As I age, I am more and more drawn to history. Surveys report few students these days find history interesting. The 1998 book, The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir will dispel this notion. The book, which covers the 45 years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, is a page-turner. It is hard to put down and provides a fascinating, intimate and detailed look into the life of the last of the Tudor sovereigns, as well as the many fascinating characters that populated her court.
Elizabeth was born in 1533 to Anne Boleyn, one of King Henry VIII’s many wives who he found convenient to have executed. Having your mother executed by your father is a very traumatic thing for any daughter to deal with. Elizabeth herself once came close to being executed too and spent many months in the Tower of London. She was imprisoned by her half sister Queen Mary I for her Protestant faith. In the end, she was released and a dying Queen Mary permitted her to succeed her. She was crowned at age 25 and reigned for 45 long years. She remains one of England’s longest serving sovereigns. England’s current queen, Queen Elizabeth II, is one of the few to serve longer. During her reign, luminaries like William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon were contemporaries.
Those lusting for a female president would find her a great example of a female leader. She was very well educated and spoke fluently in French, German, Latin, Spanish and Italian. She had thousands of horses at her disposal and was rigorous about morning walks and lengthy horse rides. She had one overriding goal during her reign: keep England out of foreign wars. She did not entirely succeed. While she wanted little to do with war, other countries very much wanted control of England. Spain was her principle enemy. She ended up lending support to Protestant governments fighting Spain, including the Netherlands and France. After her success defeating the Spanish Armada, she became proactive dealing with Spain. She periodically sent her fleet to destroy Spanish ships while they were in harbor. She also attempted to rule Ireland, often unsuccessfully. In general, she had little in the way of imperialistic ambitions. She realized that to the extent that England could get along with other countries it would remain at peace.
Known as The Virgin Queen, she remained a virgin in part because she felt it necessary to ensure England’s security. She had a constant stream of foreign suitors, which continued well past her childbearing years. There is little doubt that she was strongly heterosexual and she even fell in love a few times. She nearly married the French Duke Anjou, who was much younger than she was. However, it is clear that for a time their affections were real. It is even possible that their love was consummated. Elizabeth had much to recommend her as a spouse beyond the prestigious position of being queen. She was an accomplished equestrian, dancer, poet and scholar. She was politically adroit. She kept England at peace for so long by constantly leading on foreign suitors and playing them against each other. Playing the game of romance forestalled many military adventures against England.
She was often despised outside England for her militant Protestantism. She codified the Book of Common Prayer used by the Church of England. The Pope repeatedly offered bounties to anyone who would kill her. King Philip II’s Spanish Armada was one of many attempts that he made to revert England to what he said was the true religion of Roman Catholicism.
All these details are widely known. What Weir does is bring history to life. Elizabeth lived a public and very well documented life. She saw being England’s sovereign as a great responsibility. We are accustomed to presidents who are replaced in four or eight years. She led England’s foreign policy for forty-five years with one single and constant vision. She was both conservative and liberal. She was conservative in the sense that she was not anxious for England to change and wanted very much to preserve the status quo for future generations. She was also notorious niggardly, and ensured her royal household lived well within its means. She was liberal in being unusually compassionate. Perhaps because his father had so few problems having his opponents’ heads removed, she reserved this terrible punishment for a relative few. With every execution, she seemed a bit diminished. For decades, she dithered over the chronic problem of her stepsister, Mary Queen of Scots. Near the end, despite being protected in England, Mary was covertly working to violently overthrow her government and restore Catholicism. Equally traumatic was the execution she ordered late in her reign for her close advisor, Robert Devereux, more commonly known as the Earl of Essex. A headstrong young man with boundless ambition he failed miserably in his attempt to subjugate an Irish rebellion. When he returned to England, he tried to blame Elizabeth for his own failings and used his popularity to try to bring about civil insurrection. He paid with his life.
Catholicism was another constant problem that dominated her reign. After the Church of England was established, England remained full of Catholics, and many remained loyal to the faith. For many years, Elizabeth practiced benign tolerance of Catholicism, and even had some Catholic advisors in her government. As plots against her life and the state multiplied, she found it necessary to oppress Catholics. Eventually they were forbidden to attend mass and were required to attend Church of English services or be taxed. Today these actions would seem quite harsh. In the context of the times and the real need to keep England united, they were sensible strategies.
Elizabeth was also blessed with a coterie of top-notch political advisers, including the ever-present Lord Cecil, essentially her chief of staff and Lord Walsingham, who ran a huge spy apparatus for the state. If you have seen the two movies about Queen Elizabeth I starring Cate Blanchett (my motivation for reading this book), you will grow well acquainted with these two men. Movies can only give you a hint at the complexity of being a sovereign. She had many, many more in her cast of characters over her 45-year reign. She made the occasional misjudgment in her appointments, such as with Lord Essex. Overall though her record of appointing competent people to positions of power was excellent, and would be the envy of all politicians. That she did so over a 45 year reign is an extraordinary accomplishment.
This biography also captures the experience of living in Tudor times in a way that makes you feel as if you were alive back then. The prevalence of disease was a sad and overwhelming fact of life. Few people lived past their fortieth birthday. The plague hit London virtually every summer. The queen’s long life was due to being proactive. During the summer season, while Londoners died of the plague she took annual “progresses” into the English countryside to meet with many lords, ladies and the public. Indeed, she rarely stayed in one place very long. She had dozens of castles at her disposal. She and her court frequently moved from one to the other. There was no one place that she thought of as home.
Most kings and queens lived public and well-documented lives. Few though were kinder and acted in what were truly the best interests of her subjects. It is unsurprising that as a result she was so beloved. Alison Weir provides an exceeding intimate look at this remarkable woman that is compelling and brings history alive. I doubt that anyone can get past the first fifty or so pages of this biography and leave the rest of the book unread. Thanks to Weir’s biography, we are blessed with a human and intimate portrait of a truly remarkable woman. There is no question that in the top ten most influential women of all time, she would be on the list.
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May 11th, 2008 at 01:29pm
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Mark |
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Tags: Books, Queen Elizabeth I
There is no lack of Civil War sites in this country. East of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it is hard to drive a hundred miles without running into a Civil War battlefield. I found that one rather obscure Civil War battle, The Battle of Ox Hill, was fought just a few miles from my house. This sacred battlefield has largely been desecrated. Shopping malls and apartment complexes now occupy grounds where hundreds of Confederate and Union soldiers paid with their lives.
There are also Revolutionary War sites that you can visit. These understandably are fewer and further between. Some of these have also been paved over. For example, the longest battle of the Revolutionary War, The Battle of Long Island, was fought in and around Brooklyn Heights. As you might expect since that time Brooklyn Heights has grown up. There is not much in Brooklyn Heights to remind you of the thousands who died in that long battle.
What about wars fought in the United States before the Revolutionary War? The British probably instigated the first, when in 1670 they laid siege to St. Augustine in Florida, which was then held by the Spanish. For most of us who studied history, The French and Indian War, which was fought from 1754 to 1763, was the first war of significance on the North American continent. Yet it remains a war seemingly lost in history. I did not expect that there were battlefields from the French and Indian War that I could visit. Yet there are.
Over our 22nd anniversary weekend last month, my wife and I ventured into Southwestern Pennsylvania. Our three-day mini holiday gave us ample time to explore the local area. Our trip was fortuitous because it allowed us to become acquainted with Fort Necessity. It is one of the few sites within the United States where the French and Indian War was fought. The more exciting parts of the war were fought in Quebec. The British eventually won the war. The spoils included most of the land in North America east of the Mississippi. This was not a bad deal for seven years of warfare.
The instigation of this war had long faded from my memory. A visit to Fort Necessity near Farmington, Pennsylvania helped jog my memory. It was at Fort Necessity that the father of our country George Washington suffered his first and only military defeat.
In 1754, there was no United States of America. George Washington was then a 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel for the British Army. He commanded a garrison of over four hundred troops. They were charged with the unglamorous task of creating a wagon road into Ohio. Washington, perhaps in an attempt to show he was ambitious, appeared to provoke French troops that had claimed Western Pennsylvania. The French were encamped at Jumonville Glen, in what is now Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Depending on whose story you believe, either Washington’s soldiers were fired upon by the French or the French were surprised by Washington’s sneak attack. Technically neither France nor Britain was at war with each other at the time. Washington’s actions would change this. Ten French soldiers were killed in the attack and 21 others were wounded. It was what happened afterwards though that probably really started the war. Washington lost control of his troops, who decided to massacre the wounded French soldiers. Washington’s Indian ally, Seneca chief Tanaghrisson, put a tomahawk through the head of the remaining survivor, Ensign Jumonville. The French, once they got wind of the attack, were not amused. They went with larger forces in pursuit of Washington and his troops.
Washington withdrew to a great meadow near Farmington. There he and his troops hastily built a fort that he aptly named Fort Necessity. As you can see from the re-creation they did not have much time to work on the details. In fact, it took the French less than six weeks to locate the fort, which they attacked on July 3, 1754 and subsequently burned to the ground.
The “fort” itself was round, about fifty feet in diameter with a small storehouse in its middle. Constructed from local hardwood trees it was rudimentary and offered little protection. To defend the fort, Washington also ordered his troops to construct earthen berms from which they could fire at French troops. The French were quite successful picking them off from the woods during a driving summer rainstorm. Their defenses would not be enough. What would become known as The Battle of Great Meadows resulted in his defeat at the hands of 600 French soldiers and 100 allied Indians. Fearing a massacre, he negotiated for terms of surrender, which he later claimed to have misunderstood. The terms said that he personally assumed responsibility for the death of Ensign Jumonville. However, because of his surrender, his garrison was allowed to beat a hasty retreat back into Maryland.
Washington and his garrison were lucky to emerge alive. Yet as subsequent events unfolded, he eventually got the last laugh. His skirmish and the subsequent battle instigated the French and Indian War, which the British eventually won. When the Americans eventually won the Revolutionary War this wild land west of the Appalachians opened to settlement and would eventually become part of the United States.
While there is not much to see of the fort itself, Fort Necessity is worth a visit. The meadows look much as they did when Washington and his troops camped there over 250 years ago. When we were there, it was both peaceful and bucolic. Nearby there is a visitors center. For $5 admission fee, you can tour the small but interesting museum and enjoy a twenty-minute engaging film discussing the battle and its repercussions. One of these was the sponsorship by Congress of The National Road, a first effort by our fledging nation to expand westward. The National Road comprises parts of U.S. 40 along this area of Pennsylvania.
My bet is that you, like most Americans, were unaware that our first president sparked the French and Indian War. Nor are you likely aware of Washington’s great failure at Fort Necessity. The site may not be large, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. It took me to a time that on the American time scale is ancient. Perhaps after a visit like me you will find yourself inspired to learn more about the French and Indian War. For the history buff there is much to learn about the war. Moreover, you do not have to cross an ocean to appreciate it first hand.
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November 6th, 2007 at 11:18pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: French and Indian War
They say that circumstance makes heroes out of many of us. Risking your life to rescue someone who is injured or wounded would frighten many of us, comfortable as we are in the cocoon of our civilian lives. For a soldier in battle rescuing a fellow wounded soldier is just doing your duty. The medals for bravery come afterward.
There are many quiet heroes among us. I would like to introduce you to one you will not find in the history book: my wife’s paternal grandmother, Lillian Savannah Bowden. I will not use her married name, which she carried for most of her life. However, I will honor her by using her maiden name: Bowden. Like a soldier rescuing a comrade in battle, Lillian’s story is remarkable too. At the same time, it was not that remarkable at the time, given the poverty that wrapped up much of America in the midst of the Great Depression and the many lives such extensive poverty warped.
Here is a picture of Lillian in her prime. Born in 1896, she appears to be a young woman age sixteen or so. I imagine this picture was taken shortly before the start of the First World War. She is strikingly attractive so I have little doubt she had many suitors. If she made a big mistake in her life, it was marrying her husband Robert. Their family, consisting of five daughters and one son, lived a respectable life in Flint, Michigan. Prior to the Great Depression, her husband had a contract with the city to put in sidewalks. When the Great Depression struck, he was out of a job. He ended up drunk and abusive much of the time. In a time when virtually no one got divorced, Lillian and Robert divorced. Robert left Lillian holding the bag, trying to support six children with minimal job skills in the midst of the Great Depression.
Many people in this situation would collapse. Maybe people were made of sterner stuff, or maybe motherly love triumphed all. Regardless, Lillian suddenly had to become the breadwinner as well as play the role of both mother and father. Her solution involved a lot of working from home doing sewing and laundry, which except for sleep meant working virtually all the time at Depression wages. Like many during the Great Depression, she occasionally needed a little charity to get by. She raised her six children, but at best, they were one step ahead of poverty. Despite her extreme circumstances, she raised her children in love. She never remarried.
She realized that her children needed both education and a faith. Flint, Michigan came complete with an Adventist school. It was there that her three youngest children were educated as well as learned a faith. (The other children were already in high school by that time.) One of those children is named Patricia Adelaide. She is the fifth of the six children. The sixth child, the only boy, Robert grew up to be the father to my wife. His sad story is chronicled in this recent entry. While Robert grew up acting out his father’s vices, the rest of the family grew up poor but with good values. The younger children embraced the Adventist faith. Patricia, or Aunt Pat as my wife and I know her, remains a devout Adventist to this day. Much of her career was spent working for the Adventist Church.
Last weekend we paid a brief visit to Aunt Pat and her husband Paul, whom we had not seen in more than a dozen years. Now 78, half crippled and with five stints inside her, Pat has clearly seen her better days. Yet the faith she learned in the Adventist school in the 1930s still fills her with joy, certainty and solace. At their house on a reservoir in Pennsylvania, we were pleased to meet four generations of their family, most of whom we had never met. Many of these grown up children came complete with spouses. There were two adopted children in the brood.
I had exchanged emails with Pat and in the process learned more about her family and her mother. The family does not have much in the way of historical pictures of their family, but during our visit, Pat shared what she had. The husband of one of her grandchildren was kind enough to scan these pictures and provide them on disk to us before we left. I have printed a number of them out. Soon the following picture of Lillian Savannah Bowden will be gracing our family portrait gallery.
My wife’s father was the exception that proved the rule. There are certainly medical issues in that side of my wife’s family. I know now where my wife’s problems with arthritis and weight come from. Breast cancer also runs in her father’s side of the family. Pat lost a daughter to breast cancer fourteen years ago. Another daughter has had two breasts and part of her colon removed due to cancer. Despite these misfortunes, Pat, her offspring and extended family are a remarkable bunch, at peace with themselves and imbibed in a faith that gives their lives meaning and living prosperous American lives. They are good and kindhearted people. Now I also know (a bit to my surprise) where this side of my wife comes from.
Lillian Savannah Bowden, may she rest in peace, deserves full credit for the remarkable children that she raised. She stood by her six children when circumstance threw the worst at her. Somehow, she filled them with love, faith, spirit, reverence and generosity. Her daughter Pat, many years later, even added a PhD to her name.
Outside of my little entry about her, her life will likely only be a fading memory for the family. She deserves more. So here is my small attempt to immortalize Lillian Savannah Bowden. Lillian was not alone in triumphing over great adversity, but her work was remarkable nonetheless. I wish I had had the pleasure of knowing her. However, in a way I feel I do know her from her remarkable daughter and the four generations we met this weekend.
Lillian, you done good.
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August 1st, 2007 at 09:25pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Families, Heroes, Relationships
Bay City, Michigan is known today primarily as the birthplace of the singer and artist Madonna. For me this fading industrial city between Michigan’s thumb and forefinger has a more important meaning. In 1920, it was the city where my mother was born.
For my mother, Bay City was not just a place; it was her home. While she lived most of her life far away from Bay City, she was a Bay City girl through and through. Being away from it for so long was doubtless one of the reasons she and my father retired nearby. Alas, my mother died two years ago. However, five years ago when she was still in reasonably good health I visited her and my father in nearby Midland, Michigan. We spent one day in Bay City and an hour or so at the Bay County Historical Society on Washington Avenue. There for about $15 or so I purchased a new but nearly fifty-year-old copy of the obscure book Bay County Past and Present, Centennial Edition. It had not been updated since the year I was born (1957) but there were still plenty of copies for sale.
The book is slow reading, which explains why I spent five years making my way through the 242-page book. It frequently lost the competition to more interesting books, in particular the many Aubrey - Maturin sea novels by the late writer Patrick O’Brian. I did finally finish the book this week. I am glad I made the effort. Its pages may make for occasionally dry reading but it provides the kind of history that you cannot get in standard history books. Lavishly illustrated with many historical photographs it gives a real sense of time and place to a small area of the country that I know only from occasional visits.
We know about the expansion of our country. However, unless you are a history professor you are unlikely to understand the mechanics of transforming a frontier into a modern city. Books like this one that are meticulously assembled by local historians nicely fill in the gaps we glossed over in our American history lessons. It provides a comprehensive study of Bay County, Michigan, from many perspectives. It includes a geographical understanding of that rather flat part of Michigan. Of course, it also provides a comprehensive history of its settlement, from its earliest years when Europeans showed up (the land swapped between the French, the English and the Americans) through the development of its business and industry.
For example, I learned that before civilization arrived, Michigan was a miserable place to live. There were Native American tribes of course, but life was not wonderful for them. It was difficult to sustain any human life due to the lack of one simple substance: salt. As Lewis and Clark found out, it is hard to survive without salt. Moreover, the fat that fills our modern foods was very hard to come by in primordial Michigan. Unless you were fortunate to kill and consume a bear, you would probably not get any fat in your diet. Today we think of fat as bad, but when you have no source of fat in your diet at all, you can become quite sick. It was the lack of fat and salt, not to mention the omnipresent mosquitoes, which deterred all but the heartiest Europeans from settling in this area. Bay County itself was largely landlocked from the rest of Michigan. Massive swamps covered the middle of the state. Goods had to be ferried by boat from places like Detroit, which, early in the 19th century was more of an outpost on the edge of Lake Erie than a city.
The fur traders that visited the region reported one huge natural asset: wood. Moreover, the wood was reasonably accessible for transport, because the Saginaw River flowed north into Saginaw Bay. Our growing nation had an almost insatiable desire for the high quality wood that Bay County provided. Treaties of a dubious nature were made with the local natives that pushed them further into the woods. They allowed this part of Michigan, which was then just a territory of the United States, to attract a few farmers and, increasingly, lumbermen. The wood literally floated through Bay City, then was carried by ship or barge out into Lake Huron and down the St. Lawrence Seaway. Bay City served as a convenient place to load and unload goods and for lumberman to have holidays. Mostly though they worked long days in lumber camps deep inside Bay County.
Its seemingly boundless lumber attracted sawmills and shipbuilders. In time, Bay City became one of the premier ship manufacturing centers in the country. It specialized in production of large wooden ships, many of which were supplied to our navy during the first two world wars. In time, of course its seemingly inexhaustible supply of lumber gave out. However, its growing wealth made other things possible. Swamps were drained. Once enough swamps were drained, the railroad was able to connect Bay County with the rest of Michigan. Michigan became a state and for a time Bay City was Michigan’s second largest city.
Where does government come from? We tend to take government for granted, and give little thought to how it is organized and institutionalized. This book provides plenty of insight into how a wild territory run by a federal administrator turned into a state. It shows how connections formed between state and local governments. It provides insight into the personalities that governed these communities. There was a time when cities like Bay City truly were communities. The people who lived in Bay City felt more loyalty to their city than to their state or even their country. I found their commitment to democracy truly inspiring. While they had their quarrels, there was no quarrel about using the democratic process. Governments on all levels, from major cities like Bay City to local townships, flourished. Each brought a unique sense of place and character. Moreover, even though they lived very busy lives, citizens stepped forward and grappled effectively with the mundane but vital business of governing.
The impact of inventions like electricity and the telephone are discussed for their local impact. Before electricity, house fires were very common. Fireplaces, wood stoves and kerosene lamps (a later invention) made it very easy to lose a house to fire. There was likely a firehouse within a couple blocks of your house. In the late 19th century, ending up homeless due to a house fire was a common experience.
Things we take for granted like sidewalks, cement and paved roads did not just happen. Instead, they evolved over many decades. With its abundance of wood, Bay City thought it was being very progressing putting in wooden sidewalks over the mud. Many of its streets were covered with wooden planks. It took time to discover that wooden planks required a lot of maintenance. All sorts of variants to make roads impermeable to the filth and mud were tried. Mud was ubiquitous with commerce in the 19th century. Paved roads were the eventual result of many experiments and provided the best tradeoff between durability and cost.
This book, like I imagine many books found at local historical societies, are full of little insights like this. Life was certainly harsher one hundred years ago, yet it was no less full of the things that made life meaningful. What emerges is a portrait of a growing city, filled with people living lives both complex and simple, often near the edge of poverty. They lived very engaged lives. In some ways, I envy them for their lives seem so much fuller than mine is likely to be. While I am fortunate to live well and have many opportunities for travel, I have never really experienced a sense of community that my mother found in Bay City. I wonder how much of this remains in our country, now that we are plugged into our virtual communities.
Of course, we all rest on the laurels of those who came before us. They were not always heroes. There were rapscallions among them just as they are among us today. Yet they did the best they could with their talents. Reading a book like this one though gives you perspective to understand just how Herculean a task it is to build a civilized community, and how valuable a true community is in our lives.
Today Bay City seems tired. Its industry is largely gone. It still has lovely neighborhoods, but many neighborhoods look tired, neglected and used up. You can go down streets and find every fourth or fifth house vacant or boarded up. I do hope this is a temporary phenomenon. Midwestern cities like Bay City deserve a rebirth.
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July 19th, 2007 at 09:40pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Bay City, Michigan, Democracy, Michigan
Sorry, he was not Ronald Reagan. I will give you a hint.
If attitude were more important than actual accomplishments then perhaps Ronald Reagan’s effigy should be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. However, Reagan had many faults. Partisans tend to excuse his gross misjudgments, of which Reagan had plenty. These included:
- The bombing of our Marines barracks in Lebanon and his subsequent decision to cut and run from Lebanon entirely
- Support for terrorists (which we renamed freedom fighters) in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua that killed hundreds of thousands. His obsession led to the Iran Contra scandal, wherein we deliberately broke the law by selling arms to our avowed enemy Iran to fund terrorists in Central America.
- An executive branch lead by so many people with no moral compass that the his administration was arguably the most corrupt presidency in modern history
- A savings and loan fiasco that cost the treasury more than $120 billion
- The largest peacetime deficits in American history
Nor was it the general who won the Second World War our greatest 20th Century Republican President. President Dwight D. Eisenhower also cut and ran, in this case from the Korean War. He “ended” the violence by threatening to use nuclear weapons on North Korea if they did not agree to a truce. If you are wondering why North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-il is so anxious to build a nuclear arsenal and lob missiles at the United States, now you know why. In fact, North and South Korea are still technically a war. Both sides essentially agreed to stop fighting but never agreed to a peace. To this day, fifty years later, we keep tens of thousands of troops in South Korea on a hair trigger alert.
Eisenhower had many noteworthy accomplishments as president. The one I give him the most credit for was the creation of the interstate highway system. In addition, he was very savvy about the consequences of the emerging military industrial complex. On the other hand, during his presidency, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and we did not lift a finger. In 1953, he sent the CIA into Iran to kill its elected prime minister, and then helped put a Shah in his place against the wishes of Iranians. This resentment set up the conditions for the Iranian Hostage Crisis some twenty-five years later. It is one of the main reasons the state of Iran still hates us today. If it is part of an “axis of evil” we were instrumental in its creation. Eisenhower was also the first American president to send our troops into Vietnam. It would take more than fifteen years before we would get them out. Tens of thousands of American soldiers would die in the fiasco along with millions of Vietnamese. Perhaps most shameful of all, while Senator Joseph McCarthy terrorized the nation with anticommunist hysteria, the same general that fought tyranny in Europe turned a blind eye. In addition, he oversaw three recessions while in office.
Most of the other Republican presidents I can dismiss for obvious reasons. William Howard Taft would not be seen as a true Republican today, since he introduced the first federal income tax. However his time in office was both short and undistinguished. Warren Harding’s name is synonymous with the Teapot Dome Scandal, not to mention his moral misgivings. Harding had at least two long-term affairs while in office, including a documented fifteen-year affair with a woman named Carrie Fulton Phillips. Calvin Coolidge was too boring to be noteworthy. Herbert Hoover oversaw the start of the Great Depression. Richard Nixon: nuff said. Gerald Ford: an aberration of a president who was never actually elected, nor was he in office long enough to accomplish much.
Which leaves George H. W. Bush and Teddy Roosevelt.
I was tempted to give the nod to our current president’s father. Granted, of all the Republican presidents in the 20th century, I do not think any of them reached the stature of a man like Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, George H. W. generally did what needed to be done, even though it was not popular. In response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he showed the sort of leadership and wise judgment at which his son floundered. He organized an international coalition of forces to oust the Iraq army from Kuwait. He did it at minimal cost to the United States taxpayer and without pushing into Iraq itself. He even agreed to a modest tax increase, which was necessary, but which earned him the external scorn of the Republican Party.
However, his four years were not without other major controversies. Like Reagan, he was not amiss to a little gunboat diplomacy. He used our military to illegally invade Panama and put its dictator Manuel Noriega into a Florida prison. While he was instrumental in NAFTA, a treaty that became law under his successor, he failed to staunch a severe recession. Perhaps most troubling is that he left office by granting pardons to many who clearly broke the law, including his Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger along with five others implicated in the Iran Contra scandal.
Consequently, I give the nod to Teddy Roosevelt, who was also the first president of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt would be seen today as a Democrat. Indeed, he coined the word “progressive”, which is a label many liberals like me now prefer. He was the original trustbuster. His obsession with reigning in the power of corporate interests and the powerful in general would horrify most Republicans today. He coined the term “square deal” to describe a mutually beneficial relationship between business and labor. He passed the Pure Food and Drug Act along with its companion, the Meat Inspection Act to address problems in our food safety system that today would seem unfathomable. Perhaps most startlingly, he was our nation’s premier conservationist. He set aside more land for national parks than all other presidents before him did. In addition, with much arm-twisting he was able to create the Panama Canal. To do it though he had to break a few eggs. It took some gunboat diplomacy to convince Columbia to allow us to “create” the state of Panama.
He was a man that in retrospect did have some faults. He believed in active United States imperialism. In addition to the “state” of Panama, which was largely our invention, he also invaded the Philippines. His reasoning would seem familiar to our current president. He wanted to “uplift” these poor souls toward “Christianity” and “democracy”. Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam became U.S. protectorates, but it is hardly clear that the natives welcomed our protection. Teddy though was hardly atypical for his time. Manifest Destiny seemed hardwired into our national consciousness in the early 20th century. It would take more than fifty years before we would fully appreciate the downsides of imperialism.
Still, among all our 20th century presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, not Ronald Reagan, stands out as our best Republican president. Perhaps he blazed a trail for his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was inarguably the best president of the 20th century, yet who has only belatedly gotten the recognition he deserves.
Not coincidentally, Teddy Roosevelt’s graven image is already on Mount Rushmore, as it should be. If anyone deserves to be added to that modern American pantheon though, it should be Teddy’s distant cousin Franklin, not our 40th president.
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December 17th, 2006 at 12:09pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Bush, Presidents, Republicans, Ronald Reagan
Those arriving here hoping of a review of the latest pirate movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest starring Johnny Depp will be sadly disappointed. I have not seen the movie and am in no hurry to see it either. I did see the first movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. While I understand its appeal to that age group craved by advertisers, and found parts of it amusing, I mostly found it to be just another forgettable bubblegum movie. It confirmed to me once again that Orlando Bloom is only in movies for his looks, for he cannot act.
No, in this entry I talk about the real pirates of the Caribbean. Their story is frankly a much more amazing, gritty and appalling story than anything yet conjured up by Hollywood. My daughter gave me a book on pirates as a Christmas present. It nicely complemented my desire to know everything about the 19th century British Royal Navy that I principally gleaned from C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and, more recently, the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. This latest book, A History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas by Nigel Cawthorne is a logical complement to the book my wife bought me a few years back, To Rule the Waves, which I reviewed last year.
A History of Pirates as a book is uneven. While meticulously researched, it often drags. It needed more editing than it received, and its typesetting is embarrassingly poor, with paragraphs occasionally begun without indenting. It made me wonder if it was one of these books where the author acted as his own editor and proofreader. Whoever did edit this book either worked at a discount rate or ripped off the author. These defects aside, it is a book worth reading if you want the straight dope on pirates. It focuses on pirates in the Caribbean, principally during the 16th and 17th centuries.
What emerges is a portrait of The New World (which at that time was largely the Caribbean area) in chaos. The major powers at the time (Spain, France, Great Britain, and to lesser extents, the Dutch and the Portuguese) were all engaged in its exploration and, much more importantly, its exploitation. During this time, what we call the United States was virtually unknown. Jamestown, the first English settlement in North America, was not founded until 1607. (As I noted though, we owe our nation in part to our high comfort level with certain forms of piracy.) Much of the action in this book occurs before Jamestown was colonized.
The New World back then was, frankly, a big crazy mess. It attracted the adventurous, the desperate, the mentally ill and those who could not deal with the rule of law. Settlements went up willy-nilly. Settlements were often overrun willy-nilly too. It seemed like Great Britain, France and Spain were constantly switching allegiances, depending on how the usual wars were going back home. Your enemy today was likely to be your ally tomorrow. You would pledge your new ally eternal fraternity until, of course, politics dictated otherwise, which could be months, but was more often a matter of years. Sometimes it was not politics that changed allegiances. Often it was simple greed. More than one English captain, when England was officially aligned with Spain, found it convenient to pretend he had not heard, would violate orders and plunder a Spanish galleon. Who could resist the allure of all that gold bullion and the chance to live life on a grand scale?
You would think the Spanish navy would be full of Spaniards and the English navy full of English. However, that was often not the case. Sailing was a high-risk profession. It attracted the desperate, the miscreants, and people from all ethnicities. Considering the brutish way people were raised back then, and the barbarism routinely witnessed on the high seas and on land, few sailors had expectations that they would live into their old age. It is not surprising then that many opted for piracy.
Not only was The New World a big chaotic mess back then, but humanity had only begun to take on a civilized veneer. The number of true gentlemen out there were very few. Many, like Sir Francis Drake, could assume the role of gentleman at home and become a crazed and barbaric captains at sea. In short, the ranks of the mentally ill were numerous on the high seas. Merely living on the high seas would likely make you more mentally ill. The numbers of people with heads on their shoulders were few. The barbarians were often crashing the gates. Those who chose to settle in The New World did so at their peril. These combinations of factors inculcated a climate that bred piracy and lawlessness. It bears more than a passing resemblance to modern day Iraq.
Of those who counted themselves among polite society, pirates were the lowest of the low. Alley cats had better morals than pirates and likely smelled better too. Once caught, pirates usually received trials. Occasionally they could buy themselves the justice they wanted. More likely, they were quickly tried, hung on the wharf, and then tarred. Their bodies were prominently display facing the harbor so passing pirates would understand what was in store for them. There was no burial for these hooligans; their bodies were allowed to fall away and rot. Mercy was in short supply in those days. The idea of mercy toward pirates who seemingly lacked any compassion seemed absurd.
Of course, pirates were just greedy plunderers and opportunists, eager to exploit an area of the world that was virtually lawless. While projecting an aura of fearless, they were not stupid. They did not necessarily attempt to board every passing ship and were smart enough to develop tactics that minimized their own casualties. While the humans on board were dispensable, the cargo of the looted ship and the ship itself (the “prizes”) were not. Before Madison Avenue existed, they learned that image was the key to successful plundering. Hoisting the Jolly Roger was alone sufficient for a captain to surrender without firing a shot. Their lives were usually spared, but not any article of value on their persons. Often the captured crew would find themselves simply marooned on an island. With few resources, death was delayed. However, sometimes the crew of the captured ship would happily join in the plunder and the ranks of the pirates.
There were however, some almost civilized things about pirates. In a time when monarchies reigned, their small societies were obsessively democratic. Crews were also scrupulously egalitarian. The crew elected its captains. If the captain failed to live up to the crew’s expectations, he was easily replaced and relegated back to common seaman. Plunder was equally shared among the crew, with generally slightly larger shares going to the captain, the ship’s master and the first pirate to board a ship. When a pirate tired of acquiring treasure, he often did try to settle down. Either he cleared some jungle and made a place to live or set up residence in one of the many town that were essentially pirate havens, such as Port Royal in Jamaica. As hunted fugitives, it is unlikely that his retirement would last long.
Pirates learned to live in the moment because, with a few exceptions, once they became a pirate they became marked men. Their lifespan decreased to a couple of years. Those who did not die from piracy’s many hazards were eventually captured and hung. Many others died from generally poor food, dehydration, sicknesses and the effects of poor hygiene. If these were not enough, there was also alcoholism, scurvy and the many tropical and sexually transmitted diseases that were rife in the Caribbean.
The women were no more enlightened. The book documents the cases of a few well-known female pirates. Many of the women of the Caribbean were whores. With their settlements frequently under attack from foreign powers or pirates, women too learned to live by their wits. Unfortunately, conditions were not necessarily better back on the continent. There too most people lived sad and miserable lives punctuated by war, poverty and cruelty that by modern standards seems unbelievable.
Such was the colonizing of the New World. It was not an enlightening experience at all. Often it became a desperate quest for survival from forces both natural and unnatural. Only a very few got both filthy rich and lived to enjoy it. I sometimes wonder why today’s homicide rate in the United States is so much higher than in most of Europe. After reading this book, I think I know the answer. Many of us came from this stock. We carried over from generation to generation their angst, hostility and brutality. The Pirates of the Caribbean simply were the worst of the lot. We have come a long way.
There is much more to learn from A History of Pirates. If you are at all curious about real pirates, then this is the book for you. Although the writing is occasionally uneven and the best parts of the book are in the last half, it is nonetheless an eye opening book. It provides valuable insights into times and places that understandably we might want to forget. Like our crazy grandmother living in the attic, the story of pirates is also part of our human story. We need histories like these to remind us of where our species has been, how far we have come and why we never want to devolve back into those crazy days.
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August 11th, 2006 at 02:31pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Caribbean, Pirates
There was a time not too long ago when most people did not need an automobile. They got where they needed to go by hopping on the neighborhood trolley. Most cities and towns above a certain size had trolleys. Trolley rides were ubiquitous, cheap, environmentally friendly, quick and convenient. After seeing the DC Trolley Museum today, I could not help but wonder why we were so boneheaded as to get rid of them. We must have been out of our minds.
Oh, I know about the economic reasons that caused trolleys to disappear. They are well documented on Trolley Stop, a wonderful website full of details about our recent trolley-filled past. The automobile did them in. As automobiles became cheaper, those with automobiles often turned their cars into illegal forms of public transportation. They offered people rides for a bit less than the trolley charged. Their cars were called jitneys. Later on after World War II, cars became reliable enough and gas became cheap enough that cars finally became more convenient for many people than the trolley. Trolley ridership declined to the point where they were no longer economically sustainable. The car became king.
So here we are half a century or so later. For many of us the car is a painful and expensive necessity because we have no other options. Instead of taking us where we want to go quickly, they instead often take us where we need to go slowly. When my mother was in the hospital in June, I decided to visit her on a Friday evening. What was I thinking? A twenty-mile trip from the Northern Virginia to the Maryland suburbs during rush took me two hours, much of it on a merge ramp trying to get onto an already clogged Washington Capital Beltway. It boggles my mind that people who commute from Maryland to Virginia do this every day. They do it because they do not really have any other realistic alternatives. The trolley lines are long gone. If there were buses that could take them, they would be stuck in traffic too.
Now the only place that you are likely to find trolleys is in a museum. The DC Trolley Museum, in far northern Silver Spring, Maryland on Bonifant Road is blessed with dozens of working trolleys used in Washington, in cities across America, and overseas. They have a small but educational visitors’ center. But why read about trolleys when you can ride one instead? Most visitors to the museum buy a ticket and board one of the trolleys that pull out of the garage every hour or so. From the ding ding of the trolley’s bell to the call of the conductor to the squeal of the trolley’s brakes as it rounds corners, you can get a taste for public transportation in our recent past. It should make you wistful.
Trolleys were not just creatures of the cities. Trolleys created the suburbs. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was not expensive to extend trolley lines. So trolley companies extended them into the country and housing followed. Washington suburbs like Chevy Chase are a direct result of extended trolley lines. Many trolley companies found they needed to create interesting destinations for their passengers. The Glen Echo Amusement Park in Cabin John, Maryland was one of many such parks created by trolley companies. The profits from the parks helped keep the trolley system financially solvent.
In their heyday, trolley lines also gave stiff competition to the passenger railroad systems. At the DC Trolley Museum, I learned that there were profitable trolley lines between Hagerstown and Frederick in Maryland and many major and minor cities. These “interurban” trolley lines connected with their more urban cousins. They were also usually less expensive to ride and more centrally located.
Although trolleys were originally pulled by horses and mules, they eventually became all electric. In our increasingly polluted cities, they would now be a blessing.
In some places, trolleys are making something of a comeback. They are now referred to as light rail. Portland, Oregon is one of many cities making use of light rail. During a recent visit, Portland’s light rail system left me delighted. It took me from their airport to downtown but it also goes to many other places in the city. It cost me $1.70 and 45 minutes of my time. I could have spent $40 by taking a taxi. However, the light rail system was much more fun. It was also satisfying to see how the downtown area of Portland accommodated light rail on its streets. Some of its streets are designated for light rail use only.
This is good and as it should be. Other cities could learn a lot by emulating Portland. Many of our clogged divided highways have medians that are ideal for light rail. As usage of light rail increases and as automobiles become increasingly expensive to own it may be possible to devote some auto lanes for trolley or light rail use. I think that if we build trolley lines out from the cities toward our suburbs again then passengers will come.
The age of oil is ending, but it is unlikely that mankind will stop growing. We need to reexamine practical solutions that worked well in our past like trolleys and refine them for the present.
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July 9th, 2005 at 10:15pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Traffic, Trolleys
Perhaps I enjoy a good sea story because I am such a coward. The military never called to me. I found abhorrent the very idea of killing other people, even for a just cause. I am not stupid enough not to believe that we do not need a military. However, I am grateful that I was never required to serve. I might well have ended up AWOL and living in Canada.
Still, I take a certain voyeuristic thrill in descriptions of great sea battles. Watching Star Trek inspired me to read the Hornblower novels. (Captain James T. Kirk was based loosely on Captain Horatio Hornblower.) After finishing the Hornblower novels, I started on the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. I’m still working my way through them. For this landlubber the nautical terminology in these books were hard to understand. I sought out books like The Wooden World by N.A.M. Rodger. Gradually I began to understand the difference between terms like leeward and windward.
Last Christmas my thoughtful wife Terri bought me To Rule the Waves, by Arthur Herman. This book is a surprisingly readable 648-page summary of how Great Britain shaped the modern world through its royal navy and merchant fleets. The subject sounds dry, but it is not. Because its thesis is correct: our modern world would simply not be the way it is today if it had not been for the British Navy and its global reach. The United States would not be here today had not Great Britain felt it needed to compensate for colonial successes of Spain and France in the New World. Sometimes inadvertently, sometimes with great foresight the Brits turned the world into a world inextricably linked together. By doing so, it changed virtually everything.
The story of how it happened is fascinating. It is a story of seemingly endless war, principally between Britain and France but also Britain and Spain. It is the story of lots of reckless adventuring, captains with unbelievable courage and epic battles at sea. It is also a story of national survival against all odds that succeeded primarily because necessity required that Great Britain develop an overwhelming naval presence.
Much of the story portrays a world of shocking barbarity. It is clear that Christian teachings must have skimped on the notion of brotherly love because there wasn’t much evidence of it in our past. The most appalling violence was par for the course through much of our history. Violence permeated all levels of society and it was rife in the Royal Navy too. For the most part, humanity was closer to savage than human being.
It is also hard for us to fathom the scale of suffering during those times. For hundreds of years seaman had little idea how to prevent scurvy, so disease routinely broke out and sailors died en masse. Through much of the history of the British Navy being a sailor meant high likelihood of death. Yet over time and because circumstances forced them the British clumsily worked through their nautical problems. They created an effective sea-based fighting force. It allowed them to leverage their power as needed at critical points. That is how they managed to control their destiny. This force controlled the major sea-lanes of the world. It brought improved standards of living to millions. During the 19th century, the British Navy largely stopped the slave trade. In fits and starts, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes with great foresight the British civilized and tamed much of a lawless world.
From the almost non-existent navy of King Henry VIII, to the Royal Navy’s last naval war with Argentina in 1982 over the Falkland Islands this is a fascinating account of the rise and fall of a sea-based empire. It was every bit as large in scope and as influential as the Roman Empire.
It is hard not to share Herman’s disappointment in the decline of the Royal Navy during the 20th century. Its navy had been such a prominent force for so many hundreds of years that it is sad to read how it was systematically dismantled. Largely because Great Britain lost interest in its navy, it was poorly prepared for the rise of Adolf Hitler. After its U-boat experiences during World War I it should have known better. It is hard to fault the generous spirit of the British at the time. They unselfishly showed the Japanese how to create a first class navy, hoping Japan would be a stabilizing influence in the Pacific region. Instead when the time was ripe Japan used its knowledge to push Great Britain out of the Pacific.
The great legacy of the British Navy will be obvious for those who finish the book. For all its chaos the world is a much more orderly and civilized place because of the British Navy. Trade has become essential to all our economies. It has become the glue that helps maintain our world order. With some exceptions, we live longer, healthier, more productive and richer lives as a direct result of our global trade. Like it or not we are now all bound together. Like it or not we are becoming, in fits and starts, one world. These binding forces are unlikely to recede. Over centuries, we will work through these issues. Sometimes this will happen violently, but more often disputes will be solved through peaceful means. The British showed us the recipe: one part big stick, one part enlightenment. Let’s hope we model their lesson.
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July 4th, 2005 at 11:36am
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Navy
It can be dangerous to read history books. You learn things you don’t necessarily want to know. I am currently reading To Rule the Waves by Arthur Herman. It is the story of how the British Royal Navy shaped what we now know as our modern world. It’s an excellent read and hard to put down. As you read it you feel the mistiness of centuries past recede and you discern the often crude realities of those times. They were times that were certainly harsher than most of us can now imagine. While it often seems that today we are still a bunch of savages, reading a book like one this can make you realize we’ve still come a long way.
You learn that very famous people were not necessarily very nice people. Take for example Sir Francis Drake, the first man to circumnavigate the world. Clearly it was an incredible accomplishment but Drake was no humanitarian. Humanitarians were few and far between in the 1500s. Life was hard and brutish. But in addition Drake was no gentleman. He sailed with his good friend Thomas Doughty. But it wasn’t long after his ships passed the equator that their relationship broke down. Drake would tolerate no dissent. He interpreted some of Doughty’s words to be mutinous. On the coast of South America he convicted him for mutiny in a show trial and then had him beheaded him on the deck of his ship. Glad I wasn’t there.
I also learned that most of our founding fathers were, to put it bluntly, smugglers. Herman writes, “Virtually every wealthy American merchant involved in the rum trade, the wine trade, or even the tea trade, was to one degree or another, a smuggler. For decades, fast-running New England schooners, sleek two-masted fishing boats with fore-and-aft sails for quick handling, allowed the lawless Americans to thumb their noses at an overextended Customs Service.”
After Great Britain’s war with France, the overwhelming presence and numbers of Royal Navy ships off our coasts made it possible to effectively enforce trade laws in their colonies for the first time. Needless to say this seriously disrupted the lifestyles and incomes of the colonists. It turned out that smuggling in untaxed sugar from South America and the West Indies for other commodities like codfish and timber, and trading with countries with whom Great Britain was technically at war with, was much more profitable than trying to clear land and earn a living by farming. Much of the anger that fed the Revolutionary War was a direct result of the difficulty Americans were having maintaining our fine smuggling tradition. In short many of our forefathers were lawbreakers. And their standard of living was in jeopardy.
Naturally they did not see themselves this way. As we know the cry was about “taxation without representation”, a feeling that would doubtless be familiar to the citizens in our modern colonies like Washington D.C. But it matters not. If judged by the standards of our current administration our forefathers would be scummy lawbreakers. They would be unprincipled men for whom the ends justified the means and simply unwilling to abide by the law of the time. That Great Britain ultimately failed and that the United States won its war of independence was mostly due to the British Empire being vastly overextended. With no friendly ports on the east coast supplies for a war with America had to be imported from Great Britain itself, a ruinously expensive endeavor.
New England in particularly excelled at turning sugar from the Caribbean into high quality rum. In 1763 Massachusetts alone had 63 distilleries. Arguably rum profits were the primary source of colonial wealth, and those profits allowed a textile trade to begin in America. But Great Britain needed the money imposed on the colonies as a result of the Stamp Act to pay its massive war debts. However the Americans wanted nothing to do with paying for the costs of Great Britain’s wars, although they enjoyed the benefits of its protection.
This “have my cake and eat it too” spirit is clearly alive and well in America today. We still find taxes to be evil. We still want the benefits of free trade without any of the costs. Of course we think it is fine for us to impose tariffs on foreign goods when it is in our interests, but not okay for other countries to do the same to our products.
Maybe I was being naïve, but I was hoping that our founding fathers had higher ethical standards. But they must not have been complete scallywags. While they knew how to be pragmatic when it came to business, they were also deeply in touch with the base reality of human nature. As a result our constitution, instead of assuming the best from human beings, assumes the worst. “Trust no one” seems to be its guiding philosophy. We have branches of government continually checking and balancing the other branches. When one branch gets too much power it is usually in the vested interest of the others to figuratively whack the uppity branch on its head and tow it back into line.
Our forefathers may have been white-collar criminals and scallywags. But at least they were proud members of the reality-based community.
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May 26th, 2005 at 07:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: American History, Revolutionary War
As I sit here on the east coast recuperating from jet lag my mind is still on my recent west coast trip. I was in Portland, Oregon last week to attend an information technology exchange meeting. On Thursday many of the attendees including myself were bussed two hours or so north into Washington State to spend 90 minutes or so at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, which overlooks Mount St. Helens. (I work for the U.S. Geological Survey, so this was an obvious choice for a field trip, although not all of us are geologists.) Mount St. Helens, as you may recall, left its calling card twenty-five years ago on May 17, 1980 when it ferociously erupted.
As you know from recent news reports it still simmers today. Let us hope that if it blows again in our lifetime it does not wreak the same devastation it accomplished in 1980. At 8:32 a.m. on that May morning the mountain erupted sideways with a force that is still hard for us to comprehend. One could compare the force to an atomic bomb but really it was a much, much larger force than a mere atomic bomb. It was the equivalent of about one thousand atomic bombs. While it did not release radioactivity it did knock down old growth forest trees seventeen miles away. In the course of a few hours the 9,677 foot peak was reduced to 8,364 feet. The smoke from the eruption circled the globe. The swath of destruction reached for 234 square miles.
Unlike Hiroshima though when Mount St. Helens blew up it did so largely far away from people. But there were casualties. 57 people were known to have died as a result of the blast. Included in the statistics was USGS geologist David Johnston who had the dubious privilege of being the geologist on site on the day of the explosion. He was stationed at the Coldwater II observation station at least five miles from the volcano and likely died almost instantly. No trace of him or his equipment was ever found. This is not too surprising. Within several miles of the blast every living thing was vaporized. The power of the explosion was so severe that old growth forests in the inner circle of the explosion were not just sheared off but they completely disintegrated. After the explosion all vegetation in the inner core was gone and only sheer rock remained. Further from the blast zone 87,000 acres of trees snapped in two as if they were match sticks. The eruption melted seventy percent of the snow and glaciers on the mountain, causing boiling mud to come down the mountain, carrying trees and debris, clogging rivers, and making parts of the Columbia River unnavigable. Ash as white and fine as talcum powder appeared hundreds of miles away in Montana. In short it was the defining natural event in America during my lifetime. And yet apparently it was not nearly as big an eruption as have occurred in the past on the mountain. This one was more like a sneeze.
Getting to the mountain by car is more difficult than it seems, but involves a lovely bucolic drive north on I-5 from Portland and a turn east on Route 504. There is a visitor’s center near Toutle, but it is more than 25 miles from the volcano itself. The visitor who really wants to get a close look at the volcano needs to keep driving east following the North Fork of the Toutle River over many a twisty and steep road toward the Johnston Ridge Observatory. It is a drive is worth making, not just for the destination but also for the awe-inspiring beauty along the way. I was glad I wasn’t doing the driving since some of the turns were not the type that allowed much margin for error. 25 years later much of the vegetation has returned. Elks are grazing in the hills again. Trees can be found on the hillsides again too, although they are clearly fairly young trees. Outside the immediate blast zone though one can still see many of the casualties of that day, including the remnants of trees from the explosion. Today the streams run clear again.
We found Mount St. Helens much like Portland: mostly cloudy with periods of pelting rain. The Johnston Ridge Observatory sits above a pumice-filled plain and about five miles due north of Mount St. Helens. At 4300 feet it was a bracing place to be in mid May. I found that when I was outside I needed to put on my gloves. The wind is a constant presence on the ridge. Often passing clouds obscured the volcano. You may prefer to watch the volcano from the relative safety of the observatory, which includes a museum, gift shop and a large amphitheater. The multimedia show of course highlights the destruction that occurred in 1980. I found my umbrella to be useless. The wind was too brisk. So I had to dodge the pelting rain to grab a few pictures. Fortunately as we were leaving to return to Portland the sun broke through at last and I could take a few pictures of the mountain that were not obscured.
Looking over the edge of Johnston Ridge and down into the Pumice Plain is a feeling comparable to looking over the rim of the Grand Canyon. While the view is not quite as majestic as the one from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, it is awe inspiring nonetheless. When the fleeting weather permits the view of the volcano both inspires and unnerves. But what really rattles the nerves is imagining what it must have felt like to be there on the ridge on that day in 1980. It is hard to fathom the 800-degree heat and the ferocity of the explosion that destroyed and pulverized all but the impermeable rock. After all there are five miles between you and the volcano. The immensity of the space between you and the volcano feels grandiose. Nothing manmade would have survived those moments, but I wish there could have been a camera that caught it all anyhow. So imagination will have to suffice.
Back in 2002 my family and I visited the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s big island. That was also an impressive volcano. But Kilauea is an oozing volcano, not an explosive volcano. The bedrock of the Cascades mountain range is much different than that in Hawaii. At Mount St. Helens you are more likely to have massive explosive eruptions that slow oozing eruptions.
There are volcanoes all along the Pacific Rim, of course. But Mount St. Helens is likely the most active volcano of all of them. So while we can expect that the volcano will continue to sputter at us we need to be vigilant. There may be bigger and larger surprises from this volcano in our lifetime. It has surprised us before.
But while it is in a state of relative slumber it is definitely worth a visit if you are in the Pacific Northwest. My feeble words do it little justice, nor does the Volcano Cam perched on Johnson Ridge. In its slumbers it is a place to visit if you want to grasp the awesome power of nature.
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May 22nd, 2005 at 04:54pm
Posted by
Mark |
History |
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Tags: Mount St. Helens, Washington State
