Blue Highways: A Radar Station in Western North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

I'm making another educated guess for this post as to where William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) found the radar tower in North Dakota.  How?  I examined Google Earth, found a likely "small flourish of hills" with a "fine, clear lake" beneath them.  I didn't see evidence of a radar tower, so either it was dismantled or because of national security Google airbrushed it out of the satellite photo.  I am going to look at the idea of early warning defense (on multiple levels) by first writing about Martello towers, which LHM mentions in his quote below.  If you want an early warning about where we are located, use your inner radar to locate the map.

Book Quote

"In a small flourish of hills, the last I was to see for hundreds of miles, on an upthrusted lump sat a cube of concrete with an Air Force radar antenna sweeping the long horizon for untoward blips.  A Martello tower of the twentieth century.  Below the installation, in the Ice Age land, lay a fine, clear lake.  Fingerlings whisked the marsh weed, coots twittered on the surface, and at bankside a muskrat munched greens.  It seemed as if I were standing between two worlds.  But they were one: a few permutations of life going on about themselves, each thing trying to continue its way."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 7

This is just a stock photo of a radar system. Photo at Al Arabiya. Click on photo to go to host site.

And this is an image of a Martello tower in Ireland. Photo at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host site.

A Radar Station in Western North Dakota

Martello towers.  In entering North Dakota, LHM stops after seeing a radar antenna and calls it a Martello tower of the twentieth century.  Of course, he is writing in the late 1970s or early 1980s as the
Cold War is still raging, and there is still an off chance that Soviet ballistic missiles could appear as blips on the radar screen in a surprise attack.  You might or might not know that North Dakota, along with Wyoming and Montana, houses a number of active-duty missile silos which puts those states on the front lines if nuclear war were to ever occur.   But what really interested me was the term for the radar station as a Martello tower.  I didn't understand the reference, and one of the things I find really exciting about reading is running across a term that I don't know and then trying to discover what it means.

So here's the story about the Martello towers.  They were invented in the mid-1500s at Mortella Point in Corsica.  A small, round tower with very thick walls, they were built to serve as a lookout for North African pirates.  The towers initially served a lookout purpose.  They were garrisoned with a watchman who lit a fire at the top of the tower to signal when pirates were spotted.  This original purpose of the Mortella-type tower (it's name was later misspelled and changed to the Martello tower) is what LHM is referencing when he compares the radar station to the towers.  When I think of this use of the towers, my inner geek is reminded of The Lord of the Rings, when the signal towers are lit to call the Rohirrim to the aid and defense of Gondor.

Later, the Genoese expanded the use of the tower, turning them into small forts that could not only be used for lookouts, but also for defense.  The towers were tough and armed with cannon.  The British attacked the Mortella tower in 1794 with two warships and were unable to reduce it despite subjecting it to two days of pounding from the heavy guns of their ships (the tower eventually fell to a land-based force attacking from the rear).  The impressed British modified the tower design and built a number of them along the coasts of England, Scotland and Ireland to provide defense against a potential threat from Napoleon in France.  France itself built a number of Martello-style towers and again used them for communication and warning through the Chappe Telegraph system (an optical telegraph).

Eventually, the United States built its own Martello towers which can be seen in places like New Hampshire, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and New York City.  The Martello tower is also part of the insignia of a U.S. army infantry regiment.

In the use of communication, it is easy to see how the early use of the Martello tower can serve as a metaphor for today's long-range missile early-warning radar system.  Perhaps, if the combination of early-warning radar is combined with the instantaneous response of the Minuteman missiles in silos nearby, one can also extend the metaphor to the later use of the Martello towers as defense systems as well.  A lot of thought, bolstered by science and engineering, goes into these defense systems regardless of whether they are constructed of stone, morter and wood or if they are constructed of the highest-tech materials.  The idea is simple, provide early warning and defend the heartland.

I also think, however, of the defenses that are more close to home.  Martello towers can be metaphors for the defenses we put up in our own lives.  Security systems guard our businesses, vehicles and homes, providing warnings and defenses against fire, carbon monoxide, radon, and intruders.  Take a home alarm system.  An intruder breaks in, the alarm goes off, a signal is sent offsite to a center which calls police, and hopefully police arrive in time to apprehend the intruder.

How about even closer to home - our own personal warning systems and defenses?  These might be friends or loved-ones watching out for us, our so-called "wing" men or women who might signal that we should stay away from that good looking but unstable or unsavory character.  It might be our own consciences or inner-selves raising red flags about situations that we find ourselves in.  In response we may shut down, go into avoidance or, in desperate situations, launch countermeasures to protect ourselves.

No matter how far we extend the metaphor, we can find Martello towers that we've erected in all parts of our lives if we look.  And regardless of the level of analysis, they can be more or less effective depending on the situation.  Often our towers will give us plenty of warning.  Sometimes our towers will remain strong, holding off the attack.  We'll occasionally be surprised from behind where our defenses are weak.  Every so often a bombardment from something or someone will cause us some damage but at the end of the day, our tower will still stand.  And sometimes, a new weapon that we aren't expecting will render our defenses obsolete until we can upgrade them, usually through the lessons brought about by attack and sometimes our defeat.

In the end, advances in artillery technology rendered the Martello towers useless.  Able to withstand cannon shot because of their thick walls, they were done in by new rifled ammunition which allowed greater accuracy and destruction.  This too might serve as a metaphor.  Our modern Martello towers, our radar stations, are effective only as long as our radar can pick up incoming threats.  It won't be long before our stealth technology will be copied by other countries, and our current Martello towers, our current radar systems, will also become obsolete, at least until a new generation of Martello tower is conceived and implemented.

Musical Interlude

You can't have a post about a radar station, I don't think, without having Golden Earring's Radar Love as a musical interlude.  And it only fits better since the song references driving and is considered by Bill Lamb to be one of his top-10 driving songs of all time.

If you want to know more about...well...Western North Dakota or our nation's air defense system

Air Defense Radar Tutorial
Driving Tour of Western North Dakota
Modern Air Defense Radars
Online Air Defense Radar Museum
Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Wikipedia: Ground-Based Midcourse Defense

Next up: Fortuna, North Dakota

Blue Highways: Wallula, Washington

Unfolding the Map

Wallula, in William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) estimation, is a town that once had potential but is now a has-been.  I'll look at the concept of being washed-up and of being "a contender" in the context of life.  To see where Wallula sits either living or languishing, depending on your perspective, take a look at the map!

Book Quote

"Old Wallula was one of those river settlements you can find all over the country that appeared destined to become key cities because of geographical position.  Sitting at the confluence of the Walla Walla with the Columbia and just a few miles downstream from where the Snake and Yakima meet the big river, old Wallula was a true joining of waters (the name may be a Nez Perce word meaning 'abundant water'), although if you lift your gaze from the rivers you see desert.  Astride the Idaho gold rush trail, Wallula began well: riverboats, stagelines, railroads, two highways.  But money and history came through, paused, and went on."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 10

The Columbia River passes through the Wallula Gap as seen from Fort Nez Perce near Wallula, Washington. Photo by Glenn Scofield Williams and hosted by Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Wallula, Washington

"I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it."

Terry in On the Waterfront

Remember that line?  It's Marlon Brando's character Terry bemoaning his fate as a washed up fighter who took too many dives and never got his shot at fame.  Many of us have had the feeling at least once in our lives.  What might I have been?  To what heights might I have risen?  If I'd only gotten that chance I deserved!

Look at me, for example.  I have had lots of dreams in my life.  Some of them, dreams I had when I was really young, were unrealistic and were rightfully discouraged, destroyed or set aside.  I had the usual childhood dreams of being a football player or an astronaut.  Of course being a somewhat wimpy kid with glasses, asthma, a huge overbite, and a lack of coordination made those dreams a little difficult to achieve.  Later, as I grew into my body and some of the other issues were addressed, my dreams became a little more realistic, but only marginally.  In high school, my fascination with space led me to want to be an astronomer.  But sometime, a guidance counselor set me straight as to the career prospects of astronomers so my fascination just stayed a fascination, but nothing else.

My first real "I coulda been a contender" regret could be traced back to college.  I entered my freshman year as a computer science major.  My whole first year I took classes that taught me how to write code in Pascal, the popular programming language that was used to teach students about computer programming at the time.  My chosen major and I didn't get along.  I had a 1.8 GPA as I entered my sophomore year, and one last class in programming killed off any illusions I had about being a computer scientist.  That was too bad, since now in my late 40s I have found that when I put my mind to it, I can write programs that work.  The map that accompanies this blog, for example, is a direct result of my being able to understand basic code.  I inspiration from javascript examples I found on the internet, but by cobbling those pieces of code together and through trial and error of seeing what works and what doesn't, I made a passable Google map that I could use to portray Littourati journeys.  Still, every so often I have that what-if moment.  What if I had stayed with computer science?  Would I have been a Bill Gates or a Sergey Brin?  I'll never know, but I still wonder...

There are other things that I regret.  Don't tell my wife but I've sometimes wished that I had been more adept at dancing when I was younger.  I tell my young male friends now, and they never listen to me, that if they want to have more options for dating they have to learn how to dance.  Most women I know love to dance.  Most men I know do not.  Yet, what's the harm in learning something new and opening up opportunities to meet people?  Had I known how to ballroom dance, or swing, or salsa when I was a young man looking for fun and companionship, I would have had a hell of a lot more dates and probably a better time.  I would have been a contender, despite my awkwardness, with the ladies.  Besides, I've discovered that dancing is fun!

I regret sometimes also that I am not working in my chosen field of teaching political science.  I love teaching.  I love being able to connect with people and introducing them to concepts and to new ways of thinking that they may have not or been unable to consider before.  I love getting people excited about something.  I live for opening someone up to new concepts.  And I must say that I get to teach - I'm teaching an online class and a face-to-face class this spring.  But I still find myself regretting sometimes that I'm not in a political science department somewhere teaching full-time.

But that's the irony about regrets.  The only reason we have regrets is usually because we aren't happy today and we look back on the "missed opportunities" as unexploited gateways to a better life that passed us by.  In reality, unless our lives are completely horrible, we usually follow the paths we tread and we find the good, the joyful and the wonderful in them.  We may have the occasional regret when we are under stress or something has gone wrong and it's only then that we think that we "coulda been a contender" with some other life.  In fact, in getting where we are now, where I can write a post on being a contender and you can sit and read it, then we were contenders and we contended well!  We got our shot at a title and we made the most of it.  We could have taken shots at other titles, but we didn't.  Who knows what might have happened had we taken another path and fought another fight?  Instead of standing, we might have been on the mat.

I watched a Twilight Zone episode recently, notable for the starring role of African-Americans in this episode, about another washed up fighter who, through the powerful wish of a little boy, gets a chance to be the fighter he always wanted, instead of the has-been he is.  On the mat after being knocked out, suddenly he finds himself declared the winner.  The young boy tells him the fighter that he wished really hard for him to win.  However, the fighter can't believe that the wish is actually responsible for turning his fate around, and refuses to believe.  At the end of the episode, he is back on the mat and has lost the fight.

Which brings me back to LHM's quote.  He presents Wallula as such a place.  It could have been a contender because it had things going for it.  It had geography and gold rush money and all of the trappings such as steamboats and trains and highways.  It had money coming in.  But, for some reason Wallula didn't become a major place; it became an out-of-the-way town in the eastern end of a largely rural state.  Is that bad?  No.  It just is.  Perhaps some who live in Wallula wish for bigger and better things, but probably many who live there like it just the way it is right now.  Sure, it coulda been a contender, and coulda been something different.  Maybe Wallula didn't believe enough in itself and got passed by.  But maybe that's all just as well.  Maybe Wallula is just what it is supposed to be.

Musical Interlude

The first song that came to my mind with the theme of this post is the wonderfully melancholic Billy Strayhorn classic, Lush Life.  I am going to list the lyrics after the video because they are so amazing - Strayhorn wrote the bulk of this sophisticated song when he was only 16.  One wonders what he had experienced to be able to write such a song at such a young age.  To me, it speaks of loneliness, and of people washed up bedraggled on the shores of life and not willing to jump back into the currents and swim.  It's easier to be caught up in a backwater and "rot with the rest," as the song so poignantly states.  This version is by the incomparable Nat King Cole .  Though the photo says that it is from his 1958 album The Very Thought of You, the song was not on that album, so either this version is from 1952's Harvest of Hits or 1961's retrospective The Nat King Cole Story.

Lush Life
by Billy Strayhorn

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails

The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distant gay traces
That used to be there, you could see where they'd been washed away
By too many through the day...
Twelve o'clock-tails

Then you came along with your siren song
To tempt me to madness
I thought for awhile that your poignant smile was tinged with the sadness
of a great love for me

Ah yes, I was wrong
Again, I was wrong

Life is lonely again
And only last year everything seemed so sure
Now life is awful again
A troughful of hearts could only be a bore
A week in Paris will ease the bite of it
All I care is to smile in spite of it

I'll forget you, I will
While yet you are still burning inside my brain
Romance is mush
Stifling those who strive
I'll live a lush life in some small dive
And there I'll be, while I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too

If you want to know more about Wallula

The Columbia River: Wallula
The Columbia River: Wallula Gap
ENotes: Wallula
Oregon History Project: Fort Nez Perce
Wikipedia: Fort Nez Percés
Wikipedia: Wallula
Wikipedia: Wallula Gap

Next up: Walla Walla, Washington