When I come over Town Hill just south of Breezewood, PA, the big wind farm doesn’t quite shout out “you have a friend in Pennsylvania.” It actually makes me uneasy, since the great ominous blades slicing ponderously through the air makes it appear that the aliens have landed, and they mean us no good.
I am still processing the trip, a rapid drive up and back to Michigan to attend a very special first birthday party for a special friend of mine, and naturally there were some interesting events in between the bookends of a long weekend behind the wheel.
First, weather: I hadn’t been thinking of snow. It had been in the fifties in the Old Dominion the last week or so- certainly cooler and seasonably so as we pressed up against the Turkey Day holiday. I glanced at the extended forecast on Friday, the day I was going to take off, and blanched when I saw the blob of weather arcing across lower Michigan from Chicago.
Not much good comes out of there these days, and the prediction of four-to-six inches of white stuff forced me to adjust my leisurely speed of advance. I still stopped in Newton Falls, at the Holiday Inn Express, but eschewed a night on the town in the Covered Bridge City and got on with night’s rest in order to clear the place and be on the road again at first light.
That knocked me off the production schedule for Saturday, when I would have talked with you about the wonders of the alternate road west through the panhandle of Maryland and north into Pennsylvania via I-79 to intersect the Turnpike north of Pittsburgh.
It is a little longer than the all-turnpike route, but it is not so mind-numbingly familiar.
The snow started at Monroe, Michigan, boyhood home of General George Armstrong Custer and not far from the Raisin River Battlefield where Tecumseh’s American Indian confederation inflicted the greatest defeat upon U.S. forces in the west during the War of 1812, and certainly the most definitive until the Little Bighorn.
A few random observations from behind the wheel:
American Society and current events: Everyone seems to be a little on edge these days. Debbie, the diminutive blonde sandwich lady at Al’s Corner in Beaver Falls, PA, fixed me with an intense stare and announced that she is prepared for any contingency. She is convinced the government is coming to get her, and probably before the election. She mentioned that she had buried two husbands, and her eyes gleamed as she drew a sharp knife along the spine of hoagie roll in which she deftly inserted a bit of fried perch, and I considered possible defensive strategies, just in case. Good sandwich, though.
Automotive: Visibility declined, but the Panzer’s 4Matic all-wheel drive made the car handle like a dream. A really good performer in the snow. I was very impressed I got in while the snow was just starting to accumulate. It was an excellent afternoon to get on the floor and play with the Grandbaby with the football games murmuring in the background.
So, let’s just note that “Grandkids are cool,” and a miracle, and seeing your son be a great Dad is one of the wonders of the world.
So, that was the reason for the trip, but I drove because I hate flying these days, and there was an audio book I wanted to listen to.
So, oddly, there was a literary aspect to the weekend, and what is more, it all resonated with the strange and unsettling backdrop of terror attacks and histrionic rhetoric.
It was a total accident. I had been hooked on Erik Larson’s narratives since I read “Devil in the White City,” his masterful and compelling account of a serial killer who preyed on women visiting the great Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Earlier this year, when the pool was opening and glittering, I listened to his latest, “Dead Wake,” the account of the sinking of the Lusitania by Unterzeeboot-20.
Writing “In the Garden of Beasts,” Larson takes on the rise of Hitler in an intimate portrait. Listening to “The Boys in the Boat” (Daniel James Brown) on my iPod dragged me back to the period of the rise of the Nazis, and in perfect sequence.
If you have not read them, I strongly recommend both. Larson’s “Beasts” concentrates on 1933 and ’34, the years of the consolidation of the office of Chancellor and President in the person of Herr Hitler. It is an intensely personal account, drawn largely from the letters and papers (man, did they keep papers!) of the William Dodd family, and the Nazis with whom they socialized as Dodd served as US Ambassador for FDR.
He is an Ivory Tower Liberal of the Wilsonian school, an ardent New Dealer, intent on making his meager circumstances a badge of honor against the wealthy Foreign Service Officers over whom he is appointed. His daughter- a product of the Roaring Twenties and quite the Flapper, cuts a swath through the young men of Berlin, and winds up as the lover of the Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy. The account rises to a cloud of violence that culminates in the purge of the Sturm Abtielungen- the Brown Shirts of Ernst Roehm’s SA- and the mass executions that went along with them.
Brown’s account is even more powerful, if possible, and overlaps the period. It is the saga of a group of hard-rowing of working-class State of Washington lads who beat the world in the eight-man crew race at the 1936 Olympics.
Along the way, we encounter the Dust Bowl, the accounts of which are horrific, and make the minor variations in the weather of recent history seem like very small potatoes indeed. Not to mention the nationwide heat wave (1936 is still the hottest on record here, regardless of the tinkerings with the temperature record at NOAA and NASA), and set against the backdrop of the machinations of Avery Brundage, chairman of the American Olympic Committee, the cinematic genius of Leni Riefenstahl who willingly threw herself into the service of the monsters by filming the most intense documentary films in history: the 1934 Riechspartitag in Munich in “Triumph of the Will” and the dizzying montage of “Olympia,” the astonishing cinematic documentation of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the greatest public event held on earth up to that time.
The parade of Nazi officialdom- Goebbles and Goring and the rest- is depicted in both books with similar style and caustic foreshadowing of what the horrors that these men would foist upon a world that could have stopped them, had it cared to do so.
Oh, and the accounts of what the Boys themselves had to ensure in the Depression? It makes you realize how soft our society has become. Food stamps? How about scouring the woods around Sequim, seeking edible mushrooms to supplement the occasional egg from the hens that the mink have not killed in the coop. Working on rock faces with jackhammers while suspended on harnesses to build the Grand Cooley Dam, for example, or a boy being abandoned by a family that has too many mouths to feed.
Superb story telling in both books. Listening to the story of what the boys did on the massive construction required to build the dam to provide power to the West, the vision to have a public works project to bring work to the men, and to bring electricity to the rural folks is inspirational.
And of course, we could not do anything like that today. Hell, we can’t even build a little pipeline without anguishing for years. It is a different- and more timid- world these days.
Meanwhile, Ohio rolled by in a daze of waving swastikas and bombast and marching athletes. Pennsylvania was the same, all the contours and grades familiar as old friends. The compulsion to finish “Boys” on the drive back to Virginia was compelling. That, in turn, made it a straight-through trip yesterday, since I could not stop listening until it was all done and the only bit left was the 120 miles down Sideling Hill and into the Capital.
Anyway, when the book was done and the tears- no kidding- were dried, I went back to satellite radio and listened to the incredible events that are swirling. That, and the growing realization that I would hit the Beltway mid-way through the rush hour, and the nagging of the GPS that strove mightily to route me around the rest of the delays. I saw parts of surburban Maryland I had never seen before under the silver night of a gibbous moon.
When I got back to Big Pink last night, my legs were cramping from operating the pedals. The night in my own bed included wild Technicolor dreams that included feral criminals and a road incident that accidentally placed my Police Interceptor on the roof of a cathedral under construction near the Pentagon, of all places. My legs hurt when I got out of bed and contemplated the morning.
I assume this all will get clearer with time, and this should be an interesting week. More as I process this mess. In the meantime, I can’t say enough about those two books. History doesn’t repeat itself, as Twain noted. But there are some really crazy things going on that sure as hell rhyme.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @ jayare303