Monthly Archives: June 2008

General, Travel

The Journey Flows North

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88 bar falls 4mph NNE  dew-point 75 (!)   Summer Solstice

                        Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

                            Texarkana, Arkansas

Ate lunch today in Monroe, Louisiana at the Piccadilly Cafeteria.  This is the cafeteria you may remember from earlier times.  It has a sturdy 3-part metal rail and about 50 feet of food set out in neat little rows.  The watermelon and the cucumber salad I retrieved first could have come from anywhere, but the shrimp etouffee?  Pure Louisiana.  Cornbread and greens filled out my tray (Formica with little flecks).  This cost $11.84.  Pay at the register on the way out.

Dana brought me some hot sauce and a second large glass of water.  The atmosphere managed to be both down-home and quietly elegant.  I ate until I should have stopped, then went right on past that point.  Mmmm.  Good.

Earlier a Park Ranger at the Vicksburg Military Park got me to participate in a mock firing of a confederate cannon.  I was the gunner.  The whole business is a dance that a good crew could repeat three times in a minute.  First, a long pole with a cotton damper is thrust into the cannon to put out sparks from the last firing that might prematurely set off the charge.  A second person pushes a charge into the cannon.  The first person tamps the charge home with a wooden tamper on the other end of the swab. 

A third person stabs the charge with a sharp metal rod, opening the powder.  Then, the gunner steps up (this is me) and sights along a bronze rule.  When satisfied with the placement, the gunner throws up his hands.  This signals the person with the metal rod to step up and place a leather covered thumb over the striking hole to create a vacuum.  Yet another person puts a firing pin in the next hole.  Filled with chemicals, it lights when he yanks a six foot long lanyard.  Boom.

On a drive through the park on the tour route I thought about why we commemorate these events.  Battles.  Clashes of men and arms.  There are many monuments.  They honor states, divisions, armies, batteries, generals, colonels, the fallen and the wounded.  They are made of marble, bronze, and other stones, some small, while others, like the Illinois and Wisconsin state monuments, are huge.  This is sacred architecture called into service when some path changing event occurs in the sweep of human history. 

It does its job.  The whole drive feels solemn, reverent.  Somewhere, back behind the trees, the dead still swab the cannons and lift their muskets. 

Stopped in Texarkana for the night.  I plan to make at least Kansas City by tomorrow night, then on home.  After the Vicksburg visit, my inner compass turned toward home.  Now, headed north,the journey flows toward my pole star.

Great Wheel, Travel

The Summer Solstice

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76  bar rising 30.00   6mph SSE  dew-point 66   Summer

                            Jacksonville, Mississippi

                                 Full Flower Moon

Beltane 2008 has passed into history.  Look under the Great Wheel tab this afternoon or evening for a Summer Solstice posting.

The plan today is to head west.   A bit of time at Vicksburg Battle Field (civil war), then on into Louisiana.  I’m thinking I’ll end up somewhere around Shrevesport, but we’ll see.

Now.  Breakfast at the Waffle House.

Travel, Weather +Climate

Swollen Muddy And Fast

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90  Sunny, hazy   Airquality alert in Nashville.  Suggested:  Limit trips.

The deep south is close.  Tennessee was one of the upper slave holding states at the beginning of the civil war and did not secede with the lower south states of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and tomorrow’s destination, Alabama.  

Murfeesboro, Tennessee has the Stones River Civil War Battlefield. 

Today’s journey was and is hot.  As the road pushed further into southern Illinois, there were signs for college majors in coal mining.  Carbondale, home of Southern Illinois University was in the vicinity.  These are also unglaciated limestone hills sitting atop layers of plant life from the Carboniferous, now black and concentrated into veins of coal.  Heat and coal and the underground, the cthonic realms go together.

The Ohio river, the mighty Ohio, flexed its muscles today, swollen muddy and fast.  It was over its banks and looked like it would get higher.  This is a big river and where it feeds into the Mississippi multiplies the river we call the Father of Waters. 

Kentucky, which never seceded and therefore allowed Union access to the south side of the Ohio, continues, in the main, the rolling limestone hills in southern Illinois.  

Paducah, home of the National Quilter’s Museum and the only place in the US creating nuclear fuel for electricity generation from out of date Russian weapons (literally swords into plowshare), is not far from the bridge over the Ohio.

At Russert’s, a woman named Keeum (Kim) took mah ordah.  Cahtfeesh.  She was real nice.  She gave me a to go order of iced tea.  Good food.  Boy, the folks must like it down here, it’s roly polyville.

Nashville had a freeway down, but there was a quick way around the bottle neck and I found it.  Cities do not draw me in as they once did.  I find myself more interested in the quiet, secluded setting and Murfeesboro, though a city, does not intrude too much out here near the Stones River Battlefield.  I’ll go there in the morning, then scoot on down to Prattville and the Plantation Bed and Breakfast.

I finished a 24 lecture course on the American Revolution in the 11 plus hours I drove yesterday.  A nice setup for the 48 lecture course I began today on the Civil War.  Fits right in with the trip.

Travel

Gravemarkers Under Water

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 Wrote a long post, but lost it in a connection snafu. 

Here’s the gist.  Highway closed at the Dells.  Tornados and high water.  Got off and drove south on blue highways through the unglaciated hils of southern wisconsin.

In Spring Green I saw a submerged cemetery, the gravemarkers only partially visible in some two feet of flood water.

Finally found Interstate 39 and headed south in Illinois.  Sun a blood orange as a it sank under a dark thundercloud.  It’s path below the horizon enflamed the sky.  It looked like a prairie fire in the rear view mirror.

Stopped in little Le Roy, Illinois and found this connection this AM.  Wrote post, hit publish and it went away into the cyber ether, never to return.  Oh, well.

Until tonight, I’m on the road.

Memories, Travel

Visitations

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                             65  bar rises 29.73  2mph WSW dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny

                                                       Waxing Gibbous Flower Moon

The places I have visited stay with me, sometimes like ghosts, haunting my dreams and intruding on waking life.  Angkor.   Singapore.  Bangkok.  Ephesus.  Delphi.  Santorini.  Rome.  Pompeii.  Venice.  Florence.  Crete.  Delos.  Istanbul.  Bogota.  Cartagena.  Mexico City.  Merida.  Oaxaca. Vienna.  Salzburg.  Paris.  London.  Hawarden.  Anglesey.  Conwy.  Edinburgh.  Bath.  Cities and towns, states and countrysides in the US and Canada too many to name.

Angkor drapes vines over me, inserts vast tree roots into my memories while the howler monkeys and the cicada scream.  It’s hot and it doesn’t let up, just gets hotter, too hot in the midday.  The stone rises and rises, carved by artists capable of rendering the delicate and ephemeral in stone.  The astronomical, astrological, theological pandemonium of it all causes reverberations deep in my soul, beyond my Self and down into my links with the collective unconscious.  I was there when the stone masons cut the block, shaped Vishnu turning the great turtle in the sea of milk.  My hand carved the apsara and fitted stones into the great western gate of Angkor Wat.

Delphi sends music to me, pan-pipes and Apollo’s lute.  The cedar scented sacred way winds it way up the side of Mt. Parnassus past the Athenian treasury, up to the Temple of Apollo where the Delphic Oracle met questioners and answered their questions with questions deep in its subterranean precincts.  Here, too, is the omphalos stone, the center of the world.  The Castalian spring.  All round Mt. Parnassus are echoes of divinity, cries from the Pythian Games, honoring Apollo’s defeat of the cthonic serpent Python, still resound throughout the rocky hills.  The Delphi Oracle still speaks today and she says, “Beware, Stranger, of forgetting your past for in it lie secrets to your future.  Without your past you will wander the earth always an infant in your understanding.”

Merida and the Casa del Balam, house of the jaguar, bring heat, heat so intense that as the afternoon rains came there was no relief, only a suffocating rise in humidity.  To escape the locals do much of their business in pre-dawn and dawn hours, sitting together in the main park around the confidenitales, small curved benches made so dating couples could sit beside each other, yet not touch.  Here Mayan women sell blood oranges in front of the Cathedral, their roots at Chichen Itza and Tikal, not Jerusalem or Rome. 

Hawarden resonates with my genetic past.  On the trains in North Wales most of the people looked like they could be my cousin short, thin, dark eyes and hair.  The town with its residential library (where I stayed) and its brick and stone streets and buildings had Victorian written in its architecture, public and private.  It also had a bookish quality, an Oxford don would not have felt out of place.  The church graveyard, just behind St. Deniol’s Library, had slate markers covered with moss and huge trees hanging heavy bows over the graves.  Behind it the stone building of St. Deniol’s parish church sat calm and iconic.

There are others, many others, but these places live within me, never absent.  They are the great gift of travel and one I cherish.

Cinema and Television, Our Land and Home, Travel, World History

The Land is Our Vantage Point

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                            62  bar falls 29.66  0mph N dew-point 55  Beltane, night

                                                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Started Gettysburg tonight to get me in the mood for the southern trip.  Even though I’ve canceled my Gettysburg trip for this time, I can’t head into the south without thinking of the Civil War and trying to visit a few battlefields or other historic sites along the way.  Even as I write the word historic, I think back to something I wrote not long ago about how young our country is.

Think of Stonehenge, a temple from the paleolithic, over 5,000 years ago.  There are probably citizens of the United Kingdom whose ancestors were there, helped position the stones.  Imagine Turkey and Iraq, nations where civilization has had a foot-hold for thousands of years.  Egypt.  China and its 6,000 years of history, much of it recorded. 

Here, where most of us are boat people, only a few of the First Nations survive.  They can trace their ancestry on this land back several thousand years, but none of us with roots in Europe or Africa or Asia (at least the most recent immigrations) can see deeper into the past than Plymouth Rock or Roanoke.  Our history here spans no more than 400 years and as a country we are only 240 some years old.

The Hudson River School painters, in particular Thomas Cole, believed that the American equivalent of ruins were the natural wonders. The frontier in his day.  The mountains.  The Great Lakes.  The mighty rivers.  The forests that stretched over millions of square miles.  Now we can add the Grand Canyon, the buttes and mesas of Utah, the homes of the Anasazi.  Yellowstone.  Yosemite.  The Boundary Waters. 

It is still true. Still true that the land itself is our vantage point to consider history and pre-history.  Still true that the sight of the Rocky Mountains or Lake Superior or the Mississippi or the Smoky Mountains or the Everglades can move us to tears and anchor us here, anchor us here as firmly as the Bastille, the Tower of London, the temples of Angkor or the Great Wall of China.

GeekWorld, Travel, Weather +Climate

240,000 Miles and Still Happy

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58  bar falls 29.74  10mph E  dew-point 56  Beltane, cloudy and raining

                         First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Since this has been and will be a traveling month, I’ve been attentive to weather nation-wide.  It’s amazing to sit here looking outside at my garden where the vegetables are slow to mature because of cool weather while the east, south and southwest have had hot hot hot.  The red looked like a child had decided to color the U.S. by starting down the eastern seaboard and then moving along the bottom of the map, went up a state or two, then went on west.  Red all the way.

The automobile is my primary mode of transportation.  Train second.  Air a distant third and then only for speed or an impossible distance.  The former is the reason for air to Texas in July, the latter found me in a plane for Hawai’i. 

When I travel by car, I pay attention to the Weather Channel like a pilot watches the isobars.  It looks like my luck will be good.  The very hot weather system seems ready to break up into more seasonal summer temps.  I’m glad.

Took the little red car into the dealer today for an oil change (they like me, they really really like me) and discovered that the head gasket seep has become a full fledged leak.  That means a head gasket and head grinding when I return plus I have to check the oil every other gas stop.  Even though I repaired my air conditioning after 5 years without it (kept thinking I’d get rid of the Celica, but it kept working.), the heat still makes travel uncomfortable and it does reduce gas mileage. 

I  told Scott at Carlson Toyota I don’t begrudge the Celica few repairs at 240,000 miles.  Still a hell of a lot cheaper than a new car and I get 30-32 mpg on the road.

While we’re on the subject of mechanical devices, my computer now makes a reluctant noise when I boot up, as if it doesn’t want to get up yet.  At first it made me think:  Hard drive!  Bad.  Even though I back-up daily.  Then, on the web I found that it’s probably not the hard drive, but the cooling system.  Time for a little fresh air in the old computer case.  I like this machine.  It’s just right for my needs even though it is now 3 years old.  Like the Celica I feel I may have it a while.

Literature, Writing

Does Google Make Us Stupid?

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70  bar steady  29.81  0mph NNW  dew-point 52  Beltane, cloudy and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

“When life gives you lemmings, jump over the cliff.”  A quote from an unusually cynical book I’m reading right now.

Am also reading an article from the Atlantic which asks the question, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?”  The author says that he and other his literary friends now find it difficult to read a whole book, to sustain a long and complex thought process, to do anything more than speed read blogs.  They attach this tendency to the Web and their constant web presence, searching, reading, researching, writing. 

It makes for an arresting article title.  I wanted to read it.  The argument doesn’t track for me, however.  Unless it’s my age (compared to theirs), their experience does not match mine.  I don’t find reading a book a challenge.  I do notice that I have a shorter attention span at times, something I correlate more to the span between commercials on TV programs;  but, when I need the focus for a subtle or complicated book, it is there.

When I write a novel, it comes in daily chunks, not one long, intricate thread.  It must get there, of course, but it happens in discrete, manageable bites.  Reading complex material is the same process for me.  I read it at a pace that makes it accessible to me.  

When I started college, I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Program.  I remember two things.  One, if you want to read fast, take an index card and follow it as you move it down the page, taking in lines whole, from the center, rather than left to right.  Two, no matter how fast you read, the material determines the pace you can read.  Where 1,000 words a minute might be possible for fiction, when reading philosophy 150 words a minute is fast.  This squares with my own experience and factors into the topic, too.     

News of the Strange

Hammer Head

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70  bar falls 29.81 0mph ESE dew-point 52  Beltane, sunny and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Check out the sophisticated medical  technology used in this strange story.

“George Chandler said he feels fine, even though a nailgun fired a 2.5 inch nail into the top of his head on Friday. Chandler and a friend were doing a project in a backyard when the nailgun hose became tangled, causing the tool to fire one nail.

Chandler said Monday he told his friend he didn’t know where the nail went, but he felt a sting on the top of his head.

They discovered that the nail was driven deep into Chandler’s head, so they called an ambulance and he was rushed to a hospital.

Chandler said a doctor used a common claw hammer to remove the nail.

He said he feels “very lucky, very, very lucky” to have escaped serious injury.”