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: Somewhere along Highway 2, Montana

Unfolding the Map

Happy New Year!  January 1, 2012 finds us with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) in the middle of Montana with a bad case of highway hypnosis.  What do you do on lonely roads?  If you can, you try to achieve enlightenment and transcendence.  But, most of us won't so we do what we can to make the lonely roads interesting.

Just a warning - I'm making a complete, utter guess (here's where I'm guessing on the map) about where LHM might have stopped on the Hi-Line.  He mentions stopping somewhere after highway mile marker 465, but I couldn't find where that was, including trying to track it down through Google Earth.  I don't think that I'm off by more than 50 miles, but it's more about keeping in the spirit of LHM's words.  And, to be honest, I will guess again in the next post, when he stops again along the Milk River.

Book Quote

"Pock-pock went the tarred road cracks.  Pock-pock.  The day remained dark, showers fell and stopped and came again, the uneven roadway collected water, the van hydroplaned every few minutes.  The clamor of wind numbed my ears; the fever made me woozy.  Pock-pock.  First the highway held me then it entered me, then I was the highway.  Pock-pock, pock-pock.  Prairie hypnosis. I drove miles I coudn't remember, and the land became a succession of wet highway stripes, and I wished for a roadfellow.  I sat blindly, dumbly like a veiled stone sphinx.  Finally, to dispel the miles, I stopped, got out, and held my face to the rain.  I shook myself.  But, once more on the road, I again became part of the machine: generator, accelerator, humanator.  I  knew nothing.  A stupefied nub on the great prairie."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 6

Abandoned schoolhouse along the Hi-Line near at Savoy, Montana. Photo by Todd Klassy and seen at his Flickr photostream. Click on photo to go to host page.Somewhere along Highway 2, Montana

LHM is in the middle of a long stretch of driving a lonely highway.  There is a kind of a pleasure in driving at such times.  The miles stretch on endlessly and time seems to lose itself.

If you're an extravert, and you need companionship and stimulation, such drives shouldn't be undertaken alone or perhaps at all.  You will go a little stir-crazy in the car.  I'm not suggesting that you can't do it, but I'm just suggesting that unless you really need to drive over long stretches of lonely road alone you might consider doing something else.

If you're an introvert, like me, the alone time in the car is a time to recharge, to think and reflect, to simply enjoy the stillness in an increasingly loud and busy world.  There is a Zen quality to driving.  The highway sounds, particularly the sections of the roadway that create the "pock-pock" that LHM writes about, are white noise.  When you're in such places, even if you want to find a radio station to fill the empty air, you might be out of luck.  A radio scan might just scan through the entire FM spectrum and find nothing.  The AM spectrum is better, especially at night, but it might have a tendency to fade in and out.  In the times I drove in empty spaces, AM radio became just another part of the white noise, combining with the rush of air over the car frame, the sounds of the tires on the road, the occasional "whoosh" of a passing car, and other sounds from the car itself (the annoying rattle on the dashboard, for instance) in a barely recognizable symphony of the road.

My latest experience of drives over vast amounts of nothing when I was alone in the car was on my frequent trips back and forth between Albuquerque and Lubbock when I was teaching as a visiting professor.  Each weekend, I would make a five hour drive on Friday to see my wife, and return to Lubbock on Sunday evening in another five hour drive.  About two hours of the drive, roughly from Santa Rosa, New Mexico to Clovis, New Mexico, was through very sparsely populated areas.  The drive between Santa Rosa and Fort Sumner, New Mexico was miles and miles of on unpopulated expanse.  I must say that even though at first it was a weekly chore to get in the car and drive so much, I began to look forward to those times.  I like driving in the first place because for me, the car is a place to relax, and I looked forward to the subtle changes that would occur along the road week after week.  Perhaps a business might open in what was a vacant storefront in Clovis.  Maybe I might notice, in the winter light, a geographical feature that I had missed in the late summer light.  On one particularly windy drive, I dodged tumbleweeds all along the road.  On another, I took a new route through even more remote territory than I usually drove and stopped, like LHM, along a grassy, treeless stretch of road to listen to a silence so complete that the small breeze brushing past my ear sounded like a freight train.  Speaking of freight trains, one night I saw what appeared to be shimmering water pouring out of the side of a freight train on tracks parallel to the road far ahead of me.  As I caught up, I realized that it was an immense shower of sparks from the wheels of the freight as it braked hard for some reason or another.

In those driving moments, when I did listen to music, I usually brought my IPod and I played songs on random shuffle, and I would often note an eerie convergence between the music and drive.  Perhaps it was my overactive imagination, but at times I felt that the universe aligned.

A number of years ago, I made a few long car trips and was drawn to taking rural routes rather than the interstate.  Driving through rural West Virginia, I allowed myself to listen to the radio and made the amazing discovery that I could handle country and bluegrass music, a genre that I had never really been drawn toward before.  As I drove through small Appalachian towns, it seemed to fit and it reinforced that the musics that we create and listen to really are products of our place.  To listen to rap and hip-hop in rural West Virginia, to me, would seem as disjointed as driving through an inner-city neighborhood and blasting out the latest Nashville hits.

The road, especially the lonely places, can bring such insights grounded in reality, and also flashes of inspiration and brilliance, such as the poem that came to me at a stop along the New River Gorge in West Virginia.  It can also be dangerous.  One's mind can be lulled into a Zen state of concentration and inner awareness, but it also can be lulled to sleepiness.  There have been many times when I drove alone that toward the end of a long day behind the wheel I was biting my hand to keep myself awake until I came upon a motel I was willing to use.  Especially in the lonely places, that might be a long time coming, yet I was never comfortable pulling off the road and sleeping.  I learned to give myself breaks, break up the "highway hypnosis," and end my trips more fresh.  I also made the discovery that the amazing amounts of junk food one can get along the road can make one sleepy while driving.  By eating better, less sugared stuff, I could keep myself more fresh longer.

In that sense, LHM's description of a "stupefied nub on the prairie" is only part of the story to me.  Yes, I've been a stupefied, sugar-filled, tired nub behind the wheel, but at other times the road has led me to awareness and even occasional transcendence.  I don't have as much opportunity now to go out on the road alone, but sometimes, especially on the loudest, busiest, noisiest days, I miss it.

Musical Interlude

I'm not a real big fan of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but occasionally a song catches me.  Running Down a Dream is one that I like, and it's lyrics are pretty compatible with the post.  Turn it up and rock along!

If you want to know more about Highway 2 along the Hi-Line

Hi-Line (film): I don't kow anything about this movie, but it is a road film set along the Hi-Line.
Montana Hi-Line Photographs
Montana Highway 2 Information
Wikipedia: Hi-Line
Wikipedia: US Route 2

Next up:  Somewhere along Milk Creek, Montana