A very gray day

Houghton July 16

The smoke from the Boundary Waters and the north shore of Lake Superior is still hitting us. Not sure just what the air quality index says but it hit about 1,000 on Wednesday. It's probably lower now, although not by much, because it's raining. Anything above 300 is Bad, as in Really Bad. The local weather guys gave the predicted rain a mixed review. On the one hand, the rain will knock particulates out of the atmosphere. On the other, that might simply cause particulates to be more of an issue at lower altitudes. I don't know and don't especially care. It's going to be gray and smell like smoke outside no matter what our weather is doing here. I'm just going to hope it's raining hard in northern Ontario because a good soaking rain is about the only thing that will stop wild fires in a bone dry boreal forest. 

Our perpetually brain dead idiot of a Congress critter, the Louisiana carpetbagger, was shooting off his mouth yesterday about Canada needing to do something. Right. Like right now the Canadian natural resources people, their equivalent of the Forest Service and similar land management agencies, are just sitting back and saying, yep, let the entire Lake Nipigon/boundary waters region burn. Natural disaster, just let it go, sooner or later the fires will exhaust the current supply of spruce, balsam, and peat bogs. 

Minor digression: peat bogs burn forever, or it can seem that way. It's like when a fire starts in a seam of coal. It'll keep smoldering for months and years. There's a coal seam in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that's been smoldering for over 60 years now. No one knows how that fire started but current estimates are that it'll take another 200+ years for the fire to burn itself out. A bog fire isn't going to last centuries but it's also not going to be easy to extinguish.

Anyway, while Michiganders (and a Louisiana carpetbagger) are busy bitching about bad air, people in northern Ontario are living with apocalyptic scenarios with towns being evacuated and homes being destroyed. I saw a video filmed from a CN freight train that I was hoping was AI but was definitely real and definitely terrifying. Intense fire on both sides of the track and smoke so thick visibility was effectively zero. It's rather petty of Michiganders to complain about smoke when they're not living so close to the fires they can feel the heat. It is also, as my S.O. noted, remarkably chickenshit for people like Jack Bergman (carpetbagger) to complain that Canada is somehow to blame for aggravating asthma in Michigan when Canada has always been really fast in assisting U.S. firefighting efforts. A Canadian pilot died recently in Colorado while assisting with fighting wildfires there. Instead of complaining to Prime Minister Carney about Canada's supposed fuck-ups, Congress critters like Bergman should be asking what the U.S. can do to help. 

Of course, Begman and other Republicans can't go after the real problem that's leading to massive wildfires globally: climate change. Admitting climate change is real would piss off their fossil fuel mega-donors. Besides, Mango Mussolini has declared climate change a hoax which means, of course, that every Republican has to parrot the same line. 

It's also rather stupid for any Congress critter to bitch about Canadian fires when huge chunks of the U.S. are burning right now. If you want to depress yourself, check out the statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center. 

It is for sure an odd feeling to keep smelling smoke when the closest fire is on the other side of Lake Superior anywhere from 50 to 100 miles from here. Going by the maps I've seen on local news, the bulk of the smoke we're getting is coming from the Boundary Waters area so maybe Bergman should be writing nasty letters to Tom Schulz about how the U.S. Forest Service screwed up instead of lobbing insults at Mark Carney. 

Birthright citizenship, voting, and history

I've been reading Eric Foner's The Second Founding. Foner has written extensively on the post-Civil War period and Reconstruction. This particular book looks at the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Although in hindsight it seems like Congress clumped the three together rather quickly, it was 15 years from ratification of the 13th to ratification of the 15th.

The 13th amendment was pretty much a no-brainer immediately following the war. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves in the Confederacy; it didn't do a thing for slaves in border states that weren't in active rebellion, like Kentucky and Missouri. Congress recognized slavery everywhere had to be eliminated so they cranked out the 13th Amendment pretty quickly. It's short and simple: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States..."

Foner details the debates, which naturally included demands from slave owners for financial compensation for their lost property, but the committees working on the drafts managed to pare it down to a basic statement. In retrospect the exceptional clause has been repeatedly criticized. It's the rationale for prison labor. Need some road work done cheaply? Chain gangs. Or, a more modern example, need furniture for schools and state hospitals? Prison work shops. Or, as I read about not long ago, an airline reservation call center operating out of a prison, which really had me wondering about stuff like how secure is your credit card number when the person asking for it is sitting behind bars. But that's a digression. The exceptionalism clause wasn't seen as much of an issue in 1865; it took decades of Jim Crow and rising awareness of places like Angola (notorious Louisiana prison farm) for people to realize the exceptionalism clause has led to some horrific abuses. In any case, after both houses of Congress passed it, the amendment went to the states for ratification. Twenty-seven were needed for passage; there were 30 ratifications submitted before the end of December 1865. A few states were a little slow -- naturally, Mississippi was last, with the formal paperwork from Mississippi submitted in 2013. (And no doubt there are some Mississippians who think they could have waited a few more years.)

The 14th and 15th amendments did not sail through the process as quickly or as easily as the 13th. The 14th has been in the news a lot lately. It's the birthright citizenship amendment. In reading about the debates a number of oddities struck me. One was that for some Congress critters that big problem with affirming birthright citizenship wasn't that anyone black and born in the United States would automatically be a citizen, it was that birthright citizenship could apply to children born to Chinese laborers in California or Nevada or, possibly even worse, the children born to drunken Irish immigrants. In 1868 there were a lot of Chinese laborers in California. They were, as immigrants so often do, working at jobs sufficiently dangerous or arduous that most white guys wouldn't do them. In retrospect, the paranoia about the Chinese suddenly forming a voting bloc seems rather stupid. There may have been 50,000 adult men laboring on railroads and at other unpleasant tasks, but there weren't very many women immigrating -- and even if there were the amount of time from the amendment's passage to when new natural born citizens would be eligible to vote (age 21) seems like plenty of time for politicians to figure out how to manipulate the masses. 

The nervousness about the drunken Irish was an East Coast issue. Prejudice against the Irish was common in all the major cities. Despite Ireland being part of the United Kingdom at the time, the Irish were never seen as safely English. The Irish did not speak the King's English -- many no doubt were comfortable only in Gaelic -- and, even worse, they were Papists, the dreaded Roman Catholics who answered to the Pope, who was labeled by some American Protestant leaders as a despot. Again, in retrospect it seems rather odd, but while prejudice against the Irish has disappeared over time there is still a lot of fundamentalist Protestant prejudice against Catholics. (A minor digression, but I know people who were raised in a fundamentalist tradition -- not exactly snake-handling Pentecostal Holiness types, but close -- who were/are convinced Catholics worship idols because of the statues of saints in churches.) 

There was also discussion about Native Americans, but Congress concluded that if a Native American belonged to a recognized tribe that tribe was a sovereign nation and that's where a Native American's citizenship lay. Ergo, U.S. citizenship was a nonissue for indigenous persons. 

In any case, the important part of the amendment, Article 1, does three things: it says if you're born in the U.S., you're a citizen. As a citizen you are entitled to equal protection under the law, and, third, states can't take rights away without due process. The other sections of the amendment were basically cleaning up some issues after the war such as Article 3 saying if you'd rebelled (i.e., been in the Confederate army or government) you couldn't run for federal office (no convincing your fellow traitors that you belonged in Congress). Article 3 is often referred to as the insurrection clause; it's the clause some activists tried to use against Donald Trump running for a second term because he'd encouraged the January 6, 2021, rioters at the Capitol. The intent in 1868, of course, was to prevent the asshats who had been stupid enough to drag multiple states into seceding and causing a war from trying to get back into political power and doing something equally stupid again. And it worked, at least briefly, but mainly because Congress also passed the Reconstruction Act for the Confederate states. Reconstruction lasted until the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes effectively ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops, which is a subject for a different post.

The 15th amendment provided the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race or ethnicity. The wording is succinct -- "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -- and is notable for what it omits (gender). Gender was debated, but apparently giving ladies the right to vote along with former slaves was a bridge too far for male legislators in the late 1860s. Not surprisingly, some of the same objections to the 14th admendment were recycled to argue against the 15th: omigod the Irish might vote! What about the Chinese? It probably helped that states would still control voting (when, where, limiting eligibility through requiring literacy tests or poll taxes, all of which and more states did in attempts to limit who actually got to vote). The amendment passed both houses of Congress in 1869 and was sent to the states for ratification, which took less than a year. 

So what did I learn from this book other than the basic facts? Well, it's pretty clear that there will always be some shit weasels politicians who worry a lot more about hanging on to their Congressional seat than they do about what's good for the country. It's also clear that the current criticisms of birthright citizenship aren't new. They're recycled bigotry from the 1860s. Ditto voting rights. There have always been and probably always will be people who think the ideal voting population consists of one person: one rich guy who's willing to subsidize your preferred lifestyle. Therefore the goal becomes to make voting harder, thus thinning the voting pool. Ecclesiastes 1:9. 

Weather

The U.P. had an actual tornado this past week. It was major news. The Marquette Mining Journal has had it as a headline/front page news on their website for multiple days now. This area rarely experiences tornadoes. Granted, it was probably the lowest setting for a tornado, an EF-0, but the National Weather Service says, yes, actual tornado. Based on what was visible on social media, residents closest to the event reacted as though they've been tornado watching in Alabama or Arkansas for decades: lots of video taken by people who decided the best place to be while observing an approaching twister was on their front porch filming it. 

Voting

Our absentee ballots arrived a couple days ago. Michigan's primary is August 4. I suppose I should get the thing filled out and dropped off at the township clerk's office. There's a drop box to use when the office is closed (which is most of the time; rural township with part-time staffing) so no dealing with the post office and hoping the ballot doesn't end up re-routed through Chicago. Mail vanishes for years if it ends routed through Chicago.

I have not actually looked at what all is on the ballot this time. Michigan does an open primary so I have been toying with voting Republican simply because our current carpetbagging Congress critter actually has some opposition. It's not the usual pattern of the incumbent being guaranteed another shot at doing nothing for two years, which is good. One thing that always depresses me is seeing incumbents running unopposed. 

I have no idea just how deranged the person running against Jack Bergmann is -- for all I know he's even farther out in the right wing weeds than Bergmann -- but I figure just seeing that someone is running against Bergmann is a good sign. Even if Bergmann wins the primary I'm thinking it would be nice to make the carpetbagger nervous when he sees opponents got actual votes. 

Bergmann deserves the label of carpetbagger. As far as anyone can tell, he's never actually lived in Michigan. What he claims as his Michigan residence is a deer hunting camp near Watersmeet. Running (and unfortunately winning) offices in states where Republicans don't actually live seems to be a pattern. Mike Rogers, one of the Republicans running for Senate this year is rumored to be a Florida resident, and of course there's the classic Alabama case. Tommy Tuberville (current U.S. senator and candidate for Governor in Alabama) has been accused multiple times of not living in Alabama anymore. He did live in the state when he coached college football at Auburn, but that was decades ago.  

Mike Rogers, for what it's worth, was recently thoroughly mocked in social media when his campaign photo shopped his picture. They took a routine, totally normal shot of Rogers in an outdoor setting, probably from a public appearance of some sort, and decided it would be a good idea to do a bizarre turning an ordinary, slightly portly and definitely middle-aged dude into Conan the Barbarian or some other muscle-bound he-man. 6-pack abs, muscular biceps, the whole "I'm competing in body building contests in my spare time" look. It was bizarre. It drew laughs. 

On the other hand, Rogers can actually claim to have a connection with Michigan. He was born in the downer peninsula, graduated from Adrian College, and was a Michigan Congressman until he apparently got bored with politicking. He left Congress, picked up some gigs doing commentary on CNN and elsewhere, and got himself a comfortable retirement home in Florida. Starting a few years ago, he's been trying to get back into an elected office. He ran for U.S. Senate when Senator Stabenow retired; he lost to Elissa Slotkin. Now he's trying again to win the seat being vacated by Senator Peters.

There was a time when I would have agreed with the Wall Street Journal that Rogers belonged to the sane branch of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, once he started lusting after a Senate seat he decided to chug the Trump Kool Aid and went all in on election denial and other Mango Mussolini obsessions. At this point in time, I'm hoping that Abdul El-Sayed ends up as the Democratic nominee for Senate and goes on to destroy Rogers in the general election in November. I'm probably dreaming about El-Sayed -- he's been endorsed by Bernie Sanders so you know the Republicans are going to be screaming about godless communism -- but a girl can fantasize. 

Buffalo National River: Indian Rockhouse Trail and Rush Historic District

Old store building in Rush Historic District

Buffalo National River has always been one of my favorite parks. I loved going there back when the Park Service paid me to count buildings and bushes (also known as updating two National Park Service databases, the List of Classified Structures and the Cultural Landscapes Inventory) and I like going there as a tourist. I have toyed with the idea of volunteering to be campground hosts at Buffalo but unfortunately the usual camping season in Arkansas includes months like July and August. No one, probably not even people born in the state, really wants to be in Arkansas in August. 

Also, to be totally honest, the roads into some of the campgrounds at Buffalo scare the crap out of me. I never minded the drive down to the Steel Creek campground in a car but would not be real thrilled to tow a decent sized trailer down to the river. Or, for that matter, to have the fun of dragging that trailer back up a steep hill that seems to last forever. Ditto the Buffalo Point campground. Nicely laid out a gazillion years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps and located right on the river with a lovely little beach but featuring a long winding drive down on what feels like a steeper than average grade. (Steeper than average grade applies to a lot of roads in the Ozarks, both in Arkansas and Missouri, not just campground access roads.) 

This past March I persuaded the S.O. and the Younger Daughter that it would be nice to spend the first weekend of Spring at Buffalo Point. Buffalo Point is on the eastern end of Buffalo National River and was a state park prior to the U.S. government creating Buffalo National River. Once the National River was in place, Buffalo Point became an NPS site. Today Buffalo Point includes the campground (a fairly big one), the Indian Rockhouse Trail (rated as moderate to hard), rental cabins, a contact station (small visitor center), and a restaurant that's open seasonally. The Rush Historic District is farther down the river and requires driving several miles around on county roads to get to it. We rented a cabin at Buffalo Point. It was fairly spartan, but nice. I'd stay there again. 

Back wall of the Indian Rockhouse with stalactites

Prior to going to Buffalo Point, I had talked the Indian Rockhouse Trail up to the Y.D. It's called the Indian Rockhouse Trail because its key feature is a bluff shelter, a not quite a cave but close to it. When the state park was established in the 1930s archeologists excavated the Rockhouse. They found tons of evidence that the shelter had been used for possibly thousands of years. Bluff shelters like it are pretty common in Arkansas, although usually the typical shelter isn't quite as spacious as the Indian Rockhouse. It's big enough with a high ceiling and going back quite a few feet that it has actual cave formations (stalactites and stalagmites; one of the latter looks remarkably phallic but is a natural rock and not an example of pre-contact porn. It wasn't just my dirty mind that picked up on the similarity. I overheard several other hikers comment on the fact that the stalagmite several kids were climbing on looked like a dick). It's a popular site within the park. The parking lot at the trailhead usually fills up fast on nice days regardless of time of year. At one time, back in the state park days, there was a road. Park visitors could drive to within maybe a quarter mile of the Rockhouse. There's still one small section of paved road left, but it might be hard to figure out just exactly how that old road ran. But, as usual, I digress. 

Back in my Park Service days I hiked that trail several times. I did not view it as much of a challenge. It's an interesting 3 mile loop that includes a variety of terrain and passes several historic and natural features, like a small waterfall and an abandoned exploratory mine excavation -- it's a site where prospectors hoped to find zinc but didn't find enough to make it worth it to continue digging. The trail never raised any issues when I'd zipped over it before. It does have a fair amount of climbing involved to get back up to the trailhead, but it's not particularly hard trail. As the photo below shows, the trail can be easy walking. Or so I thought. 

Section of the trail that parallels Panther Creek

Of course, those happy hiking experiences were about 20 years ago and it was all pre-vertigo. My sense of balance has been kind of hit or miss for the past couple years (one of these days I really need to see an otolaryngologist to determine if it's an inner ear problem or something else) but I still figured no problem, especially when I'd be hiking with the kid. If I had issues she could always grab me by the ankles and drag me back to the parking lot. Turned out the uneven steps on the steeper parts of the trail were a definite issue. Not only is my sense of balance screwed up, so is my depth perception. The first two miles on the trail were fine, and then the vertigo kicked in. Stepping up or stepping down was interesting. My mind would not process just how high or low a step was, things would start spinning, and then the nausea hit. I lost count of how many times I puked so we wound up moving rather slowly on the last half mile. In short, my hiking days may be over, at least on any trail longer than a short shuffle from the parking lot.

It was a lovely day, lots of other hikers out and about. It did not help my mood a whole lot while sitting on a convenient rock hoping the sick feeling would go away to be treated to the sight of preschoolers in Crocs or sandals skipping merrily by. Like I said, it's normally not a difficult trail. You're not going to be able to push a stroller with an infant but if a child can walk and has the stamina for a 3 mile hike (and show me a preschooler who does not have energy to burn and you'll be showing me a rare child indeed) it's a no-real-issues trail. It was gorgeous Saturday so there were a lot of families at the park.

Ruins of a mining structure at Rush

Fortunately, doing a short walk at Rush the following day went smoothly. No dizziness, no weirdness, and no problems going down a short flight of stairs. It was little depressing to see how much has been lost at Rush. Several structures that were still standing in 2006 have since been destroyed by arsonists and of course age and weather have not been kind to the surviving structures. After we got back to Hot Springs I made the mistake of reading the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Rush as a historic district. It is a great district nomination. Well written, nice succinct explanation for significance, and an extensive list of contributing structures. The nomination was submitted in 1986. 

When Suzie Rogers (the park historian) researched and wrote the nomination there were multiple buildings still standing. In fact, Susie lived in one of them. That building stopped being usable as park staff housing when the Buffalo hit record flood levels -- I have a vague memory of Suzie describing being evacuated by boat, which struck me at the time as moderately amazing because the house was not close to the river. Then again, Rush is one of those places where it would be easy to get trapped by a flood. You have to cross Rush Creek to get out and if it was flooded, too, you'd be stuck. When I was at Rush 20 years ago the building Suzie had lived in was still a real building, complete with four walls and a roof, although no longer usable due to damage sustained in the flood a few years earlier. Today it's basically the foundation being swallowed by brush. Depressing. 

One of the few surviving buildings at Rush. NPS desperately needs to do vegetation management, but that's not likely to happen when the park is short staffed. 

As to why a ghost town like Rush merited being a historic district the answer is, of course, its long association with zinc mining. Zinc is apparently a fairly easy mineral to mine. There were literally dozens of zinc mines in the general area of Rush. Some of the mine workings were just barely above the size of a small borrow pit and some literally hollowed out a mountain. I was told some of the mines were humongous. Miners used a room and pillar method in the mines and some of the "rooms" apparently were cathedral size, i.e., huge and echoing. For awhile Rush was popular with the suicidal spelunkers who like exploring and mapping abandoned mines but bat gates on the adits stopped most of that. Part of me regretted the adits being gated (I would have liked to see the large rooms) but the sane part of me was relieved. Anyone going into an abandoned mine is an idiot. Even in a super stable geologic stratum rock ceilings spall on a regular basis, and not just in mines. At Indian Rockhouse you can tell by looking at the ceiling that a fairly large chunk peeled off naturally at some point in the not-too-distant past. (Russell Cave National Monument in Alabama has a cave ceiling problem. The Park Service has tried to keep the ceiling from falling there but I'm not sure they've come up with a good solution yet.)

Silver smelter at Rush

One of the things that is rather amazing from a 21st century perspective is just how far the zinc ore got hauled. An area now designated as wilderness includes the route for a wagon road. Zinc ore got hauled by wagon downriver to Buffalo City, which is where the Buffalo and White Rivers meet. Having spent time driving back roads in the Ozarks it astounds me that a lowly metal like zinc would be worth hauling by mule or oxen-dragged wagons over some truly shit terrain. I know it's an important metal used in a lot of alloys and for various purposes, but it's not exactly in the same ballpark as metals like silver. 

The zinc miners did originally believe they were going to find silver. The first major mining company at Rush built a smelter to process the ore for silver. It was an understandable hope. The Google tells me zinc and silver are often found together. Not, however, at Rush. After the smelter was built, the mining company ran it one time. According to historic descriptions, the smelter yielded some lovely colorful smoke and absolutely no silver. The smelter was never fired again. It is one of the structures that has survived quite well at Rush, probably because it was built so solidly no one ever felt like dissembling it to re-use the stone elsewhere. 

Pulitzer Project: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel

I had a mixed reaction to this particular novel. My initial reaction was, wow, finally found a Pulitzer winner that might hit the high end of my rating scale.  Michael Chabon can write, every sentence is beautifully crafted, the various bits of trivia that the novel is salted with are intriguing, but, holy wah, Chabon could have used a better copy editor.

Remember me saying that a fat Pulitzer winner is never a good sign? That's definitely true for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It would be a much better book if it was considerably shorter, like maybe 200 or so pages shorter. The copy I had was a trade paperback and did not look like it was potential doorstop material, but it turned out to be 640+ pages filled with a font small enough that it came close to me reaching for the magnifying glass I use when doing counted cross stitch. Admittedly the first two-thirds of the book flowed sufficiently well that the tiny font didn't bother me much, but then I hit Antarctica. 

Why Chabon decided to stick one of his protagonists at a remote station in Antarctica during World War II is baffling. The Antarctica section was admittedly a slog. A reader should not be thinking "What is the fucking point?!" Maybe Chabon decided that he really needed to detail every second of Josef Kavalier's experience but it honestly did not seem to add anything to the book overall, at least not for me.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay follows the lives of two cousins, Josef Kavalier and Samuel Clayman. Both are in their late teens when Joe arrives in the United States as a refugee from Prague. The Kavalier and Clayman families are Jewish, it's the 1930s, Nazis are now in control in Czechoslovakia, and life is getting scarier for anyone Jewish. The Kavaliers decide Josef should go to America to stay with relatives there. 

After Joe arrives in New York, it turns out he and his cousin share a love of comic books. It's a time when comics are just taking off, the whole phenomenon of Superman has every would-be commercial artist excited and trying to figure out how to get in on the action. Joe is an extremely talented artist, Sam not quite as good at drawing but great at plot lines. Together they push the idea of a new superhero, the Escapist, persuade a publisher to develop the concept, and do quite well for a couple years. Joe has been stashing money in the bank to eventually pay for his family back in Prague to get out of Europe. Then the world changes. On the same day Joe learns that his younger brother died enroute to the U.S. the Japanese government bombs Pearl Harbor. Joe's response to hearing that his brother drowned when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship carrying refugees is to immediately enlist in the Navy. He is determined to kill Germans. His burning desire for revenge is thwarted, though, by the Navy's decision to train him as a radio operator and ship him to a tiny station in Antarctica. 

Back in New York Sam is slowly coming to terms with being homosexual. He does what many (most) gay men did in the U.S. in the 1940s: he works hard at staying thoroughly closeted. He marries his cousin Joe's pregnant girlfriend Rosa and presents as the stereotypical suburban dad. He has occasional discrete meetings with other young closeted men while being quietly conflicted and miserable. He had been given the opportunity to go to Hollywood with his first lover, an actor, in December 1941 but had panicked at the last minute. He stayed in New York and then steps up to marry Rosa when Joe enlists without knowing fatherhood is imminent. Time moves on, twelve years pass, and Joe returns. And that's when Chabon decides to wrap things up quickly. After almost 600 pages of meandering, chatty, and, to be totally honest, engaging text Joe, Sam, and Rosa manage to tie up all the loose ends in remarkably few pages. 

So, general conclusions about this book? Definitely a mixed reaction. On the one hand, Chabon is really good with words. Reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was not work. The book flows. I came really close to telling myself I'd finally hit a 10 on my rating scale. And then I hit the Antarctica section. Okay. As that narrative bit advanced it got weirder and weirder. Reacting to a book by muttering "What the fuck. . .?" a lot is never a good sign. 

So would I recommend it to other readers? Maybe. Chabon can write. If a person has read anything else by him (The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Wonder Boys, Telegraph Avenue) that reader is going to expect Chabon's discursive style. If the prospective reader has never read anything by Chabon The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay might be a bit much. Still, even with the odd Antarctica section the book is way more readable than most of the previous Pulitzer fiction winners. Does it qualify as a beach book? I'd say yes. The discursive style can make it hard to put the book down, which means it's perfect for long hours on a chaise lounge or beach towel while slathered in Coppertone. Just remember to hydrate. 

Next up if I keep moving up the list chronologically is Empire Falls by Richard Russo, another book and author I know nothing about. Unless, of course, American Pastoral falls from the skies (or from Thrift books) and I get to do a step backwards. 

 

You know you've slid past your sell by date

If you've ever wondered if you've turned into one of those grumpy, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn codgers here's an easy test: have you begun pissing and moaning about how the younger generations are (take your pick) lazy, don't appreciate craftsmanship, are addicted to their phones, or simply aren't up to snuff compared to your generation? If you have, if you think there's something wrong with Gen X, millennials, Gen Z or whatever we've decided to call the kids currently in high school, because they're doing things differently than you did then congratulations. Welcome to silly old duffer-hood. 

People have been complaining about generations other than their own for as long as there have been people. There's the famous quote attributed to Plato about disrespectful young people who'd rather party than work -- Plato died 347 years before the birth of Christ. Obviously, sneering at Gen Z isn't new. 

Because I have way too much time on my hands (the joys of retirement), I wandered around the Intertubes looking for good quotes, memes, pithy insights on this particular topic: old people sneering at young people; young people sneering back. Why do people do it? According to psychologists, it's totally common for geezers to have unrealistic memories of their misspent youth. The grass was greener, society was mellower, school was fine, and their friends were fun. They usually don't remember classmates dying from measles or polio, but their memories of Crusader Rabbit (and his friend Rags the Tiger) are crystal clear. In their septuagenarian minds, everyone had lifestyles like on The Donna Reed Show or Leave it to Beaver.  

I do recall a kid about the same age as me suffering horribly from whooping cough when I was about 8 years old, but other than odd bits like that my own childhood and adolescent memories don't include much bad stuff, unless a giraffe snatching a hat off my mother's head when we went to a circus counts. My mom was upset about that hat. It might have been the last time she wore one so obviously it was traumatic for her. 

As for looking at it from the other direction, to anyone in their teens or early twenties now the folks who have survived past 30 might as well have one foot in the grave. Old people (and the cutoff for "old" is set rather low from the perspective of someone who passed that cutoff quite a few years ago) are technological dummies who need their grandkids help in turning on their phones. 

I'm not real big on including videos in posts, but this one does seem appropriate.

Shiloh National Battlefield

AKA Shiloh National Military Park.

Back when I worked for the National Park Service jokes about "cannonball parks" were common. Cannonball parks tend to attract two kinds of visitors: military history nerds and dog walkers. I have no clue what type of underground network exists among dog owners to alert them to the charms of walking Fido in a cannonball park but every cannonball park I've been to had more dog walkers than "real" visitors. Even Shiloh, which isn't exactly on the edge of a housing development like Kennesaw Mountain, had a dude walking two dogs in the rain. And there are almost always a zillion monuments to various dead troops. Thus, I'll confess doing site visits to places like Wilson's Creek didn't thrill me even though Wilson's Creek is refreshingly monument-free.  

Military history has never been a strong interest of mine and, let's be honest, a battlefield is a remarkably depressing place. You get to walk around a site that witnessed incredible carnage and then learn that despite thousands of people dying or being horribly wounded the battle didn't resolve much. Shiloh gets designated as the first major battle in the Civil War but all it seems to have accomplished is hundreds of bodies wound up in mass graves. The battle was in April 1862. The war didn't end for another three years. 

But I digress. Shiloh is the first cannonball park I've visited that really flaunts its cannonballs. Giant stacks of fake ones. They're prominent site markers for where various officers had their headquarters. The one shown commemorates the battlefield headquarters of brigadier general Thomas Sweeny, an Irish immigrant and Union officer. 

There's a sizable collection of other monuments, too. most dating from the 1920s. The one for Tennessee shows up on postcards, magnets, and other park memorabilia. It is, as such things go, not a bad looking monument. The scale is reasonable and the design isn't weird. It pays tribute to fallen soldiers with an obviously dead guy still gripping the stars and bars. It also makes sense that it would be a prominent memorial; the battlefield is in Tennessee and Mississippi so of course Tennessee is going to want something nice. Mississippi also has a decent monument, nothing too over the top but definitely memorializing their troops. (Photo is from a site that provides tips on planning visits to national parks.) 

Shiloh was interesting. I was glad we took the time to check it out. I did not know that it was the very first Civil War battlefield to be proclaimed a national battlefield. That happened early enough that Civil War veterans, both Union and CSA, were able to actively push for the commemoration and to attend ceremonies at the battlefield. As usual, the Park has a decent visitor center with nicely designed exhibits with historic artifacts and bits of trivia to flesh out the basic narrative (two day battle that CSA officers thought they were winning after the first day but then Union reinforcements arrived and Grant, Sherman, et al. pushed the CSA troops into retreating). The visitor center video describing the battle was good as it used the perspectives of ordinary troops on both sides. Decent casting for the re-enactments, too, which was a bonus. 

As far as I could tell, based on my admittedly thin knowledge of the war and the various officers involved on both sides, the most consequential effect of the battle was the death of General Albert Sidney Johnston. Johnston bled out from what he thought was a minor wound to the back of his leg. It took several hours for the blood loss to hit. By the time it sank in that he was seriously wounded, he'd lost too much blood and could not be saved. One of the most effective officers the CSA had, Johnston's death was a major blow to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis notably said "[W]hen Sidney Johnston fell, it was the turning-point of our fate; for we had no other hand to take up his work in the West." Given that both armies had an over-abundance of incompetent, lazy, or generally useless officers I'm not sure that's true. 

One of my co-workers in Omaha actually worked at Shiloh when the author Tony Horowitz visited as part of researching the book that became Confederates in the Attic. He always claimed Horowitz quoted him in the book, but if he did it wasn't obvious when I read it. The co-worker's favorite fantasy was to somehow get back to Shiloh as Superintendent. I have no idea if the dude succeeded. It always struck me as a weird ambition, but who knows? Maybe he was originally from that part of Mississippi or Tennessee so it wasn't so much the park attracting him as it was him just wanting to get back home. I've mentioned before the penchant of some superintendents to snag their dream retirement location as a duty station for their final high three with the agency.