Blue Highways: Boston, Massachusetts

Unfolding the Map

I didn't feel particularly inspired by today's quote, and it probably shows in the post.  I apologize, all of you visiting Littourati.  But, don't take that to mean that the quote, and maybe the post, might not bring something to mind for you.  If something comes, feel free to share in a comment.  Oh, and if you want to see exactly how far we've come in this Blue Highways journey, check out the map.

Book Quote

"Tractor-trailer rigs (using two-thirds more fuel per cargo-ton than a locomotive) blasted me all the way to Boston."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 4

Downtown Boston. Photo by "Nelson48" and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Boston, Massachusetts

What kid doesn't like trucks?  I don't mean the little pickup trucks, but the huge semi-tractor trailer trucks that barrel down roads and freeways.  Well, I was one kid that tended more toward the trains than the trucks.

I think it had to do with growing up in a little logging town where the only links to the outside world were over miles of twisting, curving mountain roads.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I suffered motion-sickness a lot going over these roads, and trucks were kind of an enemy.  A car could travel faster over these roads.  Trucks would slow precipitously going uphill, thus prolonging my agony when we'd get behind them.  I could only hope that they would be kind enough to use one of the "turnouts" along the side of the road to let us pass.  Some did, some didn't.  Either way, logging trucks, lumber trucks and other types of cargo trucks sometimes literally made me sick.

As I got older, I became more aware that trucks were replacing trains as the primary mover of freight.  I had noticed that our freight train, which used to go out once per night moving lumber over to the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, started making less frequent runs.  Once a night became 4 times a week, became 2-3 times per week, and then became one time per week, until it ceased operation completely.  We owned property on the railroad where we had a cabin, and where in the summer we slept outside not 50 feet from the railroad tracks.  I have some vivid memories of waking up at night to the sound of the freight train, it's light appearing around the bend and seemingly illuminating the entire valley, then after the cacophonous sound of the engine the clacking and whistling of the empty freight cars, and then lonely clack of the caboose and the voices of the watchmen as the little red caboose light disappeared slowly from sight and I was able to fall asleep to the sound of the receding train.

In high school, I worked in the lumber mill, and loaded both trucks and train cars though my primary job was to load trucks.  I worked on a team consisting of a tallyman, a forklift operator and me (the dog).  I would climb on the trucks, guide the lumber bundles into position, and then use a machine to band them together before binding them with straps to the truck itself.  It was good work in the coastal air, but I missed the trains.

I understand why trucks are used - moving freight by truck is cheaper, right now, than by train.  But they also cause a lot of wear and tear on the roads and can be threats in themselves.  I have been stranded twice indirectly because of trucks after I ran over a piece of shredded tire on the road which caused damage to my car.  I hear that as fuel prices rise, it may become more cost effective to ship more and more things by train again.  I hope so.

I am not going to write much this post about Boston.  LHM doesn't really stop there because, in Blue Highways, he does his best to avoid the cities.  And to tell you the truth, it is so long since I have been to Boston that I don't remember much about it.  The trips were always short, a weekend at the most, usually a day trip, so I really didn't get much of a chance to get a true feeling for the city.  I remember being in the area of Faneuil Hall and the market near there, I remember driving up from Connecticut after a wedding to get lobster at one of the lobster restaurants, and I remember the accents.

In fact, it's the accents that to me are the most intriguing thing about Boston.  It's rare in the United States to hear accents that are just so front and center as the accents in Boston.  Even Brooklyn accents, which can be pretty heavy, don't stand out so much to me as Boston accents do.  It's like the accent has a mind of its own and flattens vowels, eliminates the letter "r" in some words and stubbornly inserts it in others, despite the speakers intentions.  I have learned that accents that seem to hate the "r" so much are called "non-rhotic."  Wikipedia quotes Jon Stewart's America, incorrectly I might add, which states that John Adams drafted the Massachusetts Constitution but delegates refused to ratify the letter "R."

I love it.  I love accents, and I'm glad they occur because they give character to a region and by extension, our whole country.  I'm never happier than when I'm talking to someone with an accent.  I was recently watching a documentary that had an acclaimed scientist who wrote a book, and it was hard for me to concentrate because her Boston accent was just so pronounced that it hooked me.  Here is a National Public Radio piece on the Boston accent:

I also feel bad about spending time writing on Boston because, well, I've fessed up to it before, I don't know much about America's Revolution, and Boston played a big part in that struggle.  The Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre and Paul Revere, of course, were covered a little in my history classes in school.  But beyond these things, I didn't know much about Boston's history in the war.  For example, the Siege of Boston, a successful siege by George Washington that eventually drove the British out of the city after eleven months in the early part of the war, was something that I either never paid much attention to or I just didn't hear about it.

On one of my trips, however, I paid homage at what many Bostonians consider, with pride, their greatest shrine.  Yes, that would be Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox and one of the oldest stadiums in baseball.  I can say that it was a true honor to be there and I hope that one day, this baseball fan can return.

Musical Interlude

Here's a fun little song, by They Might Be Giants, that plays on the Boston accent and figures of Bostonian speech (i.e. "wicked," "scorcher," "critta," "pissah").  Enjoy Wicked Little Critta.

If you want to know more about Boston

There's a lot.  Here's a few basics:

Boston Daily
Boston Food Bloggers
Boston Globe (newspaper)
Boston Herald (newspaper)
Boston Magazine
Boston Phoenix (alternative newspaper)
City of Boston
Grub Street Boston (food blog)
Travel Blogs About Boston
Wikipedia: Boston

Next up:  Wellesley, Massachusetts

Blue Highways: Midland, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Traveling past the huge Dow Chemical plant in Midland, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) notes it and moves on toward the Thumb of Michigan.  I'll reflect a little on chemicals that have become, like it or not, a part of our society and a part of us.  Trace a chemical path to the map to see where Midland is located.

Book Quote

"On a map, lower Michigan looks like a mitten with the squatty peninsula between Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron forming the Thumb.  A region distinctive enough to have a name was the only lure I needed, but also it didn't hurt to have towns with fine, unpronounceable names like Quanicassee, Sebewaing, Wahjamega, or other names like Pigeon, Bad Axe, Pinnebog, Rescue, Snover, and - what may be the worst town name in the nation - Freidberger.  People of the the Thumb have come from many places, but Germans and Poles predominate.

"I headed due east across the flat country, past the great industrial pile of Dow Chemical at Midland..."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. Photo by Bill Puglianno/Getty Images and seen at the Britannica website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Midland, Michigan

In the quote above, LHM references the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Michigan.  In fact, the chemical giant was actually founded there in the late 1800s.  Throughout the 20th century, Dow Chemical and others like it led a revolution that ultimately helped bring about great advances in humanity's way of life.  There was even a time when it was "sexy" to be in the chemical industry, as this Dow commercial from the 1980s shows.

Or so that's what we've been told.  As we move into the 21st century, we more and more often see the dark side of the chemical revolution.  Cancers and other types of illnesses are on the increase, some linked to chemicals invented in the 20th century and into which we put our trust.  That which we create sometimes comes back to bite us.

I was thinking about our uneasy relationship with chemicals earlier today, before I started writing.  Today is Easter, a day of resurrection and hope in the Christian tradition.  I was in the shower and looking up to where some mold was growing on the ceiling thanks to the condensation that settles there day in and day out, and thinking that I need to wipe it down with a mold killer.  The mold killer is, of course, a chemical.  That chemical is potent enough that the instructions warn users to only utilize the product if the room is ventilated lest they breathe in and be overcome by fumes.  That got me to thinking about how many chemicals I use to clean the bathroom.  I use sprays to clean the toilet, sink and bathtub surfaces.  I use a toilet bowl cleaner with a brush to clean the inside of the toilet.  I use a floor soap with solvents in it to clean the bathroom floor tile.

That got me wondering about how many chemicals I use to clean the kitchen.  Surface cleaners, stove cleaners, scrubbing chemicals for the kitchen sink, and soap with solvents for the floor.  All of these chemicals near where I prepare my food and therefore, am probably ingesting.

But there's more.  The food I eat is often pumped with chemicals to help preserve it.  Farm-grown salmon, and many processed foods, are pumped with dyes to give them a correct and pleasing hue.  Processed foods are laced with chemicals for all kinds of things.  Not only food, but stuff I put on - the shampoos and soaps I use, the lotions that my wife uses, the sunscreen that I don't wear enough of - all has chemicals.  We take some clothes to the dry cleaner so that they can be cleaned with all kinds of chemicals.

The water we drink is loaded up with chemicals, some intentional and some not.  Fluoride, a chemical to help protect teeth is intentional.  The chemicals that leech into water tables from farms and sewage are not.  Agriculture uses chemicals for everything from re-energizing soils to killing weeds.  These are poured willy-nilly over commercial farms and thus leech into the soil and then into us.  Factories are supposed to properly dispose of used chemicals, but in the developing world they often don't, adding a whole new list of compounds into the environment that can pose short and long-term dangers.

I'm not trying to necessarily be anti-chemical.  Our basic body functions such as the conversion of food and oxygen into energy is a chemical reaction.  I've often heard that our basic emotions are complex chemical reactions that take place within our brains.  Love, sadness, depression, joy are all chemistry within the individual human laboratory that is our unique bodies.  We depend on chemicals to make us what we are.  It may even have been a chemical reaction that started the chain of events that led to all life on earth.

But those chemical reactions occurred and still occur naturally.  In a way, like we've done with other things, we came to see our ability to manipulate chemicals into helpful creations as a product of our genius.  We saw chemicals and our abilities with them as a hope of humanity, almost worshiping the idea of them in religious terms.  We could only see the upside of our efforts and many times, we didn't understand what the really long term consequences could be.  That carelessness and hubris led to toxic waste dumps, Love Canal, dioxins in the environment, the development of cancers in many individuals because of long-term exposure to chemicals in their workplace or environment.  Here's an example of what we didn't foresee - chemical resistant pests and weeds that have developed an immunity to the chemicals we dump on them, causing us to need to create stronger chemicals to fight them in a vicious circle.  In the early 1900s, most of our bodies were free of man-made chemicals.  Now, in 2012, we are saturated from chemicals that we ingest or which are absorbed through our skin.  Cancers and other illnesses have risen, possibly offsetting some of the gains in life expectancy that chemicals have bought us.

Like any tool, chemicals can be helpful but if we don't pay attention or don't quite understand how to use them, they can really hurt us.  As we learn about their benefits and costs, that knowledge helps but unfortunately, we often don't learn until we are exposed.  I think about when I was a kid, and my father and I would routinely throw plastic items on our campfires.  Of course, you can't help but breathe in the smoke from those campfires, now made toxic by burning plastic.  The place where we camped, at our property in Northern California, was near a railroad and we often took the old ties that were discarded by the railroad and burned them.  They burned really well and very hot and we sat around that fire and breathed in the smoke.  Those ties were treated with creosote, which may possibly have adverse health effects on people.

Dow Chemical is at the epicenter of what is possibly the worst tragedy associated with chemicals, the Union Carbide Bhopal, India disaster, when chemical and gas leaks from a pesticide plant killed at least 3,000 people instantly and perhaps another 8,000 from exposure.  Dow now owns Union Carbide and is responsible for the ongoing civil and criminal litigation.  We have used chemicals to build our society, and some of the seeds for that society were laid in Midland, Michigan.  We may celebrate our progress through chemical manipulation, but we also may yet rue what Dow, and other companies like it, have wrought for us.

Musical Interlude

This is a silly little ditty based on the periodic table of the elements, which lists all the chemicals known.  Since Tom Lehrer wrote this song, there have been other elements discovered, but it still gives you an idea of all the chemicals that are out there and, most likely, in you.

If you want to know more about Midland

City of Midland
MLive.com
Midland Chamber of Commerce
Midland Daily News (newspaper)
Midland Online
Midland Tomorrow
Northwood University
Wikipedia: Midland

Next up: Bay City, Michigan