Blue Highways: Backoo, North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

One thing I like about Blue Highways is William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) willingness to go off his beaten path and explore.  Backoo was not on his route but he went there anyway.  He didn't find much, but it's the exploration that's the reward - and who knows, he just might have missed something had he not gone.  Go north to Backoo and locate it on the map!

Book Quote

"A sign pointed north to Backoo.  Backoo, North Dakota, may not be the only town in America named after an Australian river (the Barcoo), but then again, maybe it is.  I went to see it, or, as it turned out, to see what was left, which was:  the Burlington Northern tracks, a grain elevator, grocery, boarded-up school, church, and a thimble of a post office."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 9

The abandoned Backoo school house that LHM mentions in Blue Highways. Photo at the Ghosts of North Dakota website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Backoo, North Dakota

There doesn't seem to be much to write about in terms of Backoo, because I couldn't really find a lot of information on the town.  But I think it is interesting that someone may have named the town after the Barcoo River in Australia.  There is another possible story about the name that the Wikipedia entry below cites: that Backoo was named after the Azerbaijani city of Baku.  However, there is no supporting information that I can see.  And with an Australian accent, it is very easy to see how Barcoo could become Backoo.

In the 1980s, Australia seemed to become the favorite country of the U.S. public.  Part of Australia's popularity was due to Paul Hogan, the Australian actor and comedian who portrayed Crocodile Dundee in three movies.  Depending on how old you are, you may remember the "That's not a knife..." scene.  Or perhaps this 80s Australian tourism commercial aired in the U.S starring Hogan.

Part of the appeal also was due to popular music coming out of the land down under into the United States.  The Bee Gees, though they moved from Australia to the United Kingdom in the late 60s, had huge hits with their songs for Saturday Night Fever.  AC/DC was a 1970s rock phenomenon and the Little River Band had a string of hits that I particularly liked in the late 70s.  During this time, the U.S. also enjoyed hits by Helen Reddy and Olivia Newton-John (who also starred in some hit movies).  In the 80s and 90s, Australian music seemed to explode.  Men at Work had a huge hit celebrating Australia in Down Under.  Midnight Oil became a favorite group of mine because of their hard driving punk tinged rock with a social justice message.  Around the early 90s Kylie Minogue, a former soap star, began burning up the pop charts.

I was always captivated by the idea of Australia.  Of course, we all learned the story of how Australia was founded as a penal colony for Great Britain, which when I was young had me envisioning a country full of dangerous criminals.  What they didn't tell us then was that most of the people sent to Australia either committed petty crimes, were in debt or were turned in by those who wished them ill.  They also didn't tell us that many more people immigrated by choice to Australia than were sent.  I also enjoyed the wild history stories of Australia that in many ways reminded me of the American West.  I thrilled over the original "Iron Man" story of Ned Kelly, the Australian bushranger and outlaw who fashioned a homemade suit of plate armor and shot it out with police.

When ESPN first became a sports network, it didn't have any official contracts with any major American sports leagues.  Instead, it ran different sports from around the world and provided me with my first look at Australian Rules Football.  "Footy," as it's known in its home country, was the strangest thing I think I ever saw.  It seemed to be a combination of soccer, rugby, American football, and even basketball because the person with the ball had to bounce it every three steps.  I watched every broadcast I could of this new game for about a month until something else, probably a girl, caught my teenage mind.

I couldn't put down Bill Bryson's account of Australia titled In a Sunburned Country (a book I'm considering for a future Littourati subject).  His accounts of some of the wonders and the quirkiness of Australia has made me want to go there even more.  He had a wonderful description of driving from Perth and listening to cricket games on the radio - he printed his version of the announcers calling the cricket play-by-play that cracked me up but also reminded me of nights driving and listening to baseball games.  I would think that a foreigner traveling through the U.S. and hearing baseball on the radio would think it the same type of gibberish that Bryson describes on hearing radio cricket.

Bryson's hilarious accounts of the all the poisonous things that live in Australia (which by far has the most concentration of deadly poisonous creatures on Earth) still hasn't deterred me from wanting to visit and explore the country.  Even a Crocodile Hunter episode (yes, he was from Australia also) about the 10 most dangerous snakes in the world (I think they all live in Australia) hasn't cooled my desire.  As I tell my wife, millions of Australians exist alongside funnel web spiders, box jellyfish, taipans, red-backed spiders, brown snakes and other dangerous things and the vast majority of them don't die.

Of course, the Australians themselves make me want to come to Australia.  I haven't known many, but those I've known are extremely nice and have always encouraged me to visit their country.  They are also very adventurous people, and the Australians I know always seem to be doing interesting things and traveling a lot, even to the most remote locations in the world, just to see what's there.  I think Australia is remote, but if you live there, then every other place on the planet must seem like it's extremely far away.

I have a goal to visit Australia and perhaps if I do, I will see where the Barcoo River is located.  I will eagerly explore its cities, like Melbourne and Sydney.  I would love to go to the other end to Perth, which I hear is a wonderful place.  Of course, one must visit the interior, the Outback.  I would like to hike and explore and hopefully not get killed by something poisonous.  And I think I'd have the time of my life.  I think that there are probably a lot of similarities between Australia and the United States, given their shared history as British colonies with indigenous populations (and the bad history with those indigenous) and with a lot of space to roam in.  But I think that it would be so different and beyond my current knowledge that it would be just an amazing experience.  I can't wait until I get the chance to see it.

Musical Interlude

In the late 70s, when I was fourteen, I was filled with hormones and desperately infatuated with a new girl who came to our school named Laura Johnson.  I thought that she was the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on up to that point, and I ached for her.  Unfortunately, I was ungainly and awkward, shy, didn't think much of myself and was not very suave or debonair around girls.  And I was not one of her crowd.  The popular guys and jocks went out with her and all I could do was watch her and yearn for her from afar.  But this song, by the Little River Band from Australia, was a big hit at that time and it was to this song, Lady, that I imagined myself slow dancing close to her.  I don't know what happened to her or where she is now, but I can feel the faint echoes of the ache in my heart whenever I saw her that year.

If you want to know more about Backoo

Wikipedia: Backoo

Next up:  Cavalier, North Dakota

Blue Highways: Langdon, North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

Hey Littourati!  What is burrowed in the ground, usually has two brains, four eyes, four arms, four legs, is totally computerized, and when it moves will probably kill millions?  Give up?  A nuclear missile in a silo, of course!  William Least Heast-Moon (LHM) gets into a discussion about nukes with a resident of Langdon, North Dakota.  Let's think about that for a post.  If you want to target Langdon, triangulate your coordinates at the map.

Book Quote

"After breakfast in the city park at Langdon, a Nordic town of swept streets and tidy pastel houses with pastel shutters at the picture windows, a town with the crack of Little League bats in the clear Saturday air, a town of blond babies and mothers wearing one hundred percent acrylics and of husbands washing pastel cars to kill time before the major league Game of the Week, this happened:

"In the park, a man walking with a child saw me staring at a 'retired' Spartan missile that now apparently served the same function as courthouse lawn fieldpieces with little pyramids of cannonballs once did....

"'She's a nuke,' the father said with proprietary pride....

"'Make you feel good, don't they?  Proud and taken care of, like.'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 8

Bed and Breakfast at Tiffany's in the frost at Langdon, North Dakota. Photo by "bedandbreakfastattiffanys" and housed at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host site.Langdon, North Dakota

Once again, which has really been a rarity on this trip through LHM's book, I can say that I've been to the area of the country through which he is traveling.  You might wonder why I have visited this region of North Dakota.  It was because of a job that I had that required me to drive to Dunseith, North Dakota and check up on some people that I had placed in a volunteer position there in the early 90s.  I can't remember for sure, but I most likely went through Langdon to get to Dunseith.  My girlfriend, now my wife, went with me.  I certainly remember, on my return trip, traveling along North Dakota 5 until it met Interstate 29, and passing by nuclear missile silos.

Of course, they weren't marked as silos.  It supposedly wouldn't do us well if everyone knows where they are.  However, they are probably the worst-kept secret in the world.  As we passed by, we realized that they were obviously some kind of installation that was not related to energy-distribution or water-distribution.  Locals know where they are, and even our enemies at the time, the Soviets, knew where they were from satellite flyovers.  When we passed them, all we saw was a chain link fence surrounding a concrete pad with a kind of cap on top of it, and maybe a small utility structure.  There might have been an antenna of some sort as well.  Usually, a sign or multiple signs warned against entering and that the "use of deadly force is authorized."

On the nuclear missile, nuclear silo issue, I have been related with people who manned the silos, and who tried to get rid of them.  In the mid-1980s, I did volunteer work in Milwaukee, and came to know a group of local activists connected with the Plowshares Movement.  Plowshares took its mission from the biblical injunction:

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

King James Bible Online (1769 version)
Isaiah 2:4

The goal of the Plowshares Movement, then, is to call attention to these weapons of mass destruction and eventually get them eliminated.  Toward that end a number of people began civil disobedience actions where they trespassed onto nuclear silos, usually by cutting through the fencing or locks, symbolically damaged the top of the silo by cutting wires or splashing red paint or even their own blood on the concrete lid of the silo, and then waited for the military to show up and arrest them.  Often the activists would get a minimum of six months in federal prison for their action.  In Milwaukee, I was friends with a guy who was close to our volunteer community.  After I left Milwaukee, he participated in a Plowshares action and received at least a year in prison.  The last I heard, he is out of prison and affiliated with the Omaha Catholic Worker, where he works on day-to-day issues of the poor and to bring attention to larger world issues such as nuclear weapons.

On the below-ground side, I remember reading how the silo actually works.  There are two military personnel stationed below ground at the silo at all times.  If it is still like I read, these members of the military, when they receive a transmitted code, must look up the code for the launch sequence and then each must insert a key and turn it at the same time to activate a launch countdown.  Should one of them balk, I had thought that the other has license to kill in order to make sure that the launch goes through, though the concept of the two keys is considered a safeguard against accidental launch and would not really lend itself to one killing the other.  This came home to me when I met Bob.  He had manned a silo while in the Air Force.  He was a nice, quiet guy from South Carolina who did on-call work for the university medical school where I have my daily employment.  Retired, he was soft spoken and I had trouble reconciling him with a person who literally had the fate of millions at his fingertips.

I also had that trouble when I met another man named Bob who worked had worked at one of the national labs in New Mexico.  Bob is another quiet, gentle unassuming man who was passionate about his Catholicism and passionate about peace and justice.  In his 80s, he put together a proposal and saw it through so that now a pilot project is testing how villages in Africa can grow food with better irrigation.  After a few times of speaking with Bob, he told his story.  His initial job at the labs was coming up with a better system to defend Europe in case of a Soviet invasion across the border.  All the models said that a full scale invasion could not be countered by NATO without the use of nuclear weapons, so Bob and the rest of the people on his team came up with the fastest and most effective way to put these nuclear warheads into play.  At some point, the labs spun off his business about the same time that he realized that what he was doing was incompatible with his faith, and so he sold out that side of the business to partners.

My father was a person who felt that nuclear weapons saved his life by forestalling an invasion of Japan, and thogh my father-in-law is more circumspect in saying it, he also argued that millions of lives would have been lost in such a campaign.  For years we lived under the protection of a nuclear umbrella.  So I understand how people might see nuclear weapons as safeguarding their way of life, like the man quoted by LHM. 

But when I visited the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was exploded, I saw a sight that signaled the diversity of the U.S. feelings about nuclear weapons, and perhaps the hypocrisy as well.  The site, located in the middle of the White Sands Missile Range and open only twice a year to the public, was off-limits to any kinds of demonstration.  But here and there in the midst of the space, encircled by a chain link fence, where a stone obelisk marked the fateful detonation, small groups prayed silently together.  Some were pacifists praying for world peace and an end to the nuclear insanity.  Others were evangelical Christians, praying for America and the greatness that conquering the atom stood for.  Some might have been praying for Armageddon, in keeping with their faith that the last battle will herald the Kingdom of God.  Others, blissfully ignorant of these groupings, posed for pictures next to the obelisk and looked for trinitite, slightly radioactive glass fused from the sand when the plasma of the blast seared the desert. 

That blast, which raised a terrible, yet beautiful, flower from the desert floor, caused even its architect, J. Robert Oppenheimer to tremble a little before its might and wonder what type of horrible genie was released from its bottle.  "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," he said, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita.  In our silos in North Dakota and other states, on submarines cruising the oceans, and in Russia, China and other places, many destroyers of worlds still sit waiting for a time when they might be called to wreak their horrible vegeance.

Musical Interlude

Another double-shot, Littourati!  About the time that LHM was pondering nuclear missiles in North Dakota, Iron Maiden was writing 2 Minutes to Midnight, referencing the Doomsday Clock and the launch of nuclear missiles.  Around this time also, Nena was penning 99 Luftballons, about an accidental nuclear launch because, of all things, red balloons.  It's the height of anger, fear and hysteria in Cold War era music, and two very different styles!

If you want to know more about Langdon

City of Langdon
Facebook: Cavalier County Republican (newspaper)
North Dakota State University Langdon Research Extension Center
Wikipedia: Langdon

Next up:  Backoo, North Dakota

Blue Highways: Rolla, North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

The immense sky, the land that meets it in an unending horizon that extends in a circle around us as far as we can see.  It's hard not go get lost in the immensity.  As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) muses on his smallness, we muse with him.  To locate yourself, click here for the map!

Book Quote

"I needed a hot shower.  In Rolla, on the edge of the Turtle Mountain reservation, I stopped at an old house rebuilt into a small hotel.  Despite a snarl of a clerk, it looked pleasant; but the floors smelled of disinfectant and the shower was a rusting box at the end of the hall.  The nozzle sent one stinging jet of water into my eye, another up my nose, two others over the shower curtain, while most of the water washed down the side to stand icily in the plugged bottom.  I lost my temper and banged the shower head.  The Neanderthal remedy.

"In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 7

Downtown Rolla, North Dakota. Photo by J. Stephen Conn at his Flickr photostream. Click on photo to go to host page.

Rolla, North Dakota

In the quote above about Rolla, North Dakota, I really like the imagery of LHM lying "like a small idea in a vacant mind."

I like the imagery because sometimes it fits in with my idea of the universe and the place I hold within it.  In fact, this image is the direct result of what LHM is thinking as he drives through the immense flatness of North Dakota on his way to Rolla.  You'll notice, if you look at the map, that whereas most of our stops have been very bunched up, this stop is a long way from the last one.  Here is what LHM has to say during that long drive from Fortuna to Rolla:

"After a while, I found my perception limited.  The Great Plains, showing so many miles in an immodest exposure of itself, wearied my eyes; the openness was overdrawn....

"You'd think anything giving variety to this near blankness would be prized, yet when a Pleistocene pond got in the way, the road cut right through it, never yielding its straightness to nature.  If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you'd find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.

"Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself.  Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.  That is what makes America what it is.'  the uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of road force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them.  This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside - a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change.  The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noiser, busier, more filled up.  For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow gambit."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 7

The reason I'm quoting so liberally from Blue Highways is that these quotes reveal what happens when we start thinking of our place in the vast scale of time and place.  We are really nothing more than motes in time, hardly even specks in space.  For most of us, we will live our lives and pass on with hardly a ripple to mark our passage.  Even those of us who seem to make a big impact on Earth will in the immensity of time and space won't register beyond our own little tiny dust mote of a planet.  When you consider things in that context, is it no wonder that LHM temporarily sees himself as "a small idea in a vacant mind?"

There are times when my mind wanders in these realms of thought.  However, I find my insignificance in the cosmos and through the eons as strangely comforting.  There are times when I wonder if scale doesn't really matter.  I look at speck of sand, like Horton peered at the dust, and wonder if there are worlds that I can't see or fathom on that speck.  I am struck how electrons orbit atoms much as our earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the black hole at the center of our galaxy.  I wonder if, when we peer into these atomic levels, if we are really peering into universes where some type of life, so tiny that there is no way to perceive it, is building a civilization and contemplating travel to a neighboring atom.

I read a story once that ended with an archeologist, trying to decipher the symbols of an ancient culture, finds a carved image of what appeared to be a god, but which he discovers that instead is a being staring at some sand and realizes that in the level of universes, we could be simply on a speck of sand in some even greater universe and space where someone is peering down at us and wondering if our universe exists.

It's easy to get lost in this - it's not easy to write about because one can go around and around in circles.  It is also easy to lose ones sense of one's own significance, just like LHM.  But here's why I am comforted.  LHM might feel like a small thought...but he is the center of his own universe and as he stares at a hotel ceiling, he is in the geographic center of North America (actually he's about 74 miles away, according to current calculations), which might be in the center of the whole universe as far as we know.  In the grand scheme of things, does it matter if I make immense waves in time and space?  If I'm significant to those around me, and hopefully my energy that transfers to them is positive energy and therefore my significance to them is positive also, then what does it matter?  In my own universe, my perception of myself is that I can be a giant, hopefully a humble and well-meaning giant, but a giant nonetheless.  It starts with my own awareness of self, which encompasses my thoughts and my senses.  It has effects in my immediate vicinity, and as my field of vision decreases, my effects diminish until they disperse into the random noise created by all the rest of life on Earth.  In other words, I carry my significance with me wherever I go, and even if I am in a place that seems so vast that I lose sense myself, all I have to do is stop, bend down and move some dirt, throw a stone, yell and watch my voice startle some birds before it fades into nothing, smile and say hello to a person and watch them react, or any other active thing that I do.  I may be a small thought in the vastness of the universe's vacant mind, but I fill up the space right around me and, in that space, I'm a force that cannot be ignored.

Musical Interlude

I wanted to find a song that captured something of the immensity of the Great Plains that LHM is rolling through in the book.  But I really couldn't find anything that fit the Great Plains, in my mind, that was actually about the Great Plains.  But I remembered this song that my sister introduced to me to, Station by Call and Response.  For some reason, this song always was a favorite and just seemed to fit when it came up on my IPod shuffle as I drove across the vast spaces of New Mexico.

If you want to know more about Rolla

Rolla website
Turtle Mountain Star (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Rolla
Wikipedia: Turtle Mountain Reservation

Next up: Langdon, North Dakota

Blue Highways: Fortuna, North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

We have crossed into North Dakota with William Least Heat-Moon, who remarks on the glacial moraine that makes up North Dakota's vast plain.  We'll look at the changing climate that may make Ice Ages inconceivable in the future, and then we'll move on.  To locate Fortuna, slowly, glacially, find the map.

Book Quote

"East of Fortuna, North Dakota, just eight miles south of Saskatchewan, the high moraine wheat fields took up the whole landscape.  There was nothing else, except piles of stones like Viking burial mounds at the verges of tracts and big rock-pickers running steely fingers through the glacial soil to glean stone that freezes had heaved to the surface; behind the machines, the fields looked vacuumed.  At a filling station, a man who long had farmed the moraine said the great ice sheets had gone away only to get more rock.  'They'll be back.  They always come back.  What's to stop them?'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 7

Downtown Fortuna, North Dakota. Photo by David Michael Kennedy at his blog. Click on photo to go to host site.

Fortuna, North Dakota

At one point, back when the book was recounting LHM's trip through Montana, I commented on the glacial forces that created many of that state's features.  No less true is the glacial forces on North Dakota. In the last glacial period, most of North Dakota was covered with up to two miles of ice which leveled its surface and pushed around the rock that LHM comments on in his quote above.  Once the ice had scraped the surface flat, warming periods led to the retraction of the glaciers north, and a vast lake, the combined volume of which was more than all the current Great Lakes combined, covered much of central North America.  Labeled Lake Agassiz, this tremendous accumulation of fresh water waxed and waned as the glaciers did their dance of advance and retreat.  Finally, in the final retreat, Lake Agassiz broke its barriers and drained into Hudson Bay, the Arctic Ocean and down through the North American river systems, creating many natural formations that we see today.  The remnants of the colossal ice sheet that covered North America can be found in the Arctic ice sheets and in the lakes that dot central Canada and Minnesota.

Of course, the vagaries of periodic changes in climate are coming up today, especially in our political debates.  It's no secret that the worldwide climate is warming.  Years of data have been accumulated that show that both the atmospheric averages are rising as well as the temperature of the oceans.  The issue is, pardon the expression, a hot one.  Most every reputable scientist that studies climate insists that human activities are significantly contributing to global climate change by causing particulates to accumulate in the atmosphere that traps heat from the sun and leads to a cycle of heating and reheating.  The best explanation of this is the effect you get from recirculating heated air in your car.  Air heats and is blown through the vents.  The heater draws upon air in the car, recirculates through the engine thereby heating the already heated air further, which then gets blown through the vents.  This cycle continues as long as you as recirculate the air.  Unfortunately, we don't have windows that can be rolled down to cool off the Earth, and turning off the cycle would involve giving up the burning of the fossil fuels that have generated prosperity for millions, perhaps even billions.

The consequences of this warming are widely speculated.  The arguments can be broken down into the following categories: weather, health, wildlife and glaciers/sea levels.  Weather is expected to become more unpredictable, with the number of extreme weather events rising.  These weather events could include prolonged drought, violent storms like tornadoes and hurricanes, and flooding.  Health is expected to be affected through decrease of availability of fresh water, a decrease in air quality leading to allergies and asthma, an increase in infectious, foodborne and waterborne diseases, and dangerous weather events.  Wildlife will be affected by loss and change of habitat and a corresponding die-off of species.  Glaciers and sea-ice are expected to melt, leading to the possibility of at least a 21 foot rise in sea level.

There are a few scientists who dispute these claims.  Some argue that the data is inaccurate.  Others argue that the current warming is a natural occurence rather than caused by humans, and some argue that the causes of global temperature rise are still unknown.  There is a subset of these scientists that also argue that even if the global climate is warming, there are few negative consequences to worry about.

I remember in some things I read about how the Thames in London used to freeze over in the winter, allowing for winter fairs to be held on the surface of the ice.  This was during what was known as the Little Ice Age, which ran from around the 16th to the 19th centuries.  When I was 15, my family took a cruise to Alaska and our ship was small enough to run into the fjords along the Canadian coast and pull up next to glaciers where they met the waters edge.  I remember being thrilled that such an immense river of ice, moving almost imperceptibly, could yet be responsible for so much power that it literally could move mountains.  While I've never been a skier, I live in a state (New Mexico) that depends on skiing to draw tourism, and it seems that the years that the snowpack is healthy enough to sustain skiing without human intervention are growing more rare.  I also read that the net effect of climate change in the southwest United States, where I reside, and in California where I grew up, will be to make the climate drier, and put stresses on water usage on a population that is rapidly growing.

Now I wonder what the next generation will face.  I don't have any children, but many friends do and I wonder what their sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters, will face.  Will they be uprooted because of climate?  Will the conveniences that we enjoy - city water service and air conditioning for instance - be available to them?  Will they have the ability to drive on errands, for recreation, or like LHM, on some sort of spiritual and emotional journey?  Will they be able to get all the food they need?  Will they be able to avoid new and deadly diseases caused by shifts in the ecosystems?  What is in store for them, and does this generation care?

LHM's ends his passage above with a farmer predicting that the glaciers will be back because they always come back.  One-hundred and fifty years ago, that may have been true.  Now, I wonder.

Musical Interlude

Julian Lennon's Saltwater is a song, written in 1991, about his growing awareness of issues affecting the planet.  Though it was written before climate change became a planetary issue, I think it fits the spirit of this post - a wistful speculation of what will happen in the future without pointing fingers and an acknowledgment of the sadness that the world we know may be changing into something irrevocably different.

If you want to know more about Fortuna

Fortuna Air Force Station (decommissioned)
YouTube: Video of abandoned Air Force station in Fortuna
Wikipedia: Fortuna

Next up: Rolla, North Dakota

Blue Highways: A Radar Station in Western North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

I'm making another educated guess for this post as to where William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) found the radar tower in North Dakota.  How?  I examined Google Earth, found a likely "small flourish of hills" with a "fine, clear lake" beneath them.  I didn't see evidence of a radar tower, so either it was dismantled or because of national security Google airbrushed it out of the satellite photo.  I am going to look at the idea of early warning defense (on multiple levels) by first writing about Martello towers, which LHM mentions in his quote below.  If you want an early warning about where we are located, use your inner radar to locate the map.

Book Quote

"In a small flourish of hills, the last I was to see for hundreds of miles, on an upthrusted lump sat a cube of concrete with an Air Force radar antenna sweeping the long horizon for untoward blips.  A Martello tower of the twentieth century.  Below the installation, in the Ice Age land, lay a fine, clear lake.  Fingerlings whisked the marsh weed, coots twittered on the surface, and at bankside a muskrat munched greens.  It seemed as if I were standing between two worlds.  But they were one: a few permutations of life going on about themselves, each thing trying to continue its way."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 7

This is just a stock photo of a radar system. Photo at Al Arabiya. Click on photo to go to host site.

And this is an image of a Martello tower in Ireland. Photo at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host site.

A Radar Station in Western North Dakota

Martello towers.  In entering North Dakota, LHM stops after seeing a radar antenna and calls it a Martello tower of the twentieth century.  Of course, he is writing in the late 1970s or early 1980s as the
Cold War is still raging, and there is still an off chance that Soviet ballistic missiles could appear as blips on the radar screen in a surprise attack.  You might or might not know that North Dakota, along with Wyoming and Montana, houses a number of active-duty missile silos which puts those states on the front lines if nuclear war were to ever occur.   But what really interested me was the term for the radar station as a Martello tower.  I didn't understand the reference, and one of the things I find really exciting about reading is running across a term that I don't know and then trying to discover what it means.

So here's the story about the Martello towers.  They were invented in the mid-1500s at Mortella Point in Corsica.  A small, round tower with very thick walls, they were built to serve as a lookout for North African pirates.  The towers initially served a lookout purpose.  They were garrisoned with a watchman who lit a fire at the top of the tower to signal when pirates were spotted.  This original purpose of the Mortella-type tower (it's name was later misspelled and changed to the Martello tower) is what LHM is referencing when he compares the radar station to the towers.  When I think of this use of the towers, my inner geek is reminded of The Lord of the Rings, when the signal towers are lit to call the Rohirrim to the aid and defense of Gondor.

Later, the Genoese expanded the use of the tower, turning them into small forts that could not only be used for lookouts, but also for defense.  The towers were tough and armed with cannon.  The British attacked the Mortella tower in 1794 with two warships and were unable to reduce it despite subjecting it to two days of pounding from the heavy guns of their ships (the tower eventually fell to a land-based force attacking from the rear).  The impressed British modified the tower design and built a number of them along the coasts of England, Scotland and Ireland to provide defense against a potential threat from Napoleon in France.  France itself built a number of Martello-style towers and again used them for communication and warning through the Chappe Telegraph system (an optical telegraph).

Eventually, the United States built its own Martello towers which can be seen in places like New Hampshire, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and New York City.  The Martello tower is also part of the insignia of a U.S. army infantry regiment.

In the use of communication, it is easy to see how the early use of the Martello tower can serve as a metaphor for today's long-range missile early-warning radar system.  Perhaps, if the combination of early-warning radar is combined with the instantaneous response of the Minuteman missiles in silos nearby, one can also extend the metaphor to the later use of the Martello towers as defense systems as well.  A lot of thought, bolstered by science and engineering, goes into these defense systems regardless of whether they are constructed of stone, morter and wood or if they are constructed of the highest-tech materials.  The idea is simple, provide early warning and defend the heartland.

I also think, however, of the defenses that are more close to home.  Martello towers can be metaphors for the defenses we put up in our own lives.  Security systems guard our businesses, vehicles and homes, providing warnings and defenses against fire, carbon monoxide, radon, and intruders.  Take a home alarm system.  An intruder breaks in, the alarm goes off, a signal is sent offsite to a center which calls police, and hopefully police arrive in time to apprehend the intruder.

How about even closer to home - our own personal warning systems and defenses?  These might be friends or loved-ones watching out for us, our so-called "wing" men or women who might signal that we should stay away from that good looking but unstable or unsavory character.  It might be our own consciences or inner-selves raising red flags about situations that we find ourselves in.  In response we may shut down, go into avoidance or, in desperate situations, launch countermeasures to protect ourselves.

No matter how far we extend the metaphor, we can find Martello towers that we've erected in all parts of our lives if we look.  And regardless of the level of analysis, they can be more or less effective depending on the situation.  Often our towers will give us plenty of warning.  Sometimes our towers will remain strong, holding off the attack.  We'll occasionally be surprised from behind where our defenses are weak.  Every so often a bombardment from something or someone will cause us some damage but at the end of the day, our tower will still stand.  And sometimes, a new weapon that we aren't expecting will render our defenses obsolete until we can upgrade them, usually through the lessons brought about by attack and sometimes our defeat.

In the end, advances in artillery technology rendered the Martello towers useless.  Able to withstand cannon shot because of their thick walls, they were done in by new rifled ammunition which allowed greater accuracy and destruction.  This too might serve as a metaphor.  Our modern Martello towers, our radar stations, are effective only as long as our radar can pick up incoming threats.  It won't be long before our stealth technology will be copied by other countries, and our current Martello towers, our current radar systems, will also become obsolete, at least until a new generation of Martello tower is conceived and implemented.

Musical Interlude

You can't have a post about a radar station, I don't think, without having Golden Earring's Radar Love as a musical interlude.  And it only fits better since the song references driving and is considered by Bill Lamb to be one of his top-10 driving songs of all time.

If you want to know more about...well...Western North Dakota or our nation's air defense system

Air Defense Radar Tutorial
Driving Tour of Western North Dakota
Modern Air Defense Radars
Online Air Defense Radar Museum
Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Wikipedia: Ground-Based Midcourse Defense

Next up: Fortuna, North Dakota