Blue Highways: Ocean City, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

Amidst the development of Ocean City, just recently ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, we stop for a moment to think about development decisions.  Just why do, or should, we build on barrier islands?  That's my question for the day, explored below.  Locate Ocean City by checking out the Littourati Blue Highways map.

Book Quote

"Near Ocean City, Maryland, the shore became a six-lane strip of motels and condominiums tied together by powerlines.  The playground of Baltimore and Washington."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Aerial view of Ocean City, Maryland. Photo by Tex Jobe at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Ocean City, Maryland

I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to write with the Ocean City theme, given the shortness of the quote and its otherwise unexciting information, until I looked at Ocean City on Google Earth.  The recent landfall of Hurricane Sandy, only a category 1 hurricane on the 5 point Saffir-Simpson Scale, underscored the fragility of Ocean City and other developed areas along barrier islands.  A barrier island is basically a spit of sand, built up by tidal action, that is separated by shallow waters from the mainland.

Barrier islands have served as a much needed bulwark against such storms as Sandy, and even more powerful storms.  As a hurricane moves toward land, its rotation and energy pushes a tremendous volume of water in front of it, much like a bulldozer pushes dirt.  This surge can be augmented by tides, so that the surge will be higher if the hurricane comes ashore at high tide than it would be if the surge comes ashore at low tide.

Barrier islands, as the first pieces of land that a storm surge hits, weaken the force of the surge and spare the mainland from the main force of the water.  Buildings that are on the mainland behind barrier islands may thus get spared the main brunt of the most damaging element, water, and therefore are much more likely to survive with little or no damage.

So why, might you ask, have we built up populated areas on the very places that get the main brute force of hurricanes?

The answer is money and politics.  Barrier islands are beachfront property, and developers find beachfront property prime areas to develop with condos overlooking the water, restaurants, luxury hotels, and other high-priced items to draw tourists, especially well-heeled ones from the nearby metropolises.  As development happens, and people begin to buy their summer condos and vacation homes, the less-wealthy arrive to fill the jobs at the restaurants and hotels and other service industries.  Sometimes, before you know it, a municipality has been created or enhanced in places that appear to be mini-paradises.

You've heard of many of these places.  South Padre Island, Texas.  Galveston, Texas.  Atlantic City, New Jersey.  In a few weeks, I'll be heading to Sarasota, Florida where part of the city consists of development along Siesta and Longboat Keys.  Tourists flock to these places for the mix of sun, sand, water and amenities and wealthier people buy houses along the water to enjoy the boating and to have a home-away-from-home.  I'm not suggesting that these places are going to go away...yet...

In 1900 the city of Galveston had one of the largest ports in the country which competed in importance with New York and New Orleans.  A city of 37,000 people had grown on this narrow spit of sand when the storm known as the Great Hurricane of 1900 hit.  Years of surviving other storms had convinced residents that they would never need fear any storms, and they had resisted building a proposed seawall to protect the city.  Galveston Island, only 8 and 1/2 feet high at its maximum, was completely inundated by an estimated 17 foot storm surge which tore buildings from their foundations and washed them into Galveston Bay behind.  Anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 people died as a direct result from the storm, either from the storm itself or being buried for days under wreckage.  As a result, the glory days of Galveston passed, and though remnants of it are left, it has never regained its lost glory.

We may still ask the question, as people still clean up from our modern-day Hurricane Sandy, only a week or so distant in the past as I write this post, which ripped through the barrier-island city of Ocean City and caused widespread flooding and damage.  Why do we develop barrier islands?  After all, these places when hit sustain millions and billions of dollars in damages.  The resulting effects take their toll on all of us.  Insurance rates rise as claims are filed.  Taxes go to emergency relief and other programs that create stresses on federal, state and local governments.  People do not help themselves, refusing evacuation orders and then flooding hospitals with injuries that places stresses on health care.  Disease outbreaks are always a potential problem in the aftermath of hurricanes.  The latest report I've heard from Hurricane Sandy is the fear that unscrupulous people will refurbish hurricane-damaged vehicles and flood the used car market without revealing that they are storm-damaged cars.

I remember after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans (not on a barrier island but dependent on natural features such as the extensive, and disappearing, system of bayous and wetlands to blunt hurricanes as they approach), many people in the U.S. asked why should the the country continue to provide funding and relief to a place that exists below sea level and is likely to be hit by hurricanes.  Notwithstanding that New Orleans is one of our oldest and most historically significant cities, and that many people who live there have known no other place in their lives - it is their home - I think it is a fair question.  But if we are willing to ask that question, we should also be willing to ask the question of barrier island development.  Why should the U.S. continue to allow development when we know that hurricanes will scour these islands clean every so often?  For that matter, we should ask the question whenever there is development in areas that are subject to natural disaster.  Why should we allow farming and towns in known floodplains?  Should we keep allowing development in Tornado Alley when we know that tornadoes cause widespread damage there?  Why should we allow cities to be built along active fault lines that will occasionally rupture and cause widespread devastation?  Why should development occur in the shadows of volcanoes that will eventually erupt?

If we are willing to understand that along with benefits there will occasionally be costs in lives and property, as well as more diffuse costs in services and health, and we are willing to accept these costs, then we should build away.  But we should be aware that there will be costs, as nature every so often tragically reminds us.

Musical Interlude

In the 1960s, Tom Rush recorded Wasn't That a Mighty Storm, an old spiritual that may be about the Great Hurricane of 1900 that hit Galveston.  The song could easily apply to wherever hurricanes hit barrier islands. The footage of the destruction of Galveston in the accompanying video was filmed by none other than Thomas Edison.

If you want to know more about Ocean City

Maryland Coast Dispatch (newspaper)
Ocean City Chamber of Commerce
Ocean City Convention and Visitors Bureau
Town of Ocean City
Wikipedia: Ocean City

Next up: Crisfield, Maryland

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

Unfolding the Map

As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) eats breakfast under a pair of two silent watchtowers from the World War II era, I will devote this post to the rapidly disappearing living history of World War II.  It's a little late for Veterans Day, but I hope it helps honor this important generation who didn't wish for a worldwide conflict to be thrust upon them, but answered the call with humility and courage all the same.  To see where these relics of the war are located, take aim and target the map.  (Note: I guessed at the site based on the fact that LHM wrote that he was "south" of Rehoboth Beach and there are two towers within site.  However, there is another likely site north of Rehoboth Beach where two towers sit in sand near the water and each other.)

Book Quote

"South of Rehoboth Beach, I stopped to eat breakfast on the shore.  Even though the sky was clear, the windy night still showed in the high surf.  At my back rose two silo-like concrete observation towers, relics from the Second World War.  At the top of each were narrow openings like sinister eyes.  A battering of starlings flew in and out of the slits, the shrill bird cries resonating weirdly in the hollow stacks.  The towers were historical curiosities, monuments to man's worst war, one that never reached this beach; yet nothing identified them.  To the young, they could be only mysteries.  Had they come from the more remote and safer history of the Revolutionary or Civil wars, they would have been commemorated.  Just when is history anyway?"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

One of the World War II observation towers in Dewey Beach, Delaware. Photo by "royal19" and housed at Flickr under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to go to host page.Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

We are just a few days past Veterans Day as I write this post, and the quote above is quite timely.  Since my father and uncles served in the military (my father was in the Army and stationed at Saipan), I have always found the World War II era to be one of the most interesting to study.  When I was in grammar school, my friends and I always drew "war pictures" complete with planes screaming down on soldiers and buildings, or fighting each other in the sky, and heroic men charging with guns blazing into battle against the Germans or the Japanese.  Given that we were in school at the tail end and just after the Vietnam War, we hardly ever considered that war as a subject for our artwork.  It was always World War II.  We supplemented our knowledge of World War II from the myriads of movies that were on television on lazy weekend Saturdays.  I think that my preteen years were spent mostly watching World War II movies or football games.

Yet as I think about it, LHM is right.  As a country, we have extensively memorialized other great wars, such as the Revolutionary War which freed the United States from Britain, and the Civil War, which reunited a fractured country (and the wounds of which we are still healing).  But the great wars of the last century - World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War - do not get much in the way of physical memorials.  In many towns across America, you might find a pillar memorializing the men from the town or region that fought in World Wars I and II.  Sometimes they have been kept up, and sometimes they are woefully neglected, sitting unobserved in plain sight.  There are monuments to World War II, including an impressive one in Washington DC, and it has been celebrated in cinema and television.  The Vietnam War has a wonderful memorial, but being in Washington DC it is not accessible to most people.  But as we move farther away from World War II, a war which might have saved democracy and civilization itself, and as its veterans pass away into history we are beginning to suffer amnesia.  We forget how a country prone to isolationism shook itself and took up the mantle of defender of democracy and in the process became a superpower.

Why do we forget?  Perhaps it's because the 20th century wars were mostly fought in foreign lands, and therefore the United States does not bear the scars of those wars on its own turf like the great battles of the Civil War and Revolutionary War.  Perhaps it's because we live in our version of a modern world, where history seems to take a back seat to technology and young people are not interested anymore in the exploits of their grandfathers.  Perhaps it's because we've turned Hitler and the Nazi movement into a comic caricature, especially on movies and television, that trivializes the horrific dangers the world faced if he had triumphed.  Perhaps it's because we didn't have any battles on American soil.  Maybe it's because we won the war which ameliorated, somewhat, the pain and anguish faced by those who lost family members and loved ones in the struggle.  And perhaps it's because as a society, we have not done as much as we can to keep this history alive.

Every once in a while, something comes along to jar our collective memories.  Books like Band of Brothers or The Greatest Generation.  Movies like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List.  The death of a Navajo code talker or a Bataan Death March survivor.  The discovery of unexploded ordnance in Europe in a river or at a construction site.  Certainly, not everyone was a hero in World War II.  Most of the soldiers fighting that war just did their jobs.  Many died, many more did not.  We celebrate the extraordinary exploits of a few, and honor the sacrifice and the commitment of the many regardless of whether they singlehandedly took out a platoon of Germans or an entrenched gun emplacement on Iwo Jima, or simply cooked (like my father) in a mess tent on a barren rock in the middle of the Pacific.

I remember thrilling to stories that my father told me about B-29s taking off from Saipan laden with bombs, sinking at the dropoff at the end of the runway toward the ocean.  He described the breathless seconds before the planes climbed back up and lumbered toward Japan, and how occasionally an overloaded one would fail to gain altitude and splash into the bay.  I remember him telling me about a group of Japanese soldiers, after the war ended, getting drunk in a cave where they were holed up. The next day, dirty, hungry and hung over, they marched into the American camp to surrender.  I remember his description of a under a parachute.  My wife's father, who served in the Navy on a minesweeper, has told stories of braving Japanese island guns to clear the waters of mines before invasions, and being in the sites of a Japanese kamikaze.  Both of these men were reluctant to bring up these stories, not wanting to boast and simply, humbly, considering it just something that they had to do.

We hear these stories because we ask about them.  How many stories are still unheard?

Yet a spirit of remembrance is coming alive as that generation dies. In New Orleans, the National World War II Museum was dedicated a few years ago.  It is a magnificent repository of memories and stories and a testament to the history and motivations behind the war.  Compared to that memorial, the unmarked lookout towers along the Delaware shore, an important part of the past effort to hold vigilance against our enemies in World War II, seem unimportant.  Yet they are part of an important collective history.  Thankfully, since LHM ate breakfast in their shadows, a movement has begun to save the Delaware lookout towers.  One of the towers, Tower 3 in Dewey Beach behind the spot where LHM ate his breakfast, is the subject of a campaign for renovation.  The plans call for a visitor center and a museum that will honor veterans of World War II.  As our World War II veterans march off, platoon by platoon, to their rest, perhaps we will realize what we've lost and creatively and respectfully honor them as they deserve.

Musical Interlude

One of the biggest selling songs during World War II, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra jarred me when I first heard it.  It seems uber-patriotic but, when I think about what the troops needed while deployed on ships, in tanks, in planes, and on the ground during World War II, I think that it probably gave them quite a lift to their spirits and helped them believe that even in the darkest days, they would eventually prevail.

If you want to know more about the Delaware shore

Beach-Net.com: Delaware Beaches
Delaware Tourism: Delaware Beaches
Newsday: The Delaware Shore
Wikipedia: Delaware Beaches

Next up:  Ocean City, Maryland

Blue Highways: Dover, Delaware

Unfolding the Map

When William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) relates the story of the Chief Justice's ghost on the Dover village green, it causes me to ponder a bit on the sometimes thin separation of our world from that of the dead.  Should you want to see where Dover is located, say a little prayer for those who have passed on and see the map.

Book Quote

"On the village green in Dover, citizens successfully buried the ghost of Chief Justice Sam Chew in broad daylight.  Around 1745, the judge's shade developed a nocturnal penchant for meditating on the common and beckoning to passersby.  His honor's whangdoodle began to keep the streets empty after dark and tavernkeepers complained.  So residents dug a symbolic grave on the green, and, in full sunshine, tolled bells as clergymen spoke the restless soul to its peace."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Downtown Dover, Delaware. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Dover, Delaware

Recently, here in Albuquerque, we celebrated Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead.  A day that we in European traditions have turned into a celebration of spooks and ghouls, of treats and tricks, and of costumes and candy is now mostly celebrated by little kids on parade at dusk while their parents keep a watchful eye on them.  Halloween is a sanitized holiday, the original purpose of which was to highlight the rending of the veil between our world and the spirit world, but  has been lost in commercialization and the bottom line of candy sales. 

The origins of Halloween are therefore obscured.  Perhaps an amalgamation of different Roman and pagan holidays, the day was usually marked as the end of the harvest and also, according to Celtic traditions, when the door to the Otherworld opened and spirits and sprites could join us here in ours.  Later, after Christian influences on the holiday, children went around to ask for cakes and other treats to offer as prayers to lost souls.  Of course, there are only echoes of that left in our Halloween, where it's all about the candy gained and consumed.

But the Hispanic cultural tradition has kept a bit of the original intent of the day alive.  In Albuquerque, families take time to come together in feasts.  They gather together to spruce up the gravesites of their families and leave fresh flowers and other mementos.  Ofrendas, or altars, dedicated to the memories of friends and loved ones are constructed in homes and adorned with food and mementos important to the person or persons being commemorated.  The ofrendas are often garlanded with marigolds, which are believed to attract souls to the altar where they may consume the spiritual essence of the food left as offerings and hear their living relatives talk about them.

The symbols of the day are calaveras, or skulls.  These are fashioned out of sugar and decorated in fancy and floral patterns and used to decorate for the holiday.  Catrinas are also brought out.  These carved figures usually depict a skeleton lady who represents someone from a higher class, a reminder that while riches may separate us on this earth, there is no difference between us when it comes to death.  We will all live our lives and die, and be reduced to the bare elements of what we are.  Skin and flesh, then bone, then dust.

My wife and I, after years of attending, had an opportunity to participate in the Marigold Parade, which over the past few years has become an Albuquerque tradition.  The parade features individuals and groups, dressed up with faces painted like calaveras, marching with grim faces (because death is grim) in a macabre procession that is at once somber and at the same time joyous.  The parade not only celebrates the thin veil between life and death, but also the follies of the living.  This year, small makeshift floats lampooning the 1% vs. the 99%, and other national and local politics, were mixed in with floats (usually the decorated beds of pickup trucks) remembering people who have passed on.  Because it is Albuquerque, a center of "lowrider" culture, the end of the parade featured lowriders, some equipped with hydraulics, filled with skeletal drivers and passengers in a strange, motorized death procession.

Like my feelings about unexplained phenomena, which I've written about in this forum in the past, I've always wanted to be able to believe in spirits and ghosts.  As a scientist, I am taught only to believe in what I've been able to observe, and to even question that.  On that score, I have never observed a ghost.  I've tried - I've visited supposed haunted places, including dragging my wife on our anniversary up to a haunted hotel, the St. James, in Cimarron, New Mexico on our anniversary weekend.  The strange smell of cigar smoke in our hotel room that was unaccounted for wasn't enough to convince me (though the always accommodating clerk told me that I was probably smelling the ghostly poker game in the card room around the corner).  Like most people, I wonder what happens when we die, and if our spirits and essences just disappear into the universe, or whether there is something beyond this life that we can look forward to, as many religions promise us.

But on the other hand, the thought of restless spirits roaming around, never finding a place of peace, is also quite disturbing.  If there are ghosts tied, by some unfulfilled longing or unfinished business, to a place or location where their sole purpose is to haunt until the end of time, then their existence seems sad to me.  They can't move on, and they are trapped in a kind of loop.  They are never able to leave that place and therefore, they never find the peace they desperately crave.  Isn't death supposed to be an eternity of peace after a lifetime of toil on this earth?

In a similar train of thought, my wife just reminded me of an interesting concept.  We read a short story once about a waiting room where souls of dead people are trapped as long as their names are spoken on earth.  In this vision, the people who are unknown are able to truly pass on because they are forgotten.  Those that seek fame and fortune, through vanity or other reasons, are those that remain in the waiting room purgatory.  If we are continually tied to this earth by how we are remembered, then maybe we aren't doing the dead a favor at all.  Maybe we, who must comfort ourselves and deal with our grief of those departed, actually are complicit in their inability to achieve rest.  What if they resent us for this?  What if they just wish that we would forget them so that we can move on, and in the process let them go where they need to be?

That's why, out of all the traditions, I like New Orleans' tradition around death the best.  Steeped in Christianity, it still maintains some of the non-Christian elements that make it special.  The deceased are mourned for a period, usually the first part of a jazz funeral.  Once the coffin is blessed however, a huge party breaks out.  The dead are "going home."  We have mourned, now we can be happy for them.  They've left the toils and cares of this world behind.  If anything, the dead should be grieving for us poor souls left on this hard rock to complete our own journeys.  They've finished theirs.

Musical Interlude 

My wife and I do a global music radio show on KUNM, and we did a show based on the Day of the Dead.  What follows is a mix of over 30 songs that are around the theme of life and death.  All you have to do is click on it and play.  Yes, that's me and my wife, Megan Kamerick, in the picture.  Enjoy!

Death and Life from mhessnm on 8tracks Radio.

If you want to know more about Dover

City of Dover
Delaware State University
Dover Post (newspaper)
Downtown Dover
Kent County and Greater Dover Convention and Visitors Bureau
Wikipedia: Dover

Next up: Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

Blue Highways: Leipsic, Delaware

Unfolding the Map

A bit of a wistful post this time, as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) passes a lonely lighthouse, far from water, on the edge of a cornfield.  What can be more lonely than a lighthouse far from water?  I guess we'll find out.  To find Leipsic, follow the ghost light of the lighthouse to the map.

Book Quote

"Although I couldn't see the bay, I could smell it and see evidence of it in an old steel lighthouse implausibly at the edge of a cornfield near Leipsic."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 12

View of the Leipsic River near Leipsic, Delaware. Photo by "jgmskm" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go host site.

Leipsic, Delaware

Though I think I might have written this once before, I once ran across a DeMotivator poster that I thought was extremely funny. The poster showed a lone tree in the midst of a vast whiteness of snow.  The caption read "If you find yourself struggling with loneliness, you aren't alone.  And yet you are alone.  So very alone."  Part of what I found funny, aside from the biting humor, is that at certain points in our lives we sometimes find ourselves alone.  Whether by choice, or by circumstances beyond our control, we may sometimes be in a place where suddenly it's only us.  There are others who are just as alone as we are, and yet we are the center of our universe so it really is only us.

I was reminded again by that feeling in LHM's quote.  By their very nature, lighthouses are lonely places.  They usually sit on the edge of points or headlands, far away from other buildings or dwellings, and their lugubrious lanterns shine in a sweeping arc out into the vast and lonely reaches of the ocean, sea or lake they sit by.  In days past, a lighthouse keeper lived out a lonely life in the lighthouse, tending the lantern in solitude, accompanied only by the sound of the gulls and the waves.

So what could be more lonely than a lighthouse left, by geology or environmental changes, sitting far inland?  And what a perfect metaphor...but for what?  Certainly for loneliness.  Perhaps for the erosion of usefulness.  Maybe the loss of meaningfulness, or the loss of purpose.

There are times when I feel like I could be such a lighthouse.

In another post, awhile back on our Blue Highways journey, I wrote about the difference between being alone and loneliness.  In that post, I spoke about how being alone is a state of being - either we are with other beings or not.  It may be by choice, as when I decide to go for a hike in the mountains to get away as much as possible from other people, or spend some time reading alone in a room in the house.  Or it may be because we just find ourselves where other people aren't, and we can either choose to stay there or go in search of people.

But loneliness is a different matter.  Loneliness is a state of mind.  One can feel lonely in a crowd.  One can feel lonely by themselves.  It's a perception, and not based on the physical reality of place.  Certainly there have been times that I've felt lonely.  It's usually when I'm troubled by something, or I've done something that has placed me in some sort of bind.  In that case, my feeling of being alone is also a symptom of my loneliness.

Of the two, I think that loneliness would be the worst.  One can easily stop being alone by finding others.  One must change a state of mind to stop feeling lonely.  From experience, that can be very hard.  And for some, it becomes chronic and depressive, and can lead to inner turmoil, pain, hurt and sometimes even tragedy.  I try to avoid feelings of loneliness as much as possible.

I think that in his long Blue Highways journey LHM struggled at times with loneliness, especially when thinking about his estranged wife.  In that way, the lighthouse serves as an apt symbol.  A working lighthouse may sit alone on a headline, but its light shines and it is working, occupied with its sole duty of keeping ships off the rocks (I realize I'm anthropomorphizing lighthouses here, but go with me for a minute).  However, a non-working lighthouse, sitting inexplicably inland has lost its purpose.  It is there alone, without a reason for being.  To me, that is the epitomy of loneliness.  As LHM gets into the last stretch of his trip, he might be able to look at that lighthouse and see a bit of his former self in it.  He started his trip in loneliness after his break up, but throughout the trip, his loneliness turned into an exercise of learning to be alone.  He was the lonely lighthouse, and now he is something else.  Perhaps he is alone, but he is not lonely.

But I ask you to think about the lonely lighthouses you have encountered in your life.  How many times have you found yourself without a purpose, vision, or ability to break out of the lonely straights you've found yourself in.  Have you ever known someone in that position?  Perhaps a loved one, or an older person at the end of their life who has lost most of the people they've known and loved?  Perhaps a friend who is going through a difficult time, and feels as if there is nobody there for them?

I think that, unfortunately, there are many lonely lighthouses in our society and world.  We may not be able to control the changes that sometimes make us temporarily alone in the world, and sometimes we simply want to be alone.  But loneliness is another matter, and when we lonely it often seems like we sit like an abandoned lighthouse, dark and lifeless, far away from the object of our purpose with no hope of ever reviving it.  When that is our state of mind, perhaps we need another lighthouse to guide us - a purpose or a person - who can pull us out of the loneliness.

Musical Interlude

The most well-known song about lighthouses is probably James Taylor's Lighthouse.  It is a very melancholy and nice song that captures a little of the loneliness of the lighthouse.

Here's another nice song, Lighthouse by The Waifs.

If you want to know more about Leipsic

Delawaretoday.com: Leipsic
Wikipedia: Leipsic

Next up: Dover, Delaware

Blue Highways: Salem, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

What is in a place name, especially those that evoke other places?  I am of the opinion that place names often help us keep alive those other places that we came from or identify with.  As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) swings through Salem, New Jersey we'll see how this little town inspired the names of possibly three other Salems in the United States.  To see the source of this inspiration, please be inspired to visit the map.  The red oak leaf, at right, comes from New Jersey's official state tree.

Book Quote

"Salem, a colonial town to the west, was abundant with old buildings and homes that would be museums most anywhere else in the country, but here they were just more declining houses, even though many stood when the men of Salem sent beef to Valley Forge to help save Washington's troops from starvation.  The town is the birthplace of Zadock Street, a restless fellow who left New Jersey in 1803 to make his way into the new western territory.  As he went, he and his sons founded towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, and named them all Salem; in Ohio, his Salem sprouted North Salem, West Salem, South Salem, Lower Salem, and Salem Center.  Americans can be thankful that Zadock Street was not born in Freidberger or Quonochontaug."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 12

Downtown Salem, New Jersey. Photo by Tim Kiser, and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Salem, New Jersey

I've had a couple of posts about town and city names, and LHM has succeeded in piquing my interest in a little mystery.  Why would a man named Zadock Street, of Salem, New Jersey spread out west with his sons and name all the towns they founded Salem?  What is it about the name Salem that was so important to these men?

First things first.  How many towns and cities and places are named Salem.  One source, Wikipedia, lists 25.  Another source, on Yahoo, lists 32.  Clearly people had reasons for naming towns Salem.  From what I've gathered online, Salem is a derivation of shalom and salaam, the Hebrew and Arabic words for peace.  Salem was mentioned as a place in the Old Testament, and became part of the name of Jerusalem, founded by King David of the kingdom of Israel.  Jerusalem means "foundation of peace."

Therefore, we can see that the most likely spread of the name Salem came with the spread of religion throughout the country.  Indeed, one source who uses the same quote by LHM above, looks into the story of the towns named Salem and of Zadock Street and wonders if LHM's story is true.  The writer points out that Zadock was one of King David's priests, thus cementing the connection between Zadock Street and religion.  The writer looks at the founding of Salems in Ohio, Indiana and Iowa that LHM says were established by Zadock Street and his sons and finds the evidence less than compelling.  Those Salems were founded by Quakers, the writer claims.  The writer says that there is no evidence that Zadock Street had anything to do with their founding, and there is no compelling evidence that Zadock Street or his sons were Quakers.

Thankfully, the internet can sometimes help clear up mysteries.  Wikipedia's entry states that one of the founders of Salem, Ohio was Zadock Street and an historic home in the city was owned by John Street, Zadock's son, and was the northernmost Ohio stop on the Underground Railroad.  The city of Salem in Indiana appears to have nothing to do with Zadock Street, but there are two other areas called Salem in the state, both census-designated places, that may have had something to do with Zadock Street.  And while I could not associate Salem, Iowa with Zadock Street or his sons, the town was founded by Quakers and was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.

What accounts for so many towns named Salem, then?  In the case of the Zadock Street and his sons, it may have been that religion plays a part in their propagation of the Salem name, but I think that there is a greater likelihood that the connection to their original home of Salem, New Jersey played a bigger part.  In a sense, we all have that attachment to home.  I cannot see the name Fort Bragg, even if the name is attached to Fort Bragg, North Carolina rather than my hometown of Fort Bragg, California, without getting pictures and images in my mind of all of the scenes I used to inhabit as a child.  The United States, as a country that was settled primarily by immigrants, would have been an alien place.  Names that evoked the familiar would have been important to people, comforting them with memories of places known in the midst of all the unknowns.

I did a post awhile back where I examined why there were so many towns, throughout the Southwest, called a variant of El Dorado.  In that case, Spanish conquistadors looking for gold, the proverbial El Dorado, left that name all over the region.  That was a case of wishful thinking.  However, in many cases it seems that people named towns and cities after that which gave them comfort and something that evoked memories of the places from whence they came.  I surmise that if you closely into town names, they've either been named for someone, or after something left behind.

Place names are a very simple part of a complex process.  No matter how adventurous or how exploratory we are, or how much we push the boundaries of our experience, we seem to need that touchstone to what we were and where we've been.  Two of the most poignant examples of this comes from our explorations into space.  The first example occurred when astronauts first left the safety of our atmosphere and went into space.  The poetic descriptions of the seeming fragility of our world when viewed from space indicated just how much "home" means to us when we look back at it.  As Alfred Worden wrote:

Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless
We glide from shore to shore, curving and falling
but not quite touching;
Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose,
crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful,
I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn't matter . . .
the bond is there in my mind and memory;
Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately
in the nothingness of space.

The other example came from even farther out in space, when the Voyager probe, close to leaving our solar system, trained its cameras back on Earth which hung like a small speck of dust in the vastness of space.  Carl Sagan said: 

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future

A sense of home, of belonging and of origin, is important.  It is an indelible part of our identity and it provides us with comfort.  As such, it is natural that we take a piece of that which is important with us, and make it a part of any place we go.

Musical Interlude

I couldn't have picked a better song to illustrate my point than Joe Diffie's Home.  This was a nice discovery, since country music is not a genre that I dip into regularly, but I'm often surprised when I do.

If you want to know more about Salem

Discover Salem County: Salem
NewJersey.com: Salem County News
Salem County Chamber of Commerce
Salem, New Jersey
Visit Salem County
Wikipedia: Salem

Next up: Leipsic, Delaware