Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Hudson River, New York

Unfolding the Map

We have reached what, until the colonists and settlers pushed farther inland, would have been to them the mightiest river of America.  Where William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) joins it, you can throw a rock across the Hudson but, eventually it becomes the large expanse of water that traverses the Hudson River Valley and flows past New York City as it mingles with the sea.  In this post, I'll look at the Hudson through song, literature and art.  To find out where we touch the fledgling Hudson, see the map.

Book Quote

"Our beginnings do not foreshadow our ends if one judges by the Hudson River.  A few miles east of the Bad Luck Ponds, the Hudson came down between the ridges to race alongside route 28; it was a mountain stream: clear, cold, shallow, noisy.  A few miles from its source in Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds a mile up on Mount Marcy (the Indian name for the mountain is better: Tahawus, 'Cloud-splitter') and three hundred river miles from the thousand oily piers of Hoboken, Weehawken, and Manhattan, here it was a canoer's watercourse.  Above the little Hudson, spumes of mist rose from the mountains like campfire smoke."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

The Hudson River right where it joins route 28 in New York. Photo by "swisstek" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on the Hudson River, New York

I remember the first time I saw the Hudson River.  By seeing the Hudson River, I mean really seeing the river, not the part that flows past the "thousand oily piers" between Manhattan and New Jersey.  I was in my late 20s, I think I would hazard, and had driven out to Yonkers, New York from Milwaukee on a work-related trip.  I had a couple of people with me, and I had worked out with them, on our trip back, to stop in Cooperstown, New York to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, then stop at one of my companion's home in Geneva, New York in the Finger Lakes area, and then cross at Niagara Falls, head across Canada (basically LHM's route in reverse) to Detroit where we would stay at the home of my second companion before heading back to Milwaukee.

Our initial drive out of Yonkers was as you'd expect from the New York City region - a lot of interstates.  We planned to take the interstate straight north up the Hudson and then connect with another freeway going west toward Cooperstown.  It was morning, and the sun gave that soft light that only the sun can give when it is a couple of hours old.  I remember both of my companions being a little sleepy.  I believe there was a moment - I can picture it in my mind though I've probably put a few images together into one idyllic one, where we crested some stretch of interstate and there lay the Hudson, expansive, placid and the water a mix of blue and green.  I picture wooded hillsides sloping down to the water.  There wasn't much beach, as I remember.  In fact, if I wasn't aware that I was driving along the Hudson River, I could have easily mistaken the river for a long, narrow lake - that's how calm the waters seemed to be.

I think that the Hudson is probably one of our great rivers, because it was probably one of the first big rivers that settlers knew when America wasn't even yet a dream in the mind of the colonists.  Yet I was surprised.  Other rivers are celebrated in well-known songs.  The Mississippi has had untold numbers of notes and lyrics written about its entire length, about certain portions of it, about its moods and floods.  Literature has been written where the Mississippi is a central character - I'm thinking particularly of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Paul Robeson and the Doobie Brothers, among others, have sang about the Mississippi.  Other rivers have also taken their central place in art, music and literature.  The Missouri River, made famous by Lewis and Clark's journey, for example, has had its moments of celebration.  Oh Shenandoah, for instance, was a song that I learned in grade school that has "across the wide Missouri" as part of its refrain.  The river has also been celebrated by such musicians as Bruce Springsteen, Carly Simon and Van Morrison.  Even lesser known rivers such as the Columbia River, the Kern River, the Red River, the Green River, and the Tennessee River get their due in song.

I tried to find songs that celebrate the Hudson River, but mostly came up empty.  I know that there must be some out there, but I couldn't find many that I could use for the musical interlude, though I was happy to see that there was a decent one.  However, for one of the United States' great rivers, there seems to be a dearth of songs about it.

Where the Hudson river really shines is in the visual arts, especially paintings.  It gives its name to a genre of paintings by artists grouped in what is called the Hudson River School.  The paintings of these artists are steeped in the Romantic tradition, in which the Hudson is shown in an idealized fashion as a true wilderness to demonstrate its savage nobility and pristine nature.  In the paintings, the majesty of nature is often at odds with humans and their drive to toward resource development, such as this 1866 painting by Samuel Colman called Storm King on the Hudson demonstrates:

Samuel Colman, Hudson River School. Storm King on the Hudson, 1866. Obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

In addition, the Hudson River also shines in literature.  Some of the earliest American literature, such as the stories of Washington Irving and the Romantic novels of James Fenimore Cooper take place within the environs of the river, and many authors over American history have written about the Hudson and the places it passes.

The Hudson River is also environmentally sensitive.  For a few years I worked with religious organizations on shareholder actions around environmental and social concerns.  A number of religious groups had filed shareholder resolutions in the past against General Electric, who dumped PCBs into the Hudson River from two of their plants.  The river also has concentrations of DDT.  The GE plants have since been declared Superfund sites and cleanup continues.  In terms of total pollution the Mississippi River dwarfs every other river in the United States in the amount of contaminants in its water, but the Hudson is still rated the 33rd most polluted river in the country.  What probably makes it even more polluted is that the Hudson is an estuarial river, in which tidal action from the ocean causes the salt and fresh water to mix, and also causes the river from its mouth to Troy, New York (over 150 miles upriver) to run backwards, and rise and fall when the tide is coming in or going out.  Estuaries are very environmentally sensitive, and in the past pollutants, such as raw sewage, from New York City and cities on the New Jersey side of the river polluted that whole, though there have been many efforts from those places to clean up the Hudson River estuary.

The Hudson is one of America's great rivers, and is beautiful to see.  While I am surprised that it isn't celebrated more in song, I am not surprised that it holds a magic place in the hearts of those who live and work around and near it.  It certainly had a great effect on our art and literature, and to link it to a past post, it was the first part of the inland transportation route completed with the monumental Erie Canal.  It deserves its accolades, and our protection.

Musical Interlude

As I mentioned above, I had trouble finding a song for the musical interlude about the Hudson River.  Paintings, no problem.  Literature, no problem.  For some reason, the Hudson doesn't inspire song the way the Mississippi or other rivers do.  However, Dar Williams came through with a song about the Hudson, inspired by her residence near it.

Addendum:  As I was searching for more information on Dar Williams, I discovered that she has a new song, just released, called Storm King, which is beautiful!  This is the mountain in the painting by Samuel Colman that I include above, and she evidently lives near it.  Enjoy this serendipitous moment of discovery!

If you want to know more about the Hudson River

Historic Hudson River Towns
Hudson River Foundation
Hudson River Heritage
Hudson River Valley Institute
Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area
Hudson River Watertrail Association
Wikipedia: Hudson River

Next up:  Hague and Ticonderoga, New York

Blue Highways: Viking, Minnesota

Unfolding the Map

We continue to ride with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) into western Minnesota, past the town of Viking and its sunflower crops.  Don't they look beautiful!  Let's stop and peruse them for a while, giving ourself an emotional lift and allowing us to appreciate beauty in the world.  To see where these sunflowers grow, please, look at the map!

Book Quote

"Near Viking, tall stalks from the sunflower crop of a year earlier rattled in the warm wind.  For miles I had been seeing a change in the face of the Northland brought about because Americans find it easier to clean house paint out of brushes with water than with turpentine.  This area once grew much of the flax that linseed oil comes from, but with the advent of water-base paint, the demand for flax decreased; in its stead, of all things, came the sunflower, and now it was becoming the big cash crop of the Dakotas and Minnesota - with more acreage going each year to new hybrids developed from Russian seeds - because 'flower' is a row crop that farmers can economically reap by combine after the grain harvest."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 10

Metal scarecrow in Viking, Minnesota. Photo by "matchboxND" and hosted at DB-City.com. Click on photo to go to host site.Viking, Minnesota

Did you know that the image at left symbolizes a type of terrorism?  Neither did I!  I use the word terrorism in jest, really, because the sunflower is a component of what is called "guerilla gardening," in which bands of eco-warriors head out on International Sunflower Guerilla Gardening Day to plant sunflowers in neglected and blighted cityscape plots.  Not only do the plants brighten the area but if there are toxins in the soil, the plants often soak up those toxins, and provide a natural way to help clean the environment.  Maybe instead of terrorism, we could call it "elationism."  I can imagine the happy warriors of the guerilla gardening movement heading out with their seeds, trowels and water to wreak havoc on blight through floriculture.

In fact, I can think of no better way to brighten up anything, because I don't know about you, but I cannot remain in a funk if I look at sunflowers.  There's just no way.

Throughout my childhood, I knew that sunflowers existed, but weren't grown very much where I grew up.  There were some in isolated gardens, but I didn't get much exposure to them.  The only thing I knew about sunflowers was all wrapped up in the packages of seeds that my friends would buy at the store.  They ate and then spit them, so that sunflower seed shell carcasses littered the ground around their feet.  I tried them, and while they had an interesting flavor, I didn't think all the work of splitting the seeds to get the little morsel of nut meat inside was worth the effort.

So it wasn't until I moved, and particularly when I moved to the Southwest, that I really got exposed to sunflowers.  Suddenly they were everywhere I looked on warm summer days.  The coffee shop around the corner had a whole row of sunflowers growing alongside its adobe fence.  Gardens always seemed to have a section of sunflowers.  On my drives to Lubbock when I was teaching, I would pass by a scattered field or two of sunflowers in bloom.  And whenever I looked at them, no matter what the circumstance, my spirits would lift.  When my spirits were high, the sunflowers affirmed that I felt good about the world.  When my spirits were low, the sunflowers would take me briefly out of dark places and remind me that there was beauty and light in the world.

The sunflower is also full of natural mystery in its beauty.  Look at that picture of the sunflower above.  Notice the spiral pattern in the middle.  The sunflower is actually not one flower but a group of 1000-2000 small flowers called florets, and the spiral pattern of these florets in the center follows a mathematical sequence called a Fibonacci sequence, where each successive spiral consists of florets that are the sum of the florets in the two spirals before.  According to Wikipedia, there are usually 34 spirals in one direction, and 55 in another, though they can be bigger.  Mathematics aside, I just look at that pattern and it puts me in wonder of the complexity and the beauty of the universe, as if a supreme power put a Spirograph on the world in the form of a yellow living thing of beauty.

Sunflowers have made a roundabout trip from and to the US.  They were probably among the very first crops cultivated by Native Americans, perhaps even earlier than corn.  They eventually made their way to Europe through the explorations of the Spaniards, who took the seeds back to Europe.  They eventually made their way to Russia where refinements in hybridization led to cultivation for the mass production of oil and food.  It was then that these new hybrids were reintroduced to the United States and planted for mass harvest in the upper Midwest.

In my previous post, I speculated about how Scandinavians in the upper Midwest could come to be known for their industriousness, their dourness and their quietness, so much so that they make fun of themselves for it.  The land, I surmised, with its long harsh winters and hot blazing summers probably takes a lot of mental energy to exist, coupled with the hard work of farming.

But the planting of sunflowers as cash crops makes me wonder if these perennial beauties, growing anywhere from six to twelve feet high, provides a lift to people who live there.  I can imagine, just for a moment, a taciturn Norwegian Minnesotan farmer, going out to his work on a summer morning before the weather gets too hot, stopping at the field of sunflowers he has planted.  In those moments, I imagine his dour look relaxes as he gazes on the sunflowers, and a brief smile appears before he gets to the hard work on another morning.

Musical Interlude

I'm giving you a sunflower double shot, today, Littourati.  For those of you that like some rock, I'm going to give you the Grateful Dead's China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider.  It seems like it would be a great road tune, especially going through the sunflowers of Viking.  The second is a jazz fusion tune by Freddie Hubbard called Little Sunflower, with vocals by Al Jarreau.  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about Viking

What can I say?  It's a small place.

Wikipedia: Viking

Next up: Thief River Falls, Minnesota

Blue Highways: White Salmon and Appleton, Washington

Unfolding the Map

Hey there...how you doing, baby?  In this post William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) takes us on a little roadtrip into desire.  So why don't you go get yourself into something more comfortable, put on a little mood music, pour some wine, turn the lights down low and light some candles, and we'll do some exploration, if you know what I mean.  You know you want it.  If you need some visual aids to get excited about where we're going, why don't you get clicking on my map to get that spark?  And now, damn baby, you must be on fire because it's getting hot in here...

Book Quotes

"During lunch in White Salmon, I noticed the map showed a town up on the northern plateau almost in the shadow of Mount Adams called Liberty Bond.  No question about where to go next....

"I tried to get directions in Appleton, a fading place of three or four fading houses and a fading school...No one about...Then a sudden clatter of hooves and a long 'Hallooo!'  A horse whickered as a woman reined up at my window....

"'I'm looking for Liberty Bond.'

"She had long, black hair loose over her shoulders.  Muscular and pretty.  About thirty-five.  Very pretty.

"'It's gone.  Fallen down....All picked over and not a doorknob left....Afraid you're too late for that one.'

"'How about taking me home to the ranch?'

"She laughed. 'What've you got in mind?'  For a moment I saw a ranch-house parlor, low light through shades, the glow of whiskey in tumblers, a deep cleave and merge of thigh.  She smiled. 'Too late there too.'"

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 7

Town of White Salmon. Photo by "Michelle" and posted at City-Data.com. Click on photo to go to host site.White Salmon and Appleton, Washington

Poor LHM.  As we travel alongside him in the state of Washington, probably around the halfway point or just past halfway in his journey, one might wonder what was wrong with him if he had not gotten lonely for romantic companionship at some time.  We know from earlier passages in Blue Highways that he has left a marriage in Missouri after it went sour and that this trip has been, in part, a way to escape his situation.  It is also a journey to reconnect with himself and with the concept of America.  We also know that at times on the trip he has been desperately lonely.  Twice, at least, he has tried to contact his wife, whom he refers to as The Cherokee, and at various points along the earlier parts of his trip he hoped that she might try to contact him or leave a message for him in some way.  The only time he made some brief contact was when he was in Corvallis, Oregon and it left him feeling even more lonely when she asked to call him back instead of talking to him.

So should we be surprised when a siren on a horse, whose prettiness he takes pains to describe, stirs romantic and sexual longings within him?  Should we be surprised that after traveling, at this point probably around 7,000 miles, that he would hope for "a deep cleave and merge of thigh?"

I am writing this post about desire, because we all face it throughout our lives and we all succumb to it in one way or another.  Desire might be the unifying theme that is carried throughout cultures and throughout time in human experience.  We are surrounded by the objects of our desires daily, whether it's the attractive person walking by on the street that makes you look, the great looking car in the parking lot, the woman trying to get your attention or the man hitting on you in the bar, a beautiful piece of jewelry in the store window, or the song about someone else's desire that awakens your own longings.  Desire is ever-present and yet must be balanced like everything in life.  You may desire your friend's wife, or the guy that you run into at the copy machine every morning, but you make the decision to curb your desire in order to maintain social harmony.  You may desperately want that $1000 dress, or the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, but you forego these temptations in order to feed yourself or your family.

We live and struggle with our desires daily.  Some are lucky enough to pour them out in creativity.  When you read a great novel, see a great work of art, watch a great performance, you are often seeing the power of desire channeled into something else of equally great beauty and value.  The drive of desire is the drive of life and connects us with all living things and to aspects of ourselves that we would otherwise only dimly notice.  The most successful human endeavors tap our minds and rechannel desire.  Religion is very good at this, often redirecting the desires of its most fervent adherents toward enlightenment, salvation, community, faith, discipline, and all the other things that religion offers.  It doesn't have to be religion - politics, art, business, and even leisure dip into the wellspring of desire.

Capitalism works as an economic system, and faces it's biggest problems, because it is based on desire.  People getting what they desire in exchange for their labor or their capital is at the heart of capitalism.  Desire causes people to work harder so that they can make more money and achieve what they desire - including snaring a mate to meet the more fundamental desires.  Capitalists attempt to make more money partly to get what they desire and attract those they desire.  Everyone working to get what they desire leads to a balance that Adam Smith called "the Invisible Hand."  Yet if the balance goes awry, and it becomes harder for many to achieve their desires and accumulation begins to favor a minority, then capitalism itself can be threatened.  Perceptions of such an imbalance is driving the current Occupy protests pitting the "99%" against the "1%".

In the end, though, desire is about connection, no matter how focused or abstract the desire is.  Why accumulate more things that you can't possibly use yourself?  Because you want them to create connections to others.  Why write, draw, paint, succeed in business, join a religion, or even just be a person of leisure?  So that you can reach out and touch others who will respond to your activities and also touch you.

This blog grew out of desire - a desire to reconnect with and know myself better, as well as a desire to see if any of what I have to share would connect with anyone else.  It has also helped me channel my activities into positive and life-giving activities rather than unhealthy activities that would touch into the dark sides of my desires.  There is a dark side to everyone's desires.  That dark side can take one down a path of pain, misery, obsession, guilt, and shame.  I have been there once or twice.  Such a road is the stuff that makes film noir's so uncomfortably enjoyable as they delve into the dark and seamy side of life.

There are also consequences to acting upon our desires, and we have to be ready for them.  I just saw a Twilight Zone episode, The Man in the Bottle, that very effectively showed what happens when we are able to get what we desire and the unexpected results that may occur.  What if LHM had been able to act upon his desire, if the pretty woman had been available, and had gone back to the ranch with her?  His trip might have hung in the balance.  He might have had to admit to her that he was just out for a quick romantic stop but no long-term relationship, and that may or may not have had consequences.  Or maybe, he might have been delayed in restarting his trip.  Or he might not have finished it at all.  There may have been no Blue Highways.  Ultimately, LHM took the energy of his desires seething inside him and produced his book.  In doing so, he reached a connection with many of us.

Musical Interlude

Speaking of consequences of desire, there are a lot of mythological stories and warnings about what happens to men overcome with desire.  The Greeks embodied the essence of desire into the Sirens, a group of mythological women with a sweet yet sad song that drove men to anguish.  Mariners were induced to shipwrecks by the Sirens voices and survivors would later die of thirst and starvation listening to the exclusion of all else.  In The Odyssey, Odysseus tells his men to stop their ears and lash him to the mast of the ship so that he could hear the Sirens' song.  They were to keep him bound to the mast no matter how much he begged until the ship was safely away.  In the 2000 movie O Brother Where Art Thou, the Coen Brothers adaptation of The Odyssey set in Mississippi, Ulysses, Pete and Delmar run across some sirens at a river that end in consequences imagined (at first) and real (later).  That will be your musical interlude for today - the "sireens" of O Brother Where Art Thou.  And in case any male readers are overcome with desire for the ladies who play the sirens, the actresses are Mia Tate, Musetta Vander, and Christy Taylor.

If you want to know more about White Salmon and Appleton

GoNorthwest.com: White Salmon
White Salmon Enterprise (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Appleton
Wikipedia: White Salmon

Next up:  Pitt, Washington