Blue Highways: New London, Connecticut

Unfolding the Map

I heard something that shocked me recently.  Those children born 18 years ago have most likely never known cars with anything other than a CD player. Being 48 years old, I remember 45 rpm records.  I also remember the Cold War.  Something as distant in time as those events and the threat of nuclear annihilation only registers on the minds of those younger than 30 if they read it in history books.  About 10 years ago, a young friend, then in her early 20s, asked my wife "so what was this Berlin Wall thing all about?"  For those of us that lived in the Cold War and remember, it was a shadow of terror over our lives that were otherwise lived normally.  This post, as we wait with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) for a ferry in New London, remembers some of that time period.  To pinpoint New London, target the map.

Book Quote

"...I asked where they built the submarines, and he pointed to a dagger of a shadow.  'That black thing is the Ohio.  She's the first Trident.  The orange bull on blocks is the Michigan.'

"'How can anything that big move under water?'

"'They're longer than the Washington Monument.  The Ohio will carry twenty-four missiles, each one with a dozen warheads: two hundered eighty-eight atomic explosions.  One hell of a bitch with twelve sisters coming along behind at a billion dollars each.'  He offered a Chiclet.  'They used to name battleships after states because they were the dreadnaughts of the sea, but there's your dreadnaughts of the next war.'

"'....You think war is finished?  Whatever peace we'll know will come because of things like those devils...Those Tridents are the new Peacemakers...'"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 6

New London, Connecticut. Photo by Ralph Thayer and hosted at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host page.

New London, Connecticut

Recently, on a work trip to San Diego, I took time out from the conference I was attending to spend some time at the Maritime Museum with my wife.  The harbor's star attraction was the USS Midway, a decommissioned and historically important aircraft carrier.  But for me, the highlight of the visit was a tour of a decommissioned Soviet submarine.

I've been, at least somewhat, a fan of submarine films.  Movies like Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October and U-571 are filled with drama and tension.  I suppose such tension comes with the tight, cramped and even claustrophobic environment of a long metal tube submerged for days and weeks beneath the surface of a deep, dark and unforgiving ocean.  One mistake, one faulty rivet or plate, or one engine (or nowadays nuclear reactor) accident could mean a cold, dark and unpleasant death.  In wartime, the stakes and terror can be even higher, and death could come in the form of a torpedo or a depth charge.

The most recent movie I saw on submarines, K-19: The Widowmaker, was about a Soviet submarine much like the one I toured in San Diego.  But only by going into such a submarine can one really get a sense of the conditions in one.  Touring through the sub, I understood why the pay was greater and the honors greater than in other parts of the Soviet Navy.  Pipes and valves stick out in odd places, guaranteeing that if you don't watch your head you will probably crack it open on something.  There were cramped toilets where the sailors had only weekly shower privileges.  Other features: a tiny kitchen with a cook trying to stretch stores as far as they will go, helping men forget with an unauthorized shot of vodka or beer; miniscule berths that sailors shared - one used the berth and slept while the other did his duty; everywhere the smell of diesel and hot machinery.  When I did my tour, I realized that the mother and her son passing through the sub behind me were Russian, and they spoke Russian with each other while looking into cabins and berths.  I closed my eyes and imagined that where once a chorus of Russian voices filled that ship, the strains of Russian now probably echoed infrequently off the inner hull.

It is easy to forget, or not even realize, that from the end of World War II until 1989 the world was at the mercy such metal tubes, whether they rode under the waves or rocketed through the air.  As my studies in international relations remind me, many scholars believe that these engines of war were what saved humanity.  Submarines and missiles, goes the argument, were what kept the peace between two of the most powerful nations the world has ever seen.  Such subs. loaded with nuclear missiles and nuclear-tipped torpedoes, were the trump card of the Cold War.  If a devastating attack was launched, even if the enemy was taken by complete surprise and completely annhilated, its subs could launch a similarly devastating counterattack from off the coasts, destroying the other nation in a matter of minutes.

That was the world I grew up under - nations held hostage to peace under the threat of weapons of mass destruction pointed at each other.  It was called a peace, but it was a damn frightening peace.  Just as two gunslingers, hands at their sides, face each other in the dusty street in movies about the Old West, the United States and Soviet Union stared each other down, weapons in plain sight, each knowing what the other was capable of, each waiting for one to either move or back down.  Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviets decided to station nuclear missiles in their ally Cuba, and the United States responding with a blockade.  It was steely-eyed feint and counter-feint, each probing for weakness and backing off if there would be disadvantaged.  For almost five decades, these gunslingers, the US and the Soviets, faced each other until finally, the Soviets blinked, turned and walked into the sunset.

But we who grew up under this peace had no idea that, unfathomably, it would end so peacefully.  When I was old enough to understand the international situation to a degree, I began to have nightmares involving flashes and mushroom clouds.  Nuclear tests were common until banned by international treaty.  Small wars often sprung up in far-flung and distant places, leading to sharp words and threats from the United States and the Soviets.  The Soviet government was painted as evil and ruthless, the Soviet people were described as dour, wretched, and lost.  I thought, like many others, that when the standoff did end, it would end civilization as well.  We just didn't know when.

A common phrase taught to me as a child was "believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see."  When my parents took our family on a cruise to Alaska on a Soviet cruise ship in 1980, I saw Soviets for what they were - people.  I even got a crush on our server, a young Russian girl named Larissa.  At the time, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and I had trouble reconciling the words of our government condemning the Soviet government and the incredibly friendly people, sharing their rich culture with us, staffing the ship.

My studies taught me that the international drama of the Cold War was, in many ways, carefully stage-managed.  Knowing that they faced annihilation and that there would be no winner in a major conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union minimized the opportunities for direct conflict and instead fought through proxies.  The argument that these nuclear-armed antagonists deterred each other from direct conflict therefore has much merit. 

I often hear the same argument made for arming individuals in our society.  The argument goes that if someone knows or suspects that you are armed, they won't harm you because it could lead to harm to themselves.  However, there is a difference between national action and individual action.  Nations are collectivities of people and therefore the risk of irrational action is less.  Nations are rarely impulsive - even the actions of Hitler and the Nazis was a well-thought out plan, and based on self-preservation.  All nations will choose self-preservation over destruction - even Nazi Germany made some overtures toward peace at the very end to try to preserve itself. 

Individuals, however, can have moments of irrationality with no cultural and collective filter to put the brakes on those thoughts.  I think of the times when, in the heat of passion or disappointment or anger, I have done irrational things.  The United States and the Soviet Union managed their conflict in a rational manner and usually considered the potential consequences of their decisions carefully.  The person who kills, or the person who feels threatened whether or not there is an actual threat, can often behave irrationally and give in to impulsive actions.  That's why I cannot buy the argument that a safe society is one where individuals are armed.

But back when I was growing up, I didn't understand such.  And I feared, greatly, that one day my life and my world would end in a flash of light.  It seems that the chances of that were, and remain, low.  I might have more to fear from a greater number of individuals packing heat within my own country than a nation-state packing a nuclear bomb.  I hope I never experience either.

Musical Interlude

The first song for the musical interlude is Yo La Tengo's Nuclear War, a remake of a Sun Ra song.  I like the images the creator of the video put in to accompany the song, as well as the clip of J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, at the very end.

Of course, leave it to The Beatles to turn a weapon of destruction into a children's song in Yellow Submarine.  The video uses clips from the movie Yellow Submarine, interspersed with footage of swimming Beatles.

If you want to know more about New London

City of New London
Connecticut College
TheDay.com (newspaper)
Mitchell College
United States Coast Guard Academy
Wikipedia: New London

Next up: Orient Point, New York

Blue Highways: Umatilla, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

For the first time since we started traveling with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), we go back into a state that we've already visited.  Okay, so a technicality might be when we passed through the Navajo and Hopi reservations from Arizona and back into Arizona, but the reservations aren't really carved out as separate states.  In my mind, then, this is a first and I attach to it some symbolic qualities of a new beginning in William Least Heat-Moon's journey, especially since he had been so emotionally low in Oregon before.  Where does Umatilla fit in the geography of the journey, take a look at the map!

Book Quote

"Across the Columbia at Umatilla, Oregon, and up the great bend of river into country where sage grew taller than men."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 10

From McNary Dam Overlook in Umatilla, Oregon. Interstate 82 bridges over the Columbia River in foreground, and Mount Adams in the background. Photo at the Columbia River-A Photographic Journey site. Click on photo to go to host page.

Umatilla, Oregon

Here is a first for LHM's journey in Blue Highways.  In the nearly 200 places that we've visited so far, he has never doubled back into a state after leaving it.  He may have meandered, and he may have wandered, but he has pretty much kept himself moving straight through states, seeing some of what they have, and then moving on without a backward glance.

So why does he dip down into Oregon again, crossing the border at Umatilla (pronounced yoo-ma-till-a - I live in a Southwest border state and my inclination is to pronounce it ooh-ma-tee-ya)) and then going up the south and east side of the Columbia River?

A simple answer is that it's where the road has taken him.  If you look at the map of the area, the road he has been driving upon in Washington, state route 14, ends at Interstate 82 across the river from Umatilla.  He evidently decided to cross the river on the interstate, and then pick up the Columbia River Highway (US 730) to continue his drive along a blue highway.

He also has tended, whenever possible, to avoid interstates.  An alternative route might have taken him up Interstate 82 to Kennewick, where he could have then taken US 395 across the river and then started making his way east on US 12 from there.  But he chose not to.  Instead, he dips back into Oregon.

I don't put a lot of stock into this, but just go with me for a minute here as I look at some possible symbolism of this return to Oregon.  It may be a bunch of crap, but all of my posts are my own interpretations of what I'm reading so far, so I can go out on a limb once in a while, like I have a few times in my posts.

Symbolically, it seems as if Oregon was a difficult state for LHM.  Really, beginning in California, he had some despair and began questioning why he undertook this journey.  He began to perceive life and our travels in it as an unending circle that just keeps bringing us back to the same point.  He didn't really see the utility of that, especially since that same point always seemed to be a low point.  As he moved up through Oregon, these feelings became more intense.  In Corvallis, Oregon he reached his nadir.  Sitting in Ghost Dancing, while it rained for days, he called his wife and she didn't want to talk to him.  At that point, he decides he wants to see "what the hell is next."  He continues to the coast of Oregon where Lewis and Clark reached the end point of their westward journey, and that association with the explorers seems to enliven him.  After touching the coast, he turns east and at Portland, he heads into Washington.  In Washington, he briefly flirts with a woman who fires his imagination.  Then he meets some hang-gliding folk who discuss the thrill of the unknown and the risks involved.  As we read, and travel with him, we can see his writing change as well - he gets back into the trip again and seems more excited to see what else might come his way.

Here's my stretch with the symbolism.  His dip back into Oregon seems to be a return to the same state where he once languished in turmoil and low spirits.  Except that now, he isn't languishing anymore.  It's therefore a return to a former area of weakness but now with strength and a groundedness that lets him move through and not get stuck.  It is a repudiation of negativity that put him in the blues before.  And, as we'll see, he stays forward looking, moving without pause on to Wallula and to points beyond as he heads back into the state of Washington.

I do counseling because I've dealt my whole life with being stuck in places that aren't necessarily the best places for me to be.  These are self-critical, self-pitying and ultimately soul-sucking places that want me to stay there.  I've learned that when I leave those places they don't just disappear, just like Oregon was not going to fall off the map once LHM left it.  Instead, my hard places sit there and wait for me, seemingly knowing that I'll come back by roundabout routes.  If I'm not paying attention, often I end up back in them.  Then I get stuck again.  But lately, I've been doing something different.  I've been visiting those places but in a different frame of mind and with a different reference point.  Sometimes, it's hard.  But other times, with a new vision and outlook, I can remake those places into something much nicer.  It becomes me deciding when, how and even if I will visit, not fate or life dictating to me where I go.

Another very important and real symbol - by "real" I mean not my imagination - in the passage above is LHM's mention of sage.  Sage has symbolized a number of positive concepts throughout history.  On this page, I learned that sage stands for or was thought to contribute to the following:

immortality
increased mental capacity
healing
life creation
prosperity
business
curative powers
spiritual cleansing
banishing of evil spirits

In addition, sage is at the heart of a Christian legend that relates how Mary and Jesus escaped from the soldiers of Herod after Jesus' birth.  They asked a rose bush to open its petals and shelter them, but the rose bush refused and told them to go to the clove plant.  The clove also refused and referred them to the sage.  The sage blossomed abundantly and sheltered them, and the soldiers passed them by.  Since that time, the rose has been cursed with thorns, the clove with flowers that don't smell very good, and the sage has been blessed by curative powers.

Since LHM drives into an area abundant with sage, it doesn't seem to be a stretch that he is driving through a cleansing place, a healing place, and a place where the bad and even evil of the past can be banished.  And maybe this is all a coincidence and means nothing.  Sure, LHM could have decided to take the interstate and avoid going back into Oregon again.  But he didn't, so you can draw your own conclusions.

So, that's my little foray into symbolic territory.  Perhaps I've overthought this, but that's the beauty of symbolism.  It doesn't have to be something that one plans out.  LHM probably never even thought of this - he was just looking for a blue highway rather than the interstate.  It was up to me to make whatever symbolic allusions that I perceived.  But, I can take these flights of fancy because I am an unique reader and I can interpret as much as I want and I can allow my thoughts to go whither they wish.  That's the beauty of reading, Littourati!

Musical Interlude

Once again, I had a song come to mind for this post.  I'm not sure why it this song wanted to come forward, but it did.  The title is appropriate to the post, and so enjoy Get Back by The Beatles in their famous last rooftop concert at their Apple Studio in London.

If you want to know more about Umatilla

Center for Columbia River History: Umatilla
City of Umatilla
Wikipedia: McNary Dam
Wikipedia: Umatilla

Next up: Wallula, Washington

Blue Highways: Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe have our place in the universe, and what a grand and infinite universe it is!  We stop with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) on a lonely stretch of highway in Nevada, look up at the stars, and are amazed what we see and humbled and comforted all at the same time.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to fix our place in the cosmos of Blue Highways.

Book Quote

"I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight.  I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.  Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements.  But on that night his evidence wouldn't hold.  Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth.  Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

"The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me.  It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by the vacancy...."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 5

On US 93 between Pioche and Ely. Photo by Mike McDonald at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.

Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

I have been fascinated by the night sky since I can remember.  When I was a kid, before I grew up and became jaded, I would often just look up into the night sky in complete wonder at the stars.  It helped that I grew up in a very small town on the Northern California coast.  Ground light did not really mask the light of the stars there, so I often saw the stars and the distant stream of the Milky Way in all their glory.

When I was around 10 years old, my parents bought me a cheap telescope.  I spent hours looking at the moon.  That year Comet Kohoutek appeared to the naked eye, and I spent hours in the early mornings training my telescope on the comet as it sat low on the eastern sky.  I used to imagine that I actually could see the gasses streaming off of it - it was probably mostly my imagination.

Until I almost ready to graduate, my dream was to become an astronomer.  I thought that there would be nothing better than to sit in an observatory, look through telescopes, and study the mysteries of the cosmos.  I really had a very romantic notion of them, which can still be stimulated when I see a movie full of sexy astronomers who discover the comets that are going to hit the earth, or hear the first signals from an alien civilization.  In reality, I probably would not have been able to handle the physics that I would have needed to know - calculus-based physics did me in when I studied it in college, along with just plain calculus.

As a jaded adult political scientist, I still have a fascination with the sky and the stars.  I don't often take time to look up anymore, which is sad.  But still, things will catch my eye.  A bright planet will get my attention, and I usually will try to find out what planet is sitting on the horizon in the early evening, or close to the moon at midnight.  For a long time, I had a screensaver on my computer called seti@home.  SETI is the acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the organization had radio telescopes trained on various sections of the sky to see if they could pick up signal patterns that would indicate intelligent communication.  The screensaver I had was part of their parallel networking - while my computer was not being used, it was analyzing SETI data and sending it back to SETI.  With thousands of home computers doing the same thing, SETI could analyze the data without having to purchase or rent prohibitively expensive supercomputer time.

One of my most meaningful astronomical experiences came in the Davis Mountains of Texas at the McDonald Observatory.  My wife and I went to a star party, and there, looking through an amateur astronomer's large telescope, I saw the rings of Saturn and the Great Red Spot on Jupiter for the first time.  It was thrilling to see with my naked eye the things that I'd only seen in books before.

Of course, the naked eye experiences are always the best and most gratifying, such as suddenly seeing a constellation like Orion, or learning how Polaris (the North Star) can be found.  I remember lying on my back on a hillside once with some friends and watching a meteor shower.  Over our heads a large meteor streaked, and then suddenly with a crackling sound, broke up above us.  Perhaps the meteor was as large as a small truck high above our heads, but it was fascinating.  What fireworks display can match that?

I'm not the only one fascinated by such things.  Walking along a dry arroyo in the late afternoon in Chaco Canyon, my wife and I looked for pictographs painted by the Anasazi when Chaco was a thriving center.  On an overhang we found them.  One of them looked like a star, and it is speculated by some that the painting symbolizes a large supernova that appeared a thousand years ago and was visible for weeks with the naked eye.  Today it only appears in telescopes as the Crab Nebula.

Here in New Mexico, we are busy building Spaceport America, where companies like Virgin Galactic will rocket space tourists to a suborbital position at the very edge of outer space, and allow them to experience weightlessness for 10 minutes before re-entering the atmosphere and gliding back to Earth.  My wife posted a video where a public relations person for the Spaceport explains the layout of the Spaceport terminal, and another where he explains the activities other than tourism that will happen there.  I'd love to go on that ride, but sadly, I don't think I'll ever have the $250,000 in pocket change to pay for a trip, nor the million or so dollars it will take to hitch a ride on a Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station.  However, I did get a chance to see the Space Shuttle fly over New Orleans, trailed later by the International Space Station.  They were two bright lights in the evening sky, but it touched that fascinated boy in me yet again.

I really need to get out and start looking at the sky again.  I need to lay on my back, like LHM did somewhere along the side of US 93 between Pioche and Ely, Nevada, and just watch and wonder.  It is a comforting reminder, in a strange way, that I live upon a ball that endlessly revolves around a fiery, stable thermonuclear furnace.  That star revolves around the center of a galaxy with an immense, black hole core.  That galaxy speeds endlessly toward some unknown fate untold years in the future of the universe.  That universe continues to expand.  Our lives come and go, but the machinery of the cosmos keeps working.

Here is a favorite poem that I first read in college, and which always brings out the wonder in me when I read it:

Imagine Grass

The planet that we plant upon
rolls through its orbit of the sun,
bending our grass upon the breeze,
While far away the galaxies
in a decelerating pace
reach for the outer edge of space.

Imagine in that final sky
("Give me deceleration; I
will give you mass and curvature.")
at journey's end a far-flung star
of an unnumbered magnitude
Mount Palomar has never viewed.

In that expanded universe
the furthest star will be the first,
poised at the end of everywhere,
on the edge of nothing, like a prayer,
to turn from nothing and retrace,
pulsating through the curve of space.

So many billion light years since
the particle horizon densed,
conceive the universe defined
within the orbit of the mind,
and somewhere in the measured mass
of everything, imagine grass.

Knute Skinner
in A Geography of Poets
(1979, Bantam)

Musical Interlude

What song is better to put to LHM's perusal of the universe than The Beatles' Across the Universe?  Here it is for your listening pleasure.  Will nothing change your world?  Perhaps a night stargazing under a cloudless sky with no light pollution will change it quite a bit.

If you want to know more about US 93

AARoads: US 93
Federal Highway Administration: History of US 93
Wikipedia: US Route 93
Wikipedia: US Route 93 in Nevada

Next up: Ely, Nevada