Blue Highways: Osso, Goby and Passapatanzy, Virginia

Unfolding the Map

We pass into Virginia as our trip west to the origin starts to gain momentum.  Today, 12/21/2012, is the predicted date of the Mayan apocalypse.  Even though it has little to do with today's passage, I will consider apocalypse and doomsday, and more.  To find out where we are as the Mayan calendar ends, go here for the map.

Book Quote

"I came into Virginia on state 218, an old route now almost forgotten.  The towns, typically, werre a general store and a few dispersed houses around a crossroads: Osso, Goby, Passapatanzy."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 1

View of farmland near Passapatanzy, Virginia. Photo by R.W. Dawson and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host site.

Osso, Goby and Passapatanzy, Virginia

Last year, I saw the most depressing movie I can remember seeing in a long time.  Lars von Trier's Melancholia ends with a rogue planet smashing into the Earth, completely annihilating destroying our world.  Just like that, in molten rock and fire, everything is gone and the universe is bereft of human presence.

I bring up apocalypse because today as I write this, 12/21/2012, is the latest in a string of days since the beginning of time that people have been predicting the end of the world.  I think it's instructive that the original meaning of apocalypse is, from the Greek, a "disclosure of knowledge" or "revelation."  Of course, we have since come to identify apocalypse with doomsday scenarios. 

For example, if you go to this page on Wikipedia, you will see a list of of predictions starting with the fear of Romans that the city would be destroyed, through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, and into the modern day.  While most of the predictions are biblical in nature, some are based on astrological predictions such as planetary alignment.  More than a few self-described prophets of doom have revised their predictions at least once when the world didn't end.  And while many predictions were made in earnest, more than a few hoaxes were reported.  My favorite is the Prophet Hen of Leeds, in which a hen laid eggs that had "Christ is coming" written on them.  It was later revealed that the apocalyptic phrase was etched in eggs with corrosive ink and reinserted back into the hen.

In the 20th century, as nuclear weapons were developed and improved, apocalyptic predictions of all-out war, often combined with Christian prophecies of the Second Coming of Christ, became de-rigueur as explanation for the end of existence.  As we moved into the 21st century, religious and nuclear apocalyptic predictions began competing with other explanations involving space aliens, planetary alignment once again, space objects colliding with earth, and terrestrial electronic malfunction.  1999 was forecast to be the year that we met our doom, and when we lived past that, the Y2K computer malfunction was forecast to end civilization as we knew it at midnight when the year 2000 commenced.  When the predicted dire consequences didn't happen, various people predicted a similar number of catastrophes.  Not content with our own predictions, we reached back into history to conjure the latest, Mayan calendar prophecy of doom.  A story I heard recently was that even the remaining Mayans didn't take the prophecy of their ancestors that seriously.

I'm beginning to think that humanity is uncomfortable without some kind of impending doom hanging over its head.  Knowing that we each meet our own personal apocalypse in the form of death at some point in our existence, maybe it's comforting to know that there is the possibility that we can all go together.  We know that eventually there will be an apocalypse when the sun eventually burns through its hydrogen and expands and dies.  If humans have survived and manage to be off the planet by then, we know that the universe will eventually end.  It might rip itself apart, or it might lose all of its energy and die a slow, cold death.  Or, perhaps it will reverse and fall in upon itself, creating a new universe in a titanic explosion.

In my estimation, time itself records the end of the universe.  If we crudely imagine the passage of time to resemble the frames of a movie, every brief moment, second, or fraction of a second constitutes the end of the universe in that instance and the beginning of another at the start of another fraction of time.  No matter how small the interval, each new interval brings something slightly changed and new.  If the interval is large, we notice big changes.  A passage of ten years creates alterations in reality that could easily be interpreted as a universal change in this or that.

We still haven't lost our taste for the predicted worldwide apocalypse, and we tend to mostly ignore the little apocalyptic events that happen to people on a small scale every day.  A death of a friend or loved one, a sudden illness that throws a family into financial chaos, the loss of a business, all can cause conditions resembling apocalypse in the lives of one or a few people.  I think of the Newtown children whose lives were snuffed out by a gunman a week ago, and I imagine that the parents of those children are focused on their own personal apocalyptic tragedies, not some Mayan prediction of the end of the world.

I doubt that LHM was thinking about the literal end of the world when he was driving through Osso, Goby and Passapatanzy, Virginia.  He might have felt, however, that he was at the end of the world and certainly, in the original meaning of the word, his trip in Blue Highways was his apocalypse, often found in quiet, rural and wilderness areas with few people around so that he could reflect and find meaning.

And ultimately, I think that is what the eventual end of humanity will be like.  I don't think we'll go out in a blaze of glory, with missiles or comets or asteroids or rogue planets.  To me, that's not a disclosure of knowledge or a revelation.  I don't think that there will be fire or brimstone, or a glorious Second Coming and celestial battle.

Instead, I picture the eventual end of humanity as a slow progression, but also one in which we've lived out our purpose after having achieved some revelation or some assimilation of important cosmic knowledge.  At that point, our end will consist of no drama, no pyrotechnics, no mess.  Our apocalypse will simply be the last breath of a last someone in a future time in some quiet place with a universal truth now fully understood.  That future someone's last breath will linger for a second on the atmosphere, and then the silence of the universe will fill the space where once were human voices.

Musical Interlude

Tom Lehrer is currently a mathemetician.  But in the 1950s and 60s he had an interesting side line...he played piano and sang humorous songs.  Here is one of his famous ones dealing with apocalypse, We Will All Go Together When We Go.

If you want to know more about Osso, Goby and Passapatanzy

King George County
Wikipedia: Goby
Wikipedia: King George County
Wikipedia: Osso
Wikipedia: Passapatanzy

Next up: Fredericksburg, Virginia

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