We stopped at Grimes Point to read the petroglyphs and contemplate the ancient shoreline of Lake Lahontan while jets took off from the Naval Air Station. Then we drove on to Dixie Valley, where the jets were doing an aerial ballet with helicopters.

When we tried to turn north we were stopped at a military gate. Eventually we found public roads and headed into the Stillwater Mountains. But before we could reach the safety of the hills we stalled on the exposed valley floor. I hastily reattached a loose battery wire while entertaining visions of becoming a bombing target.

We were planning to camp in the mountains but the canyons we explored were beaten to dust by cattle. So we came down to see the sunset over the wetlands of the Carson Sink.

We decided to camp among the motorheads at Sand Mountain. We found a spot on the edge of a group of motor homes and dune buggies. Chris said it reminded him of a South African “lager”—a circling of the wagons. The next morning, he hiked on the dunes, while dodging buggies. We had a look at the old Pony Express station and then hightailed it home, agreeing we had seen the elephant.

Jon Christensen

Why you should Tear off the front of your house and eat insects

Why would you tear off the front of your house to a depth of four feet? Or the entire attached garage? To convert your house to passive solar. And you should do it. At least that’s what I think. (If you rent, organize.)

The people at Environmental Building News might not agree with me. They are quite tame. But they could help if you really wanted to do it.

EBN is a monthly newsletter that is always filled with good ideas, such as how to heat your house with solar energy, plus discussions of new environmentally friendly building supplies and techniques.There are usually pertinent letters from readers as well.

I learned from EBN that if you toss a fluorescent light fixture made before 1979 onto the pile of rubble that was once the front of your house, there is a 50 percent chance that the ballast in it contains enough PCBs to contaminate 9 million gallons of water. They suggest that we arrange among ourselves to pay a $1 bounty on old ballasts, which could be collected at drop-off locations and disposed of properly.

Like so many publications of the newsletter type, Environmental Building News has no advertising and so must support itself on subscription income. A subscription costs about 65 bottles of Anchor Steam beer or $67 from Environmental Building News, RR 1, Box 161, Brattleboro, VT 05301, 802-257-7300.

Speaking of beer reminds me of snack food and my other favorite ‘zine du jour—The Food Insects Newsletter. Their latest issue arrived about a year ago bearing the first in a four part series on “Insects as Human Food in the Great Basin: An Ethnoentomological Approach.” The author, Carin A. Miller, is a student of the newsletter’s editor, Florence V. Dunkel, who has prepared gourmet insect dinners for CBS “Hardcopy” and the Discovery Channel at her home in Bozeman.

The first part of Miller’s series promised significant information regarding the use of insects as food in the Great Basin. However, like so many of these sorts of publications, they are waiting on enough subscriptions and renewals to publish the rest of her findings. The Food Insects Newsletter is $9, only about eight bottles of good beer if you’re still with me, from Florence V. Dunkel, Dept. of Entomology, Montana State University, 324 Leon Johnson Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717-0302, 406-994-5065.

Thomas Whitehead

Bird brains

We recently took a trip with the new Great Basin Bird Observatory. We were just 60 miles from Reno in the Lahontan Valley, but it was like being on safari in Africa. Thousands of shorebirds covered the surface of Carson Lake, more than I had ever seen in one place in my life.

Located strategically on the Pacific flyway, a major bird migration route, Carson Lake and other lakes in western Nevada attract waterbirds in numbers so vast they evoke images of wildlife on the Serengeti. Biologists have long recognized the value of such sites, and the Great Basin Bird Observatory was set up to involve amateur bird watchers in the appreciation and protection of birds and the places to which they flock.

Volunteer bird watchers came out in force to join wildlife biologists attempting to get an accurate count of the birds that use Carson Lake. Counting birds in such huge groupings is not an activity for people with short birdlike attention spans. Birds have an annoying tendency to shift ceaselessly about, or take flight at the slightest warning, and on a desert lake the problem is compounded by heat waves and mirages.

While one team took to an air boat to count birds out on the lake and other teams scattered to various marshes, we drove the edge of Carson Lake doing our best to count from the shoreline. Thousands of graceful avocets stroked the surface of the water with their bills in unison. Black-necked stilts cried shrilly, and phalaropes spun lightly in dizzying circles, as we scanned dense shimmering congregations of birds stretching as far as we could see. With a final count of 46,000 birds and 30 species, it was a magical day, a birdwatcher’s dream day in fact, not even marred when we buried the truck up to its axles in wet clay.

For more informationa about birding activities, contact the Great Basin Bird Observatory, 440 Hill St. Suite D, Reno, NV 89501, 702-348-2644, or e-mail gchisholm@aol.com.

David Lukas

Dump it back East

Carson City resident Robert Leonard Reid has a solution to the nuclear waste problem. Reid writes about the Waste Isolation Pilot Project—a warehouse for nuclear waste carved into underground salt domes near Carlsbad, N.M.—in his new book America, New Mexico (University of Arizona Press).

“It seems to me that burying nuclear waste is like hiding a flask of bourbon under the mattress,” writes Reid. “It doesn’t solve the problem, it is vulgar, and it disturbs the sleep. My solution overcomes each of those shortcomings.

“I would draw up a list of the names and addresses of every politician, Department of Energy Official, Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, Defense Department functionary, nuclear industry representative, scientist, engineer, and self-styled expert who has publicly sung the praises of nuclear power, or downplayed the problems of nuclear waste disposal, or ridiculed the promise of clean, renewable alternative energies, at any time since it became clear that nuclear waste is an intolerable menace; say, during the last decade. (I’m being generous.)

Then I would gather up the crud—low-level, high-level, and every other level—load it into jauntily marked eighteen-wheelers, transport it to the homes of the people on the list, and dump it in their front yards. I don’t have the addresses of the winners of this sweepstakes but I expect that most of them live in Connecticut and Virginia. In my view, their front yards are as desolate as southeast nowhere, and no more necessary.

“The recipients may do with the bilge what they please, as long as it stays on their properties. I’m confident that, stacked in artistic arrangements in gazebos and greenhouses, the faintly glowing drums, like the prospect of a hanging, will on each of these prophets have the effect, in Dr. Johnson’s words, of concentrating the mind wonderfully. Wonderful concentration of mind has sometimes been absent from discussions in New York and Washington about what to do with nuclear scum. The idea that big, wide, empty, faraway, politically weak places like New Mexico (Editor: or Nevada, Utah, or southwest anywhere) are something like toilets is dreadfully simpleminded and needs to be reexamined by those who hold it.

“Moreover, it is disrespectful. If the directors of the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities will agree not to bury their nuclear scuzz in New Mexico, I will agree not to toss my empty beer cans onto their front porches. I am willing to bet that most New Mexicans will cheerfully sign similar agreements.”