I LOOKED OUT my window this morning at the loblolly pine branches in my front lawn. A gust of wind blew and the pine cone buds released a huge plume of yellow pollen.
I have long declared that spring begins on Feb. 15 in Mississippi. That’s when the stable winter temperatures, starting in mid-December, start to rise dramatically. A few weeks later, just on cue, the yellow pollen bloom covers everything we see. It’s the clearest visible sign of the beginning of spring.
The pollen bloom always reminds me of my mother’s passing, which occurred right before the pollen bloom of 2012, 10 years ago. It’s so hard to believe it’s been that long. Five months ago, my mother-in-law Dottie Cole passed away. Life moves on.
Soon the red clover will appear on the sides of the road. The second clearest sign of spring. Years ago, I wrote a little guitar ditty about the clover:
Look at the red clover.
It comes back again.
So many years, so many useless fears.
So many wasted tears.
When I get energetic, I might record the song on my phone and send it to my family. They have heard me play the song every spring for the last 25 years.
The average temperature of Jackson day and night, spring through winter, is 68 degrees. You can’t get more perfect than that. If you like the changing of seasons, which I do, then Jackson has the best climate in the world. You get the variety, but on average, a perfect 68 degrees. Plus we have plenty of rainfall to make beautiful huge trees and endless vegetation.
We are spoiled. Most of the world is short of water. My sister, who lives in west Texas, is fearful of her property values as that state suffers through the worst long-term drought in recent history. They pray for rain. In Jackson, we pray for rain to stop.
Mississippi doesn’t have to worry about forest fires or earthquakes. That’s a blessing, There is the New Madrid fault, which supposedly caused the Mississippi to run backwards in 1812, but that would only barely affect the very northwest corner of the state.
Tornados are a different story. Per square mile, Mississippi gets the second most in the nation. Our per capita tornado deaths are in the top five, averaging about seven deaths per year. That’s more than the average annual lightning fatalities of two but a lot less Mississippi annual traffic fatalities of 663.
Looking at this statistically, my annual chance of dying from a lightning strike or tornado blast is one in 300,000. My lifetime risk is one in 3,750. It’s just not something I’m going to worry about.
This reminds me of some columns I wrote 15 years ago when the feds and state spent $150 million building tornado shelters around the state.
Any expenditure of that size is required to do a cost-benefit study which I acquired. The cost-benefit study assumed that every tornado shelter would be packed to the brim every time a thunderstorm rolled through a county.
I later determined that hardly anyone ever went to any of the shelters. However, these extremely expensive and reinforced structures are occasionally used to host retirement parties and wedding receptions and the like.
Simple logic could have predicted that nobody would use a tornado shelter. First of all, by the time a tornado is upon you, it’s too late to do anything. If you knew it was coming, you’d simply get in your car and drive the opposite direction. If you went to the shelter every time a storm rolled through, you’d be going to the shelter about once a week for the rest of your life in order to prevent a one out of 3,750-lifetime chance of death.
Now let’s compare that to speeding. Your lifetime risk of dying in a car wreck is one in 56. That’s a real risk. Speeding just 10 miles an hour doubles your risk of car death. Yet people speed all the time just to save a few minutes.
So if people are unwilling to not speed to cut their risk of car death from one out of 28 to one out of 56, they sure aren’t going to spend hours hanging out in a storm shelter to reduce a one out of 3,750-lifetime risk.
So there: The federal and state government could have saved the taxpayers $150 million if they had just asked me.
Gun deaths in Mississippi are about 686 per year, almost the same as car deaths but half of those are suicides. Only 20 percent of homicides are committed by strangers, so you are 20 times more likely to die in a car accident by speeding than you are to get shot by a stranger. So quit worrying so much about gun violence and start driving the speed limit.
Mississippi, or at least Jackson, has one pitfall — Yazoo Clay, which has caused our aging streets and pipes to fail more dramatically. This is bad luck. Apparently Louis Lefleur failed to do any soil testing in 1810 when he established his fur trading camp.
So we should all be a bit sympathetic with the role nature has played in Jackson’s infrastructure catastrophe.
That being said, there are things we can do. For instance, the city can mark dangerous potholes with a cone, some type of signage or a barricade. But even that minimal effort is not being done, causing millions of dollars of damage to tires, rims and front ends.
How hard would it be for a city public works employee to drive around with a truck and put barricades in front of dangerous potholes? This failure of the most basic level of maintenance has already caused the death of a beautiful young woman. Does it really have to happen again?
