among the first to market specialty coffee to domestic retail customers in Nicaragua, and they call it Sol y Luna: Sun and Moon!

Houston, Too Close to New Orleans

Although I love driving with music, whenever I am driving alone I am more likely to be listening to public radio. During a recent drive, I heard most of an excellent hour of journalism about urban planning, and it put me in mind of this great piece of driving music.

The reporting was an in-depth examination of urban planning and disaster preparedness in the great Texas city of Houston, which Jerry Garcia found to be "too close to New Orleans."

I am not quite sure what he ever meant by the line ... maybe he just meant the 350 mile stretch of Interstate 10 that joins the two cities. I was thinking, though, more abstractly ... about hurricane stories with eerie parallels.

To understand, we have to go back a few years, to Hurricane Pamela. Remember that one? Most people do not, because it was not a real hurricane. Rather, it was a hurricane simulation, described in some detail in the October 2004 edition of National Geographic.

The feature article begins with a narrative describing the hurricane's aftermath as if it had actually occurred. I remember reading it with students in my climate change class a year later -- and it took a while for them to realize I was not reading an account of Hurricane Katrina, a very real storm that had struck New Orleans in August 2005.

In other words, a lot of what happened to New Orleans not only could have been predicted; much of it was predicted. Which brings us to Houston, a decade later. Houston should be especially sensitive to hurricanes. Not only has this coastal city had plenty of its own experiences over the past century or more, but it received many refugees from New Orleans during Katrina.

Image: Reveal radio

So Houstonians should be eager to prepare for future hurricanes, and some of its leaders are indeed working on serious preparations for what is called a Mighty Ike hurricane. In this case, the real hurricane came first. Hurricane Ike struck Haiti, Cuba, Louisiana, and Texas, costing many billions of dollars and killing close to 200 people (some were never found), but a shift in its path spared Houston the worst of the damage, and gave planners there a bit of a second chance.

The planning and recommendations for what was dubbed Mighty Ike have provided an extensive case study of disaster preparation more generally. Interactions among population growth, construction patterns, transportation networks, and climate change are complex and have played out in this planning process. It is the subject of a one-hour report by Reveal News that serves as a primer on the environmental geography of hurricane preparation.

One segment of the reporting focuses on the dangers posed by tank farms -- the large storage tanks associated with the petroleum and chemical industries that are so important in Houston. A small sample is shown here, in the Bayshore area.

Each circle is a tank, perhaps 150 feet in diameter and 30 to 50 feet high. Each is surrounded by a square berm that provides secondary containment in case of a rupture in the tank or a leak in its piping. In my former life as a regulator analyst, I would sometimes have to calculate the required height of such berms -- it was usually just a few feet. (Yes, I put my high-school math to work in the real world.)

Right after hearing the Houston story, I found a kitchen-scale analogy while draining cold-brew coffee with a Filtron brewer. I placed a high-rimmed plate under the decanter, just in case I had too much water (which I did not). As with the berms around the giant tanks, a relatively modest rim provides all the needed containment -- which is based on the amount of storage in the tank or in the coffee maker. These regulations were never intended to protect the tanks from water coming in, just as my plate is not designed to protect from a wave crashing across the kitchen counter. The problem, of course, is that these tanks are far more likely to encounter a tidal surge than my coffee is to catch a rogue wave. The containment berms need to be re-conceived as exclusion berms or -- as the story indicates -- these huge tubs of poison can simply float away.

The report also serves as a reminder of all the ways in which humans will resist uncomfortable news about the environment, and will certainly resist spending money to prevent or mitigate disaster. Geographers and other experts now tend to avoid the phrase "natural disaster," in fact, because choices made by humans so often shape the outcome of catastrophic events (not necessarily for the same humans).

Lagniappe -- A Third City

It was not just Houston and New Orleans that were brought to mind by this reporting. The Might Ike story was updated for radio a year after its original broadcast, but I heard it just a day or so after a localized but devastating storm struck one of my favorite places -- Ellicott City Maryland. I have posted about this twice so far -- Flood Flash and Flood Peak -- and may be adding a third post, as I think about the Might Ike scenario and as I read local critics who recognize the connections between Main Street flooding and the construction of houses and shopping areas in the headwaters.

Details are not available, but this image suggests the hydrological connections between the flood zone on Main Street and the increasing replacement of forest with impervious surfaces in the headwaters.

UPDATE (added March 2020, in reference to 2017 and 2019 events)

Sadly, Houston did get.a chance to experience the kind of problems in the Might Ike exercise, and it was not good. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Depression Imelda in 2019 did tremendous harm to the city. As Kate Yoder wrote for Grist, the latter storm -- which dropped 40 inches of rain in one event -- might lead to the disappearance of the dismissive phrase "not even hurricane" from local language.

Flood Peak

On the night of the storm, I saw a short
video in  which this clock
was  ripped from its base.

Thanks to social media, I continue to watch news from Ellicott City, Maryland. It is a charming little town that I visit every time I return to Maryland; a couple days ago, I posted about the most recent flood to ravage the town, just a week after we had enjoyed walking and shopping there. The town has experienced severe floods every decade or two since it was founded. This is the first flood, however, to have taken place in the age of smart phones, and it happened during the Pokemon Go craze, so that even more recordings of the calamity are available than would be otherwise. It also seems likely that even though this was far from the highest flood level experienced in Ellicott City, waters seem to have risen much more rapidly than in prior events.

The small city continues to return, owing to several factors, and in fact some preliminary rebuilding is already underway. The article and video Shop owners search for closure offers some insight into the reasons people will rebuild.

A subsequent article describes the efforts of a local kayaker who has found cars in the river nearby, along with the town's iconic clock tower. He mentions the fact that the nearby Patapsco River floods when flow reaches about 10 times its normal volume. On most rivers, this level -- called bank-full discharge -- could be expected to occur at every 2-3 years.

The flood data mentioned by the kayaker comes from a gage in the main stem of the Patapsco River, just a mile or so downstream from the Main Street, which acted as a tributary of the Patapsco that night. (The mouth of the Patapsco River, incidentally, forms the Baltimore Harbor.



During this week's flood event, flow rates reached 300 times normal, and perhaps 500 times the recent low. Notice the scale on this graph -- it is logarithmic, as are many graphs used by hydrologists. If this graph used a linear scale, the peak flow would be shown somewhere a couple dozen feet above your screen.

The relationship between flow and elevation is unique for each point along any given channel -- it is known as the rating curve. Stream gages actually measure the water's elevation, and then the volume is calculated from that. The night of July 31, the gage surged more than 15 feet above its prior level, and quickly fell back to just a foot or two above that level. 

Note that this is these levels were recorded in the main channel of the Patapsco. It represents an averaging of flow over a much larger basin that the small tributary basin where the most intense rainfall occurred. In other words, the flashiness of this event -- had it been measured at the base of Main Street -- would have been even more dramatic than what is shown here.

Photo: David Alton

Maryland photographer David Alton has posted some beautiful, poignant and intriguing photographs of the aftermath, including several that reveal the extent of structural damage. Flowing water is powerful, and its ability to do destructive work increases exponentially with depth. What makes it all the more powerful is that its ability to entrain sand, gravel, cobbles, and even boulders (those are actually technical terms) also increases exponentially. So the rushing water shown in so many social-media videos during the storm was actually like flowing sandpaper, doing this kind of scouring below the surface -- indeed below what used to be the streets and sidewalks. As a fellow geographer in the area pointed out, loose cobblestones were readily available on this street, perhaps adding incrementally to the undermining that occurred.

Photo: David Alton

During the storm, I became aware of the importance of this clock as a symbol of the town. A young man making a short video during the flood commented about the clock as he showed it being pulled away by the rushing water. "There goes the clock," he said almost reverently -- this signified much more than the other objects he could be filming at that moment. It is remarkable that just two days after it was found by the kayaker mentioned above, it was back on its pedestal, helping to restore a sense of place in Ellicott City.

Flood Flash

HOW TO HELP -- Ellicott City Parternship

Ellicott City encompasses 30 square miles of the northeastern corner of Howard County, Maryland, but to people from the western suburbs of Baltimore, the name refers to the charming shops along a single street in a small granite ravine.


I enjoyed frequent visits to Ellicott City during my days as a student at UMBC, and once even walked the seven miles from my apartment just to enjoy a stroll along Main Street. The first breakfast of our honeymoon was enjoyed there, and we visit any time we find ourselves visiting family, including my in-laws who live in a modern condo perched high above College Avenue. I most recently blogged about Main Street in 2012, shortly after taking a haunted tour of  our old haunts.

We enjoyed shopping in Ellicott City just over a week ago, and were thus all the more shocked to learn of the devastation that took place there last night. Notice on the map above that several streams converge near the upper end of Main Street and then disappear into buried channels.

Last night SIX INCHES of rain fell in this area in just two hours.

Estimates from Doppler Radar show the greatest intensity of rainfall centered over this narrow valley, and local rain gauges indicated even greater intensity. The results were devastating -- a beautiful streetscape gutted in a very short period.

Photo: Scott Weaver on Just In Weather

Rushing waters quickly undermined buildings, some of which may not be salvageable. More than 100 people were rescued from automobiles and from the Phoenix Emporium at the bottom of the hill by heroic firefighters, police, and civilians.

From Baltimore Sun archives --
Photos from previous floods. 
Notice the 1868 marker ABOVE
the bridge.

During our most recent visit to Ellicott City, we noticed a great density of Pokemon hunters, which means that plenty of smartphones were on hand last night to document the damage as well as the rescues. For some of those images and videos, see Flood Destruction (Just In Weather) and State of Emergency (Howard County Patch). The arts community is vital in Ellicott City, and has already begun raising funds for recovery.

The fact that this flooding occurred where natural streams had been put into underground pipes reminds me of the successful daylighting project in  Yonkers that I described earlier this year.  Given the extreme intensity of last night's storm and the very narrow topography of the Main Street area, however, it is doubtful that a comparable project would have been enough to make a difference in last night's events.

Lagniappe

Dan Somers recorded two minutes of cars being swept down Main Street during the flood.

YouTube user fatosh69 filmed 5 minutes from the window of a second-story restaurant. Warning: this is the most unsettling video of these events in real time. One local friend -- who recently survived a tornado -- describes this as horror-movie footage.

David Franklin Perry recorded a 20-minute walk-through with police during the night. He begins in the middle of the affected area, moves uphill and then back down to the base of Main Street.

Muir to the Story

I like to think of myself as too bright and wise to engage in hero worship, but I must admit that certain people occupy high pedestals in my view. John Muir is one of them. I am not alone in this his name graces many schools, natural features, buildings, and even a minor planet, according to a recent article by Justin Nobel, The Miseducation of John Muir.

Muir is best known as the founder of the Sierra Club (of which I was an active member when we lived in Texas) and for his role in establishing the National Park Service. I learned of him in the first geography course I took as an undergraduate -- Conservation Thought -- in which his views were contrasted with those of Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the National Forest Service. In modern parlance, the two would be considered "frenemies" -- one dedicated to the preservation (non-use) and the other to conservation (sustainable use) of wild areas. Despite understanding the importance of balance between the two, I must admit always liking the purist Muir a bit better than the pragmatic Pinchot.

For those who admire Muir as I have -- or who love the National Parks that are his legacy -- I recommend Nobel's article, which exposes some "ugly truths" (Nobel's phrase) about Muir, along with some more benign but little-known aspects of his early biography.

First, the benign. I did not know that he had been  both a worker and a mid-level manager in the Industrial Revolution; the wilderness he loved was a strong contrast with the machinery that was equally dear to him. He also had walked the post-war American South long before he walked the Cascades of California, covering 1,000 miles on foot.

And now the ugly: His writings about that walk extol the natural beauty while describing the people -- especially indigenous people -- in very ugly terms. He did not recognize -- at least as a 29-year-old explorer -- that the views of nature he advocated were already held by people he viewed as primitive.

Looking back, Native Americans today are critical not only of those ugly attitudes but also of the adulation Muir received for doing things -- like the long walk itself -- that were already part of their cultures. In this way, Muir is a focal point for the deeply problematic way in which even European-American approaches to land stewardship have usually marginalized those who were its stewards long before colonization.

Lagniappe

After reading Nobel's article, I checked this blog for references to Muir and was surprised to find that my 2009 Botanical Travels post had actually mentioned controversy related to indigenous people in Yosemite.

2025 Update 

Sometime after writing this post in 2016, I decided to devote some significant time to it. Muir and his view of wilderness, after all, comprise the underpinning of much of what I teach -- particularly in a course entitled Land Protection. The distinction between preservation and conservation is complicated enough -- all the more so if we acknowledge that most or all of the "wild" land had ben in use all along.

So I started to prepare for a sabbatical in which I would examine all of this in more depth. I even started a very rough bibliography for this work. Sabbaticals come far enough apart (every 8th year at my university) that my priorities eventually shifted and my next/final sabbatical will be in Cabo Verde doing essentially unrelated projects. 

This update relates to the fact that someone already did the research I in mind, and in fact did it quite a while ago and quite well. I am currently reading the audio version of ethnoecologist M. Kat Anderson's 2005 book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. As the long title with the requisite colon suggests, this book gives every indication of having originated as a doctoral dissertation. The author references ample field work and also provides numerous, very specific examples to bolter the claims she makes. 

As the first part of the title implies: places that Muir and other European Americans thought of as wild were actually part of very complex patterns of land use that had developed over a period of more than 100 centuries before Europeans arrived in what is now California.

Hashtags - Plural

When I was in graduate school, one of my fellow doctoral candidates wore his #12 jersey in solidarity on any day the Chicago Bulls were playing. That geographer -- Ralph -- did so because he was a Chicago native, a season-ticket holder, and a loyal fan of  the Bulls in general and Michael (as he called him) in particular.

Ralph comes to mind as I read the latest news from Michael Jordan because of the focus of his research -- community policing. Yes, that is a very appropriate topic for a dissertation in geography, and Ralph had studied policing from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles.

And Michael Jordan is one of the best-known geographers in the United States, though he is better known for pursuits not directly related to his undergraduate major.

The latest news, of course, is that Michael Jordan has decided to speak out against the violence that is gripping our country -- two aspects of that violence in particular. As NPR reports in Michael Jordan Speaks Up for Black Lives and Police Officers, the basketball star has donated $2,000,000 to two organizations that he hopes can help to heal communities -- one established by the NAACP and the other by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Like most Americans, he knows, respects, and values both African American men and law-enforcement officers. Like most Americans, he probably knows people who qualify as both. I certainly do. Rather than pretend that neither category matters, however, he is not choosing hashtags. For Jordan, it is not #blacklivesmatter OR #dallas5. It is #blacklivesmatter AND #dallas5.

If you have taken the time to read this blog post, I hope you will read the NPR article and more importantly, Michael Jordan's own statement, I Can No Longer Remain Silent.

Skipjack Learning

"Thought into action," my old traveling buddy (and fellow geographer) Mike used to say, whenever we actually followed through on some talked-about adventure, whether it be spelunking in Virginia or our 8,500-mile jaunt to Ensenada in his old VW.

That phrase came to mind as I prepared for a small adventure on Great Shellfish Bay, better known as the Chesapeake. It was near the Chesapeake that I first became a geographer -- as a student at UMBC -- and it is also where I was fortunate to experience learning geography in the field for the first time. Dr. Parker's courses on the Amazon are what drew me into geography, but he was not able to take us there (I of course went later on my own a few times, taking a student with me once).

But his colleague Dr. Miller was able to take classes to one of his study areas -- the nearby Chesapeake Bay. I took a whole course on the bay, reading Beautiful Swimmers and hearing from local experts who came to our class. A real highlight was going out on the bay itself, on a research craft operating from another University of Maryland campus. Little did I realize back then how important experiential learning would become in my own work as a geography educator.

A couple of years ago, I found out that only a few skipjacks -- which I had learned about in the course -- were still sailing, and that it was sometime possible to go aboard, in or out of oystering season. I have grown increasingly interested, as I continue to learn about the maritime history and coastal geography of my adoptive home from the seats of replica whaleboats. "Some day," I thought, "I'll do that." As I prepared for our latest visit to family in the area, I decided that this would be that "some day," and I put thought into action. As a bonus, I was able to bring my brother along, as we had the same day free.

We went to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael's, from which we departed on a two-hour cruise aboard the H.M. Krentz. (Museum admission is included with the price of a sailing tour, but not vice-versa, of course.) The H.M.Krentz is one of a very small number of craft that continues to harvest oysters under sail, and its captain is a font of knowledge about the maritime history, ecology, and economy of the Bay. This is a very nice way to support regional ecotourism, learn about local fisheries, and get a bit of fresh air at the same time.

The H.M. Krentz is berthed aside a classic Chesapeake Bay lighthouse, many of which once dotted the shallow waters of the Bay. They were specially designed to be stable in soft sediments. This was the last of a couple dozen photos I took on board, all of which are in my Skipjack 2016 folder on Flickr.

I can also recommend grabbing a coffee at the nearby Blue Crab Coffee Company on Fremont Street.

Yemen: First Coffee

Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia, by a goatherd named Kaldi, according to legend. But it was first cultivated across the Red Sea in Yemen. Because this all happened some time ago, we should add "what is now" to the place names. We should also note that we call the main species of coffee (comprising 70 percent of world production) Arabica because Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. About 30 percent is known as robusta because it comes from a heartier, heat-resistant plant that originated somewhere in West Africa.

I was thinking of this recently because a new friend told me of a fort he had visited in Yemen -- constructed by the Portuguese to protect exports of coffee to Brazil. Of course, Brazil itself eventually became the leading producer of coffee, currently growing about 1/3 of the world total of both major types.

This led me to revisit some of my earlier posts about Yemen. In Missing Coffee (2013), I point readers to a whimsical but informative essay by a professor of food science, who explains the importance of Moka. In Arabica and Arabians (2010), I point to a few items related to Arabian iconography in the coffee business.

Coffee grows on terraces at unusually high elevation in Yemen, where it is too hot and
dry for coffee to be grown in more typical circumstances.
Image: Al Mokha

In my coffee seminars, students work in small groups to do research about the coffees of specific countries. They make posters and brew coffee from each country, which we present and serve at a large tasting event. Only one group has undertaken to research Yemen. They had difficulty finding much information about the current status of the coffee industry there. They learned that production is small -- something like 1/10 of one percent of the world total -- and the only vendors they could find were selling by the container (37,000 pound minimum). This suggested that most Yemen coffee production is for commodity markets, but I did find a single-origin source in the strangest place: Amazon.com, which does coffee from Yemen by way of several roasters.

One of those roasters is among those I found in today's research -- a company that is based in my home town and that is deeply committed to the coffee farmers of Yemen. Even though Yemen is not a major producer, its coffee industry is thought to employ one million people, or about 4 percent of the world's population. Washington-based Al Mokha (The World's First Coffee^TM) is connecting customers directly to those workers through direct trade, development programs, and consumer education. I hope to visit with Al Mokha staff during my next trip to D.C.

It is from Al Mokha's blog that I learned about a 2004 report on Yemen's coffee from the U.S. Agency for International Development. A dozen years is a long time -- especially in coffee -- but the great detail of the report suggests that it would be valuable for understanding at least the background of the current coffee scene in Yemen. Yemen's Coffee Revival is a briefer but more recent (2014) report from the regional news magazine Al-Monitor.

Coffee Week

Yes, Coffee Week (Not Weak)!

Beneficio Hayes-Boh: Doing the
dry-mill process at home on a
very small scale.

Coffee Week (Not Weak) is a course that I am offering -- with the help of many coffee professionals -- during the second week in July. I arrived at that quirky title because two other good titles were already taken. Geography of Coffee is my annual study tour in Nicaragua (coming soon to Peru and Ethiopia) and the Secret Life of Coffee (cleverly named by my wife Pamela) is the speaking-intensive seminar I offer each spring.

As soon as I read the notice that our university was offering faculty a new format for courses -- allowing us to teach all day for five days (or in half-day segments for 10 days), the Coffee Week concept was born. To make it punnier, I wanted to call it Coffee Week -- Not Weak Coffee, but that would not fit in the scheduling software. Hence the cryptic, parenthetical subtitle.

The reason I was able to visualize the course so quickly is that our region is rich with coffee-related resources, including all kinds of excellent cafes and a handful of the world's most important roasters. The 8-hour class sessions give us a chance to visit quite a few of these, hearing directly from the people for whom coffee is a way of changing the world ... for the better.

Most of the places we will visit are independent cafes -- by their very nature, these are ideal places for discussion of any topic. The cafes will serve both as venues for conversation and topics of conversation. When millions of dollars are being spent on the marketing of commodity coffee in generic storefronts, what makes a local shop with limited resources survive and even thrive?

Our visits will also include a couple of those important roasters -- important because they focus on the fair treatment of the people who actually grow the coffee -- and some non-profit organizations with coffee connections.



Legend:
. - MONDAY - TUESDAY - WEDNESDAY - THURSDAY - FRIDAY - 

This map is not complete, by any means. I could easily fill a second week, including full days in Providence and Boston. I am willing to bet, though, that the six students taking this class will find their own way to more of our region's coffee treasures in the near future.

Find reviews of more than 100 independent cafes on my GeoCafes blog. This includes many student reviews and a few of my own, of cafes throughout New England and as far away as Shanghai. That blog has its own map, of course!

Read more about the original plans for Coffee Week (Not Weak) on my November 2015 Cafe Crawl for Credit post. Learn more about all of my endeavors -- coffee-related and otherwise -- through my new portal at www.doctor.coffee.

Retiring Home

Photo: Lancaster Times

Garrison Keillor tried to retire a couple of times, but it seems this is the real thing, and it is fitting that he has ended A Prairie Home Companion 42 years after he started it. Not quite the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but pretty close. I have not listened every week, but I have listened many weeks, and I remember hearing him for the first time early in the run. Pamela Hayes-Bohanan and I never saw the live show, but we did have the great privilege of seeing him as a solo act at our wonderful Zeiterion Theater in New Bedford -- a real treat of nothing but his story-telling.
Another public-radio great -- Scott Simon -- shared a moving tribute this morning, crediting Keillor with creating public radio as we know it.

We will miss him, but few deserve a retirement more than Keillor, and I suspect that he will continue to spin stories for years to come. And when he finally does set down his microphone for the last time, we have four decades of great works -- audio, print, and even a little bit of film -- to explore.

But what is so spatial about Keillor? In other words, why is his retirement acknowledged on a geography blog? The short answer is that just about everything that interests me can be seen as related to my way of thinking about geography. But in this case, I can offer a few specific connections.

First, Keillor told fictional stories about people we eventually came to feel we knew personally, and he put those characters in a place that he described with many details and with obvious affection. We could tell that it was similar to -- but distinct from -- the places he had grown up in. Almost like Tolkien, he created an entire imaginary world, but in this case it was a world quite small in scale and quite close to our own.

Second, he took the time to get to know the places where he found his audience. I spend a lot of time learning about New Bedford, but heard quite a few new things about it from his most recent monologue there. I was reminded of this when I listened to part of his penultimate PHC broadcast, from Tanglewood in the Berkshires. Not only was he sharing information about western Massachusetts with his audience, he was bragging about its many virtues, even though he does not live there. He simply loves places, and that makes him a geographer!

Third -- and this is a reach -- he named the most famous radio variety show of the past four decades for a biome. It does not get much more geographic than that!

Lagniappe
The New York Times also published a nice tribute, with a lot more detail about Keillor, including some early photos that are quite funny.