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March 1, 2014

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Excursion 17 (9/5/20130

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Excursion 17, Part 1 (The Eagle Has Landed)

In which our intrepid hero encounters an unusual eyrie…

I saw a UFO once.  I use this term in its literal sense—an unidentified flying object—rather than as a synonym for “flying saucer” or “alien spacecraft.”  I was probably about 13 or 14 years old at the time.  It was very early in the morning—I was outside putting stuff in the car, as my family was getting ready to go on some trip (one of our rare vacation trips, I suppose).  The sky was perfectly clear and I just happened to notice an odd little circle hovering high up in the sky.  It was extremely tiny and I was kind of surprised I even managed to see it in the first place.  I couldn’t figure out what it was, and neither could my family.  My father suggested getting his spotting scope, so we brought it outside and looked at the object through it.  Even through the spotting scope, we couldn’t really make out any details.  We eventually decided it was most likely a weather balloon, which I still think is the most likely explanation.

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January 12, 2014

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Excursion 14 (7/13/2013)

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Excursion 14, Part 4 (Alone in East Liverpool)

In which our intrepid hero explores the empty streets of East Liverpool…

I was 21 in 1988 when I learned I would be moving to Ohio (to go to graduate school).  I knew nothing about Ohio.  The mental image I had was a jumble of snow storms and rubber factories, all with healthy sprinkling of “Rust Belt.”  I discovered, of course, that Ohio is a wonderful and varied place—this blog itself is sort of an ode to the state.  But it is certainly true that there is a Rust Belt and certainly true that Ohio is one of the states at its center.  Ohio cities like Akron, Youngstown, Toledo, Dayton, and others were thriving industrial cities.  Ohio boasted steel mills, automobile factories, all sorts of heavy industry.  Much of that is gone now and although new technologies and new businesses have replaced much of the heavy industry that went to Japan or Korea or China, Ohio has still not recovered from this transformation and probably never will.  Many of the people who had steady factor jobs will simply never make the leap to an information-based economy.  Few assembly line workers can become computer programmers.  Ohio will always have this hole in it, I think.

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January 12, 2014

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Excursion 14 (7/13/2013)

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Excursion 14, Part 3 (On the Trail of John Hunt Morgan)

In which our intrepid hero encounters the ghost of a Confederate general…

The Civil War has long fascinated me.  Of course, on one level it should, as I have a Ph.D. in American military history.  But it began long before that.  I probably have my grandparents to thank for that, because at some point they purchased American Heritage’s Picture History of the Civil War (1960) for my uncle Dennis, when he was a child.  This amazing book, containing fascinating diagrammatic paintings of battlefields and text written by famed Civil War historian Bruce Catton, remains today about as perfect an introduction to the Civil War as I could imagine.  I soon discovered that they had related gems on their living room bookshelves, including Reader’s Digest abbreviated versions of some of Catton’s histories.  These were among the earliest books I read on military history and certainly had a lifelong influence on me.  They also produced another effect on me that still lasts, too—a wistful realization of the immutability of history.  Sadly, no matter how many books on the Civil War I read, no matter what new material they may uncover, McClellan never manages to take Richmond; Hooker always loses his nerve.  It is Groundhog Day, but where Bill Murray never changes.

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September 6, 2013

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Excursion 9 (6/1/2013)

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Excursion 9, Part 4 (The Safe House)

In which our intrepid hero discovers the safe that could not save itself…

For the past 18 years, I have had to travel a lot for work.  That means a lot of stays in hotels.  After all these years, I know exactly what I want and don’t want from hotels (don’t worry, I won’t list them).  Hotels rarely surprise me, although sometimes they definitely still do.  Things were a lot different when I was a kid, though.  Hotels—or, more typically, motels—were rare and strange creatures.  We could rarely afford to travel much, so the few vacations I went on as a kid are pretty much engrained on my mind.  They weren’t really very far—places you could get to by car—and were all in the Southwest:  Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, etc.  As a kid, I found motels both exciting and a drag.  They were a drag, because we’d typically get a room with two double beds and my sister and I would have to share a bed and we got little sleep (plus, my parents snored).  But on the other hand, they were unbelievably cool.  Even things like ice machines seemed strange and exotic.   There was stationery in every room!  More than once, we had those “Magic Fingers” beds you could pay a quarter to have vibrate.  We couldn’t get enough of that.

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August 24, 2013

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Excursion 8 (5/19/2013)

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Excursion 8, Part 6 (Justice for Jake and Ella)

In which our intrepid hero discovers a mysterious death…

There was a poll conducted not long before I write this (in late August 2013, three months after this excursion), in which the pollsters gleefully revealed that a substantial percentage of Louisiana Republicans blamed Obama for the failure of the federal government in dealing with Hurricane Katrina.  The point, of course, is that Obama was not even president at the time, but rather a freshman senator from Illinois who had nothing to do with Katrina, good or bad.  What I think this speaks to more generally is how flexible people can be—flexible in terms of things ranging from memory to burdens of proof—when something they want to be true (or not true) is on the line.  Think of conspiracy theorists, for example.  Pick a conspiracy theory:  UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the New World Order, 9/11, you name it.  Conspiracy theorists generally impose an impossible burden of proof to accept contentions by non-conspiracists while simultaneously lowing all barriers of critical thinking when it comes to accepting contentions or evidence from like-minded people.  This is true for more than simply conspiracy theories or political beliefs; it actually happens quite a bit in ordinary life as well.

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July 21, 2013

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Excursion 7 (5/9/2013)

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Excursion 7, Part 4 (The Tin Trojans)

In which our intrepid hero encounters Trojan horses of a most unusual kind…

Let me declare flat out that unexpected pleasures are the best pleasures.  A gift is better if you don’t know what it is, better still if unanticipated.  Case in point:  twenty years ago, a local movie theater held a week-long series of Hong Kong films.  This was long before Americans knew who Jackie Chan was and Hong Kong cinema was known primarily to cinephiles.  I myself had never seen a Hong Kong film at that point, so I decided to go see one of the movies.  This was the 1993 film The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk.  I knew absolutely nothing about this film—and this was before the World Wide Web—so I found myself in a situation that I pretty much never am in, going to see a movie completely blind about it.  I didn’t know the cast, the plot, the concept, nothing.   To my delight and surprise, the movie, an action-comedy, turned out to be extremely entertaining.  Because I had no expectations for the film at all (I didn’t even know it would be a comedy), the fact that it turned out to be pretty decent made it even better, because it was so unexpected.  Even the smallest pleasures get magnified when they come unannounced.

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July 7, 2013

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Excursion 6 (5/4/2013)

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Excursion 6, Part 5 (A Barn Doomed to Disappointment)

In which our intrepid hero is reminded that the world is always changing…

It’s amazing how very different we can feel depending on whether or not we are going somewhere or returning from somewhere.  The leaving is filled with expectation—hopefully a happy, excited sort of expectation, but we all know we sometimes leave towards destinations we dread.  The return, though, is usually completely different.  Sometimes we are simply anxious to get home and it doesn’t even matter what is around us—we have only that one thought in mind:  GET HOME.  Sometimes we are more relaxed about it and can enjoy the journey, understanding that at its end is the comfort and familiarity of home.  I remember once, when I was in high school, returning home in the darkness from some interminable bus ride from somewhere in west Texas.  I had a Walkman with me and was playing Simon & Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park.  When the song “Homeward Bound” played, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  As I’ve grown older (and am now pretty close to the half century mark), the song has only become more powerful to me and if I ever hear it while I am coming back from a long trip I get quite melancholic.

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