Blue Highways: Newport, Rhode Island

Unfolding the Map

As we pull into Newport, Rhode Island with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), do you feel a bit of nostalgia?  Do you have some melancholy associated with a place that was, but now feels different?  As I come home again, I feel it keenly, and will share some thoughts with you on the subject.  If you wish to visit the years gone by, you'll only be able to do that in your memories.  But if you want to see where Newport is located, navigate to the map.

Book Quote

"....I went on toward Quonset Point, the homeport of the ship I had been assigned to."

"....At the end of the road, a mile in, the big pier was empty.  Nothing but rusting stanchions and bollards, and weeds along the railroad tracks.  The whole bay stood open and vacant.  The Champ, the Essex, the Wasp used to fill the sky with gray masses of hull, gun, and antennas.  The great carriers were gone, and also tugs, tenders, big naval cranes, helicopters, jets; the shouts and hubbub and confusion of sailors and machines and aircraft, all gone.

"....I had lived and died walking off and on this pier and many times had dreamed of the day I'd come back as a civilian, free of the tyranny of the boatswain's pipe and his curses, free of working in a one-hundred-twenty-five-degree steel box.  I felt cheated.

"Where the hell was the diesel oil of yesteryear?  Where the drawn faces when we left, the cockahoop faces when we returned, the sailors kissing girls and lugging seabags, mahogany statues, brass platters, straw hats, and black velvet paintings of bulls and naked native women; trucks honking, the sailors on duty cursing down from the deck and offering services to the women, the sea wind snapping the flag from the jackstaff, the last smoke blowing grit on us from the tall stacks?...Christ.  I knew you couldn't go home again, but nobody had said anything about not getting back to your old Navy base."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 5

Downtown Newport, Rhode Island. Photo by Daniel Case and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Newport, Rhode Island

It's often jarring when you go back to someplace that you frequented after an absence of a number of years.

While my absence from my home town hasn't spanned as many year as LHM's absence from Newport, Rhode Island, it still astounds me every time I go back and something has changed, landmarks have disappeared, and I am left sometimes with a profound sense of loss.

Of course, time moves forward whether we want it or not.  But when one wants to capture something of the past, some marker that reconnects us to previous eras of our lives, and it is no longer there or has changed in some unalterable way, it can be a shock to the psyche.

LHM goes to Newport expecting to see something of the old Navy base out of which he served.  When he gets there, what was once a huge industrial facility for maintaining ships of the fleet, including the big aircraft carriers, is now gone.  All he is left with are the memories of the base and Newport as it once was.  His reaction is one of shock and annoyance: why are there lobster fisherman where there once were the finest of the Navy.  He even references Thomas Wolfe.

It may be that one can't go home again.  I often say now that I'm "going home" to visit my mom, or to see old friends.  In reality, home as it was in Fort Bragg, California has really ceased to exist for me.  The house where I grew up has changed too much.  Gone is the horrible brown carpeting, replaced with a durable wood floor.  My room has become a guest room, with nothing left to mark my years of passage there.  An acre of our big yard, where I used to play football with friends and where I constructed two holes of a six hole golf course, has been sold to the neighbor and now there is a shop and a bunch of his equipment on it.

The lumber mill where my father worked, and where I spent four summers as a worker and a security guard, is gone.  When I drive down Oak Street toward what used to be the main gate, it still shocks me to see the ocean rather than the huge sawmill building that rose higher than any building in the town.  Along the whole of the downtown, in fact, the only thing that separates the town from the sea is a vast tract of silent oceanfront property that once housed mills, drying sheds and what seemed like endless stacks of cut lumber stretching far away north and endless decks of newly cut logs that stretched far away south.  Now, the steam-powered rattle and noise of the mill machinery, the revving motors of the forklifts and carriers, and the signature noon whistle that could be heard all over town are all ghosts on the ocean breeze.

All this is coming back to me now because it is the advent of my 30th high school reunion.  Recently, on the trip home to attend that event, I learned that an old college friend had come out to California for a conference and decided to stay with some friends in the wine country.  We talked a little about old times, but mostly we looked at each other and, at least for me, a certain wistfulness about the time that had passed and the changes in us.  While much change has been good - for him, a debilitating disease in remission, a stable relationship, and a good job in Maine - one still cannot be unaware that time is marching and we've gotten older.

At my high school reunion, as I walked into the room I saw some people who I've kept in semi-regular contact with over the years, either by seeing them when I come home or through media like Facebook.  Despite that, I saw a couple of people that I hadn't seen for those 30 years.  A number of people I didn't recognize through the changes that time and experience had wrought.  A number had trouble remembering my name.  High school seemed to be such a huge part of our lives that it has grown out of proportion to many of our other experiences.  A classmate that I spoke with put it in perspective.  I went to school in a small town and was with most of my classmates all through my school years.  He reminded me that all of my classmates, at the age I now am, were a part of only about a third of my life.  Yet that period, and especially the three years of high school I attended, seem like such a huge thing.  All of the successes, and all of the failures, have been magnified.  All of the slights and praises from classmates, while hidden under the veneer of my adulthood, still rattle around in there if I choose to go back and remember them.  I suspect that a small few of our alumni don't come back to the reunions because of the trauma they faced in high school from an equally small number of cruel classmates.

That's where I would modify Thomas Hardy and LHM.  One can come home again, but sometimes one might not wish to.  Home is in the past, and home can connote much that might be painful to relive.  When I think of what was home to me thirty years ago, it consisted of a dysfunctional family, a tortured and negative sense of self, and a longing for something different.  When I think of what is home now, it consists of a more positive sense of self, many accomplishments, and different family dynamics albeit with echoes of the past.  The nostalgia of the past is often best left as a place to visit, at a time of our choosing, and not as a place to dwell in.

Musical Interlude

The song that best encapsulates the melancholy of the past, at least for me, is Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days.

I'm not sure why, but I get a melancholy homesick feeling when I listen to America's Ventura Highway off of their aptly named Homecoming album.  And I didn't even live in southern California...

If you want to know more about Newport

City of Newport
Discover Newport
Newport's Cliff Walk
Newport Daily News (newspaper)
Newport Mansions
Wikipedia: Newport

Next up: Westerly, Rhode Island

Blue Highways: Mount Tom, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

In this post, as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) spends a day on Mount Tom outside of Woodstock, Vermont, he seems a little distracted.  We'll reflect a little on the healing prospects of nature, and the double-edged sword of protecting oneself.  To find Mount Tom, let the map be your guide.

Book Quote

"I spent the day on Mount Tom.  Had I owned a ghost shirt, I'd have danced madly all over that mountain.  Instead, I tried to keep from looking inward, tried to reach outward, but, as Black Elk says, certain things among the shadows of a man's life do not have to be remembered - they remember themselves."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 9

Trail on Mount Tom near Woodstock, Vermont. Photo by "ikur" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Mount Tom, Vermont

If you ask me, LHM did this all backwards.  But first, a little back story that I didn't provide in the quote.  If you're joining for the first time as we follow Blue Highways, one of the reasons LHM took off on a trip around America is that his marriage fell apart.  At various points along the trip, he tried to talk with his estranged wife, who he named "The Cherokee."  In the passage preceding this quote, he wakes in Woodstock, Vermont from difficult dreams involving remarriage with her.  He spends the day on Mount Tom to clear his head and soothe his emotions, but by the end of the day when he is back in Woodstock he calls and has a frustrating talk with her which only serves to get him angry.

In my experience, nature is best experienced from a stable platform.  By that, I mean that if one is in an emotionally unstable state, the healing value of nature, of being in a calming, soothing environment like that of Mount Tom is hindered or muted.  It's not that nature wouldn't be able to calm and heal someone in that state, it's just that the healing forces of nature would have to work harder and would probably need to be applied repeatedly to have an effect.  A simple day outing would not suffice.

I think of myself when I have entered nature in an emotionally unstable state.  A few years ago, my wife and I went for an outing in the Tent Rocks, a geologically fascinating area near our home in New Mexico.  At the time, our marriage was troubled with many issues, and my mind was focused on those things.  We walked the trails of the Tent Rocks, through the hoodoos and fantastic geological formations created through volcanism, erosion and time.  I saw them, but I didn't really see them.  I was too preoccupied, my mind racing with potentials and possibilities and pitfalls.  Therefore, while being in the wilderness in an amazing place took me superficially from my everyday surroundings where all of my troubles and difficulties were stacking up, I didn't really absorb the Tent Rocks.  I saw but did not see.  I need to go back to see the Tent Rocks now that I am in a more stable emotional place.

It's not that LHM didn't try to calm his emotions.  He states that he tried to focus outward, rather than inward, but to paraphrase him, a man's shadows will manage to make themselves known.  In my experience again, those shadows seem to come when one is ungoing emotional unrest.  LHM makes reference his quote above to the ghost shirt, which to Native Americans were a protective garment.  The ghost shirts were adopted by many Native tribes in the late 1800s and were initially worn to protect the wearer from the certain doom, notably earthquakes, that were believed to be the punishment for the white invaders in North America.  However, some Natives believed that the ghost shirts would protect the wearer from the white man's bullets.  They didn't, as was proved at the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.  It is believed that the idea of the ghost shirts were adopted from Mormon temple garments that are supposed to protect the wearer from evil.  However, throughout history there have been many beliefs that the wearing of garments, or even the shedding of clothes, offered one protection.  One of the most interesting cases I've read is about General Butt Naked, in Liberia, who led his troops into battle while nude believing that it protected him from bullets.  He hasn't been proved wrong yet, as he is still alive!  Although I think that his butt-naked battle days are over. 

However, the ghost shirts and other forms of protection are all focused on dangers from without.  How do you protect from the turmoil within?  If you are surrounded by a cloak of protection, such as a ghost shirt, a protective bubble ala Green Lantern, a safe room, or a Romulan or Klingon cloaking device, it doesn't actually mean that you are able to vanquish the doubt, madness or rebellion that can brew within the individual or individuals within the protective device.

Here we get back to LHM.  From my lofty perch thirty years in the future, I might have advised him to get his compulsive act of calling his ex-wife over with before he went up to Mount Tom.  He could have had his despairing, angry moment where he yelled and hit the telephone booth door.  After, a drive up to Mount Tom and it's clean air and forests would have helped calm him.  The views from the top of the mountain could have given him perspective.  Perhaps Black Elk's wisdom, "I did not know then how much was ended," would have come with less desolation and more inner peace.

But then again, I have been known to act exactly as LHM did.  Lucky for me, I have had access to good people who provide me that perspective, and the slightest bit of wisdom to know that should I need healing energy, calm and perspective, that I can always reach out to Nature.  In a week, I will be doing just that.  I will go camping for a weekend in New Mexico's Pecos Wilderness.  I will hike on mountain trails, take in the vistas, and observe wildlife going about its business in the moment.  I will watch my dog joyfully leap into the car, not caring for a moment where she's going but just happy to be going somewhere, and then her joy at being outside for an entire weekend.  For a few days, I will heal, and then come back to civilization, work, and relationships, put up some protective cloaks and live, taking the buffets to my psyche and soul that life brings, until I realize I need rejuvenation and peace again.

Musical Interlude

For the musical interlude, I am posting Protection.  Written by Bruce Springsteen for Donna Summer, who recently passed away, both of them recorded their own versions of the song, as well as a duet that has never been heard.  This version is a fan remix, putting these legendary musicians' voices together.

Addendum

At the risk of giving in to my own hubris, I once wrote a sonnet that sort of fits LHM's situation in this chapter.  Here's what LHM writes about his phone call to The Cherokee:

"By evening, my judgment had given way, and I called home.  I was talking fast, talking, talking, trying to find where we stood, how our chances were.  She talked.  No matter how we tried, our words - confounded - ran athwart and, as usual, we ended up at cross-purposes.  Neither of us knew where to go from there.  Nothing to do but hang up.  When I put the receiver down and heard the line ding dead, I tried to excuse the failure by thinking that nothing ever works out over a telephone."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 9

I wrote this sonnet after a similar experience with a girlfriend a long time ago, in the late 1980s.  It has similar themes to LHM's quote, including dancing, nature, a dead telephone line, and loss.  I humbly offer it to you here:

Autumn Thoughts
by Michael L. Hess

A click, and then the lifeless droning hum,
As I replaced the phone upon its hook;
I walked outside, into the setting sun,
And sat upon the porch to think and look.

A cavalcade of brightly colored leaves
Ran helter-skelter down the somber street,
Driven by a soft, yet forceful, breeze
That pushed them onward to an unknown fate.

How I wished that I could join them there,
And also dance away my lonely grief;
Until, with growing pain, I was aware
That life is but the wind, and I, a leaf.

I thought of love and loss, and thus entranced,
I ran into the street to join the dance.

If you want to know more about Mount Tom

Climbing Mount Tom
Hiking around Woodstock
Mount Tom
Mount Tom and the Pogue Trail

Next up:  Quechee Gorge, Vermont

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Erie Canal

Unfolding the Map

The Erie Canal is huge.  Not necessarily in dimensions - it was only four feet deep and often just 40 feet wide, though it does span 363 miles from end to end.  However, it is really huge in that it was an massive government public works undertaking, criticized and ridiculed, that paid for itself in a short amount of time and contributed in countless ways to the development of the United States.  Stand with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) on the edge of the canal, imagine the packet boats filled with people and barges filled with goods towed by mules and horses, and learn more about this amazing piece of our history.  To find my approximation of where LHM stops at the canal, duck your head at the low bridge as you travel to the map.

Book Quote

"The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky froggy trough.  But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce....

"From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port.  Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats.  Ten years after Clinton's Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo increased three hundered percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America.  No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

The Erie Canal near Rome, New York. Photo by "genewest" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on the Erie Canal

When I was in grammar school, we still had some music education in the public schools.  It didn't happen often, maybe once a week, but it usually involved some kind of percussion playing and/or singing.  I think we had a guest teacher who would come in and lead these sessions.

I remember that the song book with which we worked had patriotic songs, and I remember that there were a couple of folk songs in there that I liked, but which I can't really remember so many years distant.  John Henry might have been one of them, or at least it comes to mind.

The one snippet of song that I remember from that book is this:

Low bridge, everybody down,
Low bridge, 'cause we're comin' to a town.
And you'll always know your neighbor,
You'll always know your pal,
If you ever navigate upon the Erie Canal.

Why I remember this one lyric, I can't say.  After all, there were more recognizable songs in that book.  There were other tunes in that book that were fun to sing.  Yet I've always kept that lyric about the Erie Canal in my head.

The Erie Canal is one of those massive efforts in our history that shouldn't be forgotten, but the benefits of which are not often considered.  The concept was simple - create a waterway that joined a major river system with the Great Lakes so that development of the middle of the country could proceed.  The execution was anything but simple.  This waterway had to traverse over 363 miles of country with a total elevation rise of 600 feet, entailing inventiveness and the practical application of engineering that had never been used before.  The sum estimated to build it was considered to be almost unimaginable.  Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who sent Lewis and Clark into the interior with an instruction to look for woolly mammoths and giant sloths, thought that the project was practically insane for the time period.

Even so, it was taken up by the New York legislature and passed.  The canal became known as Clinton's Folly (after Gov. DeWitt Clinton of New York) and was widely expected to fail.  Yet it didn't.  It employed thousands of people in the construction, particularly recent immigrants in need of work, and many of whom died of disease in marshes.  At the time, the United States had no civil engineers, so it literally created the practice of civil engineering in the country.  The builders of the canal, with no practical experience, had to solve problems like marshes and escarpments that stood in the way of joining the Hudson River with Lake Erie.  The Canal also utilized new inventions, like hydraulic cement, to solve problems such as leaks.

How did the Canal work?  Draft animals such as mules or horses pulled barges and packet boats by walking along a towpath alongside of the canal.  There was only a towpath on one side of the canal, so when boats met each other, one draft animal would move toward the canal side of the towpath and the other toward the far side of the towpath.  The mule or horse team at the far side would stop and let the boat float, causing the towline to go flat, and the other team would step over it and continue on.

This was a public works project that yielded enormous benefits to the benefits to the fledgling nation.  American inventiveness and ingenuity were suddenly the envy and marvel of the world.  New York City became the preeminent port on the Atlantic, spurring competition in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia.  According to A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, in his comprehensive history of the hotel, the increased opportunities of transport led to a rash of hotel building throughout the United States.  Some estimate the Canal led to savings in transport costs of up to 95 percent.  People and goods had to travel by animal drawn wagon before the Canal was built.  If you consider that it was estimated that a team of four horses could pull one ton twelve miles to eighteen miles a day, depending on the road, but 1000 tons for 24 miles over water, you can see just how effective the Canal was in increasing commerce into the interior.  The accompanying surge in population to the Midwest was an added benefit to a country that saw itself with a Manifest Destiny.

I am intrigued, in this day and age when government spending on public works is attacked as wasteful, how much good this governmental outlay of capital on such a project caused so much good.  We are in a period where government can do no right, and certainly there were many doubters about the Erie Canal, yet the expense worked to the betterment of the nation.  I am especially intrigued because, probably even more than now, the country had an immigrant problem.  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were flocking to the United States and settling in slums in major cities.  The construction of the Erie Canal allowed them to find work, as well as moving them out of the slums and into areas where they could settle.

In New Mexico, the state government is almost finished on a project called Spaceport America.  I almost see the idea as being analogous to the Erie Canal.  As the federal government ramps down its spending on NASA, there is a push for private industry to step in and fill the gap by providing service to the International Space Station and other space initiatives.  There is also expected an accompanying rise in space tourism.  When my wife and I took a tour of the Spaceport facilities, the tour guide was positively gushing about the private sector role, and very negative about government.  The message was that government doesn't do any good, and should stay out of the private market.  My wife was moved to remind him that without government spending, the Spaceport would not have been built at all, and that government spending can often spur additional private spending.  The guide then modified his rhetoric to agree, but then argued that government should then get out of the way.

As I see all the problems facing this country as I write, including a crumbling infrastructure, a large unemployment rate, and questions about immigration, I see a place for government spending.  I may be revealing my political stripes, and readers are free to disagree, but of course I live in a state that lives or dies by government spending on military bases and research, federal lands, and reservations.  But, it is very telling to me that some of the United States' biggest accomplishments could only come about by government being willing to spend money where a need was perceived, often regardless of how that expenditure was seen by the public, and often with spillover results that yielded benefits beyond the initial project.  I'm willing to admit that government is not always positive, but often it is.  Just look at the Erie Canal and its place in our history.

Musical Interlude

The Erie Canal song was written by Thomas Allen in 1905 after Erie Canal traffic switched from draft pulled barges to engine-powered barges.  It is a piece of nostalgia about loss of a way of life and change in an increasingly mechanized society.  In this version that I found, the song is performed by no other than Bruce Springsteen, off his tribute to Pete Seeger in his album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.  The song was recorded live in Dublin, Ireland which adds an additional link - at the time many Scots-Irish immigrants to the United States were employed in building the canal (there is also a recording of Springsteen doing the song in Belfast, Northern Ireland which would have been even more appropriate, but it is not as good as this recording).  This is the song that I sung in grammar school, but probably not as good as Springsteen and his band.

If you want to know more about the Erie Canal

Building the Erie Canal
The Erie Canal: A Journey Through the History
Erie Canal Museum
Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor
History of Building the Erie Canal
History of the Erie Canal
New York State Canals
Scenic Historic Erie Canal Sightseeing Cruises
Wikipedia: Erie Canal

Next up: Rome, New York