This week’s KQED work project, thanks to KnightLab’s TimelineJS (and our local utility filing for bankruptcy):
Road Blog: Chicago to West Des Moines
I left my power cord back in Chicago, so I will keep this short. After a relaxed, not to say lazy, start of the day, we started rolling at 11. OK — that was kind of lazy.
Made our way out from the North Side out to through the western suburbs on Interstates 294 and 88. Got off of U.S. 30 to continue west at Rock Falls. Right there we had the only weather of the day, driving through a line of thunderstorms that apparently marked a cold front. It was much cooler and drier to the west — 74, for instance, in Morrison, Illinois — see above — where I stopped to check out the local grain elevator scene.
We stayed on U.S. 30 across the Mississippi, through Clinton, Iowa, and on to a hamlet called Calamus. A road sign pointed north to Lost Nation. I kept going, but pulled over half a mile on to consult an actual paper map to see what getting to Lost Nation might involve. Wandering for 8 or 10 miles on country roads, it looked like. We were not under the gun timewise — we were to meet Eamon and Sakura in West Des Moines (they were coming up from Cincinnati, part of their trek from New York to Seattle) — so I did a U-turn and headed up the backroads.
Lost Nation: The best picture would have been of the road signs pointing out the turn, as the town itself (population 400) proved unprepossessing in our 5-minute visit (it bills itself as offering “small city security with big city access). One wonders about the origins of the name, and the stories that have found their way into print suggest both pestilence and a fanciful-sounding Native American tale as the source.
Me, my expectations tend toward pestilence or worse. Not too far down the road, we passed a sign saying, “Limited government under God: Vote Republican.”
We stopped to see what locals advertise as the world’s biggest wooden nickel, just outside Iowa City. After that, we got on Interstate 80 for the rest of the trip west. Eamon and Sakura got to the hotel nearly at the same moment we did (they would have beaten us, but stopped by the Iowa state capitol building on the way). Then dinner. Then back to our hotel, the Sheraton, and back on the road early in the morning.
From Above: Bowknot Bend
Above, a shot from a flight from Nashville to Oakland in April 2016. I always take a window seat. I hardly ever watch the in-flight movies. The the window is my in-flight movie.
Every once in a while, I’ll actually get a half-decent picture of some dramatic piece of landscape. I was reasonably sure that this was the Green River someplace in eastern Utah. Checking Google Maps and Gmaps Pedometer, this place is 25 miles due west of Moab and 28 miles south-southeast of Green River, Utah. The perspective is looking north from just south of the bend.
Here’s the spot on Google Earth’s satellite view: www.google.com/maps/@38.6054343,-110.0189264,9139m/data=!…
Here’s a U.S. Geological Survey map of the area: www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=6925846
Here’s a NASA Earth Observatory image, shot from the north, looking south: earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83353
From the NASA writeup: “Bowknot was named by geologist John Wesley Powell in 1869 during one of his famous explorations of the rivers in the American West. The Green River flows south (toward the top of this image) and joins the Colorado River downstream. The combined flow of these rivers was responsible for cutting the Grand Canyon, some 325 kilometers (200 miles) away from Bowknot.”
And finally, here’s Powell’s journal entry, dated July 15, 1869, of traveling down this stretch of the Green River:
About six miles below noon camp we go around a great bend to the right, five miles in length, and come back to a point within a quarter of a mile of where we started. Then we sweep around another great bend to the left, making a circuit of nine miles, and come back to a point within six hundred yards of the beginning of the bend. In the two circuits we describe almost the figure 8. The men call it a bow knot of river so we name it Bow knot Bend. The line of the figure is fourteen miles in length.
There is an exquisite charm in our ride to day down this beautiful cañon. It gradually grows deeper with every mile of travel; the walls are symmetrically curved, and grandly arched; of a beautiful color, and reflected in the quiet waters in many places, so as to almost deceive the eye and suggest the thought, to the beholder, that he is looking into profound depths. We are all in fine spirits, feel very gay, and the badinage of the men is echoed from wall to wall. Now and then we whistle, or shout, or discharge a pistol, to listen to the reverberations among the cliffs.
At night we camp on the south side of the great Bow knot, and, as we eat our supper, which is spread on the beach, we name this Labyrinth Cañon.
‘Is Everybody OK?’
I’ve written before — a while ago — about the terrible early days of June 1968.
I’m a little puzzled that I could be reflecting on the 50th anniversary of anything. I’m like the old guy in 1968 looking back on the end of the Great War.
But here we are. Fifty years ago on this date, immediately after declaring victory in the California primary, and just moments after 14-year-old me turned off the TV election coverage and went to bed, an assassin shot Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles.
If you listen to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” you might have heard this StoryCorps segment, which features a man who came to the mortally wounded Kennedy’s aid. If you were alive at the time, you remember the photograph of that scene.
The segment brought that night and that terrible loss back in a rush. The most poignant moment: Juan Romero, the hotel worker who tried to help Kennedy, saw the senator’s lips moving as he lay on the floor. Romero says he put his head down so he could hear Kennedy’s words. He was asking, “Is everybody OK?”
The National Joy Smoke
I think we all have an idea what the national joy smoke is today. It’s not Prince Albert, in the can or otherwise.
But a hundred years ago? I just encountered the ad below while fishing around for newspaper mentions, circa 1917, of one of my dad’s uncles. The ad here appeared in the Warren Sheaf, still published in Marshall County, Minnesota — just northeast of Grand Forks, North Dakota.
The ad copy (early “Mad Men,” transcribed below) is not to be missed.
Say, you’ll have a streak of smokeluck that’ll put pep-in-your-smokemotor, all right, if you’ll ring-in with a jimmy pipe or cigarette papers and nails some Prince Albert for packing.
Just between ourselves, you never will wise-up to high-spot-smoke-joy until you can call a pipe b its first name, then, to hit the peak-of-pleasure you land square on that two-fisted-man-tobacco, Prince Albert!
Well, sire, you’ll be so all-fired happy you’ll want to get a photograph of yourself breezing up the pike with your smokethrottle wide open! Talk about smoke-sport!
Quality makes Prince Albert so appealing all along the smoke line. Men who never before could smoke a pipe and men who’ve smoked pipes for years all testify to the delight it hands out! P.A. can’t bite or parch! Both are cut out by our exclusive patented process!
Right now while the going’s good you get out your old pipe or the papers and land on some P.A. for what ails your particular smoke appetite!
You buy Prince Albert everywhere tobacco is sold. Toppy red bags, tidy red zinc, handsome pound and half pound humidors—and—that classy, practical pound crystal humidor with sponge moistener took that keeps the tobacco in such perfect condition.
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Winston-Salem, N.C.
‘The Essence of Poverty’
A random radio mention of Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and its connection to the story of Annie Sullivan, celebrated as “The Miracle Worker” for her role in the education of Helen Keller and the blind and deaf in general, leads me here:
Anne Sullivan Macy: Miracle Worker, from the American Foundation for the Blind.
And to this quote from her biography:
“The essence of poverty, is shame. Shame to have been overwhelmed by ugliness, shame to be the hole in the perfect pattern of the universe. In that moment an intense realization of the ugliness of my appearance seized me. I knew that the calico dress which I had thought rather pretty when they put it on me was the cause of the woman’s pity, and I was glad that she could not see the only other garment I had on … the inadequacy of my outfit did not dawn upon me until the woman pitied me.”
(I wound up reading the entire AFB “gallery” on Annee Sullivan. What a story.)