Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
Well, here I am back in Palo Alto the good, having missed the first two weeks of classes, and definitely not on the Dean's good books until I unleashed all my feminine wiles and broached the unbroachable. We agreed between us that as the blessed event is not until May, I can finish and graduate on time, and after that it is between me and the California Bar. So that is all that done as long as I can just finish third year, which may or may not be the complete formality my classmates think it is!
Reggie says that he is absolutely fine with everyday squadron service as long as his home port is somewhere as exciting as Morocco, and that he can't wait for me to join him and help him find out about Moroccan cooking. I will be over before Christmas, but if previous experience is any guide, I won't be up for exotic food!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: I notice on rereading that I intimated that there are stories about Justice Douglas. No, I am not repeating them.
St. Nicholas, Washington Irving tells us, was first seen by a Dutch scouting party checking out Manhattan. Shipwrecked on its shores, they had a vision in which good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children." St. Nicholas becomes the founding father of New York, which is why he is the patron of he New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804, and to which Washington Irving belonged when, in 1809, he published this in an extended parody of Samuel L. Mitchell's Picture of New-York, the publishing sensastion that was Irving's History of New-York. The history of Santa Claus being a crowded field, especially at this time of the year, I'll leave the rest to silence except for the confusion of dates for St. Nicholas' advent, whether on the 6th of December, the 24th, 25th, or New Year's Eve, and the indigenous North American parallel that seems relevant here, Le canoe volant, or, as the Wikipedia entry more primly has it, La Chasse-galerie, which in the story carries voyageurs home to their loved ones on New Years Eve. And, as always, I should acknowledge the brilliant connection that Lauren Golf makes between the legend of the flying canoe and the Sullivan Expedition, or boats floating above the flooded countryside in general.
But "the first Christmas" in North America was at the second permanent European colony in North America, Port Royal, Nova Scotia. It was celebrated by Samuel de Champlain, Membertou, the sachem of the Micmacs, and Champlain's Order of Good Cheer, more than two centuries before in 1605.
We are in a little hotel just outside of Maastricht, which I know was not in our itinerary, but we were having so much fun cycling on the Rhine that we decided to make a trip down the Moselle and extend our stay by a day, returning via Rotterdam aboard Cebu Queen, as what is the point of being an international shipping heiress if you can't get a berth on short notice. We have many pictures to show you, but none taken after dark, which threatens any minute due to brownouts, which are not one of the things about Europe that I will miss. I will talk to you about our meetings with the captains in Rotterdam when we get back. Not much to worry about, but there were some concerns expressed, mainly about an expected increase in traffic from the mainland due to Mao being increasingly erratic. Or so I'm told, anyway.
The Atlantic Seaboard Fall Line is one of those things that everyone talks about and nobody explains. The Wikipedia article has it as a "900 mile escarpment where the Piedmont and Atlantic coastal plain meet in the eastern United States." To save the reader the bother of clicking through, "the Piedmont" is defined as a plateau region between the same coastal plain and "the main Appalachian mountains." The Fall Line is also the boundary between a "hard metamorphised terrain" and the sandy and flat alluvial plain to its east, consisting of "unconsolidated sediments."
In other words, the plain is the bit with no rocks, which was probably fairly important to the Neolithic people who lived along that coast, and always puts me in mind of the execution of John Ratcliffe by vivisection with mussel shells, which seems like some kind of ritualistic statement about a paramount chief's obligation to trade for workable stone. Or maybe that's just because I was sucked into watching clips from Maximilianon Youtube when I should have been writing this.
The map of the Fall Line here, apart from being very colourful, ends at the New Jersey/New York Palisades and therefore omits the palisade over which the Mohawk tumbles to the Hudson in New York, the rapids that powered the mills of Springfield and Lowell, Massachusetts, and the ones on the St. Lawrence upstream from Montreal that blocked Cartier and Champlain's way to Asia.
I hope this finds you well and in the hands of Fat Chow in Trail, and not still taking the waters. I am couriering this from Paris so I can report on our banquet with the captains and Our Man on "Poverty Row" in Le Havre last Saturday. The captains seemed content with their gratuities, so hopefully there will be no leaks like the ones that some of our competition have suffered. (It helps that none of our boats sprang a leak off Ireland.) On the downside, there's going to be some bad movies. As our man says, there will be no more trucks of silver nitrate arriving at the studio, and "Every time a truckload of film pulls up, the neighbours just say that we're getting ready to do another stinker."
Before our meeting with Fat Chow, we at least got to do some sightseeing and general tourist things in Normandy, and EAT! I haven't had FOOD since we left Formosa, and how I've missed it! California has a lot of things, but it could really do with some good restaurants. The rest of my impressions of France, including a decent chance to see parts of Paris that aren't mainly for intrigue and smuggling, are going to be delayed until I actually do them, so, starting tomorrow, and coming to you by the surface mail.
So the original plan was to write Postblogging Technology, August 1952, II: Clever Subtitle, I Wish, this weekend. But then two things happened. First, my final week of holidays for 2022, reappeared after getting itself mysteriously lost last month. (Just kidding, I know exactly what happened to it, but I don't see that there's much reason to press one schedule writer's screw-up if he's not inclined to own up to it.)
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not at my best planning around weeks off that appear on my work schedule with four hours' notice. Second, my flu shot is scheduled for tonight, which might or might not wipe me out tomorrow.
The upshot is that I'm going to write the postblog starting tomorrow and then head off to Vancouver Island for the weekend to meet up with my Mom and my godlike sister-in-law and my bigshot brother who is a doctor and also my bigshot nephew who is also now a doctor. (And getting married! Whoo-hooh, M.!) And also maybe the other nephews and nieces on that side, depending.
So instead here's some technological appendixing, about what might be, depending on how this whole "global warming" thing plays out, the most historically significant single highway in all of human history. (If we do, it's the Royal Road.)
Wikipedia lays out the story in a more accessible way than a seventy-year-old number of Engineering: Interstate traffic from New York through Philadelphia, the first and third largest cities in the country, combined in northern New Jersey with traffic for the capital and the South and with western traffic via the Pennsylvania Turnpike to create intolerable congestion for New Jerseyites as automobile use advanced through the Jazz Age. Then, a combination of the Depression and World War II prevented any more gradual remediation until by 1948, the situation was intolerable, leading to capos getting separated from carloads of bodyguards on the Jones Beach Causeway, with unfortunate consequences.
The Governor of New Jersey therefore authorised a "turnpike," or toll-supported highway, to run from the George Washington Bridge connecting New Jersey with Manhattan, to the Delaware Memorial Bridge (actually, an interchange next to the bridge; close enough). On 5 November 1951 (but not really, because of delays in deliveries of the rolled steel components of the Hackensack and Passiac river bridges) only three years later, the Turnpike opened to traffic, which is only a bit less astonishing than the schedule of its complementing Delaware Memorial Bridge, begun on 1 February 1949 and opened on 16 August 1952. (Between province and city, we have a commitment, announced 2 October 2019, to replace the George Massey Tunnel under the main channel of the Fraser River between Richmond and Delta with an eight-lane tunnel that will be completed in "2030.")
It has been a frantic week as Reggie received last minute instructions ordering him to the naval laboratory at Woods Hole for top secret discussions of top secret stuff related to listening for submarines from ground stations, and then back to New York in time to catch our liner. I was to have a fine time catching up with Miss K., who has since last I was part of her circle completed an MA in French at the University of California, and who was on her way to Paris for PhD studies. Unfortunately for me, although not for her, a whirlwind shipboard romance supervened (and I think she has doubts about doctoral studies, anyway, and is more interested in authorship). So I have seen absolutely nothing of her, the Sorbonne will see nothing of her, and perhaps I was there to see the salad days of one of the writers who will answer John Pierce's call for a more serious kind of science fiction!
And I had the time to finish this letter, while my darling bones up on the physics of computed acoustics, or some such. It has Fourier and Laplace transforms, anyway. Whatever those are, for I fear that closer exposure will leave me an irremediable neuropsychiatric case! (Whatever happened to shell shock? I can spell shell shock without pausing and using my fingers to remind myself that the "y" comes before the "c." When I write in English, I mean. Or type it, which is the real issue.)
