New Haven to Boston, Part 4

[All this info from plaques near the Route 1--Baldwin Bridge.]

These northerly hills sloping down to marshland—Essex and the tranquil towns of Middlesex County, the tidal estuary ebbing around and between Nott Island, Lord’s Cove, Goose Island, Calves Island—250 million years ago, this land lay encompassed in the spine of a mountain range thrust up by violent tectonic collisions.

It was around 25,000 years ago that the last of the Ice Age glaciers swept down over New England and scored the land so deeply, furnishing the soft outlines of future river valleys. Paleo-Indians arrived here 10,000 years ago, over the Siberian land bridge from Asia. North America was then a vast tundra, and the humans were most likely following herds of caribou.

 During the course of our most recent glacial epoch, a much greater portion of the world’s oceans were locked up in Earth’s ice caps, and world-wide sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are today. The Connecticut land mass once extended out about 100 miles south of present-day Long Island, out to where the Atlantic Ocean now washes the continental shelf. Ancient forests stretched to this southern coast, their petrified remains today reposing off the Atlantic beaches, and here also roamed the shaggy mastodon herds memorialized in Neolithic cave paintings. For hunter-gatherers, it was a gold coast.

The course of the Connecticut River was established 13,500 years ago., During one of Earth’s periodic climate shake-ups, with global temperatures climbing, the packed ice of taiga and tundra retreated northward all across the crust of the earth, and this once-compressed layer of crust began to rise. To the north, where the heaviest layers of ice had pressed down, the crust now rose to the most dramatic elevations, forcing the glacial lakebeds of North America to drain southward. Over time this continental drainage managed to effect the north-south cut of America’s main riverways, and the river channel of the Connecticut was laid during this thaw.

By 5,500 years ago, the North American climate had grown mild and hospitable, and the human societies which had immigrated so recently now began to settle into permanent villages. Some time in the last four thousand years, a rich alluvial soil was deposited along the banks of the Connecticut, establishing the bounteous marsh environment of the present day.

By 3,500 years ago, the Connecticut River had become an important commercial waterway. Copper from Michigan, chalcedony spear-points from Labrador—these were traded between established cultures up and down the coast. Disputes over land claims along the riverbank began to simmer as early as a thousand years ago, after corn, beans, and squash had become well-established in vital croplands attached to agrarian communities.

            Today, most vessels on the Connecticut carry gasoline and home heating oil, hauling these necessaries upriver as far as Hartford.          

NEW LONDON: 14 MILES

New Haven to Boston, Part 3

CONNECTICUT BEGINS WITH THE SOUTHERN, NORTHERN TRAFFIC OF THIS RIVER.

YOU GOT I.D. ON YOU?

8am, sitting on the bridge, Connecticut state police pulls up. Among the drivers passing, “a couple people” have made worried calls about me. He’s either a jumper or a terrorist. The cop takes in the view and says “I can see why you’re doin’ this, though.” The spare, straightforward beauty against the slow action of the sunrise. My whole mind is transformed and brought to a good state. (The first automobile bridge was built here in 1911, the toll was five cents. This eight-line bridge was put up in 1993.) [See sketch.] The cop sets me back on my way, gets me walking again.

[The last great impression I had was the solace from that sunrise? I felt like a poet. I’m a little depressed now, late at night, poring over these weather-beaten old pocket notebooks in order to type them up. But I should strive to be faithful to the original, hard-won impressions of the world.]

“Having lived, one has done more becoming [I wrote, flinching and striving], one must have become more of something.” And—“ART: you have to collude with a big lie, but it’s the GREAT LIE that humans can truthfully depict ORDER and PROCESS (to a goal).”

New Haven to Boston, Part 2

-->

On my night train to New Haven, a little girl with pointy teeth and a punk-rock mommy is singing “Die, Monster, Die” by the Misfits.

11:35: Stopped by the Branford Police near Branhaven Plaza. There’s been some sort of incident here earlier. The cop has a blonde marine cut. He wants to know if I’m coming from the big bar, called SBC (a chain). “That a grenade in your pocket?” he demands. Nah, I just get a hard-on from hilarious cop humor! I give over my passport so he can write my name, birthdate and residence. I notice the year, looks like 1671, on his green town-seal shoulder patch.

Branford keeps attractive fire trucks: banana-yellow, almost green.

I have passed the same ancient steam shovel three times. Its arm is strung with cords and pulleys, instead of pistons. A light drizzle.

2:30 am, near Orchard Market, Guilford: “Stand in front of the car.” This is a Connecticut state trooper, and he attempts to ‘run’ my passport. “Stay dry,” he says finally. I am clean. He’s a nice cop.

From a late-night incident when the whole Fairfield P.D. tried to interrogate me, I’ve learned not to excite cops by telling them the entire truth of my journey. I don’t know why but this revelation turns me into an attractive police catch. “Congratulations, boys, you found Osama Bin Walkin’!” You could say it sends up a red flag.

4:30am: Back in historic downtown Madison. For some curious reason, the only vehicles on Route 1 at this time of night are red pick-up trucks. I’ve noticed this before.  Outside the travel agent’s office is a gag milepost with hands pointing in all directions: “Quebec: 408 Miles”. Feasible, I think. Seductive.

The outdoor amphitheatre in Hammanassett State Park. (Did I see a performance of Romeo and Juliet here as a boy with my family? It rained lightly for the last scenes, the audience swooned a little. I think I remember this store called “The Book Room”. Friend from childhood overdose, I flash on this, what’s the story?)

January 6^th. A very early diner breakfast, lots of coffee, beneath a TV showing ESPN. Today is NBA player Gilbert Arenas’s 25^th birthday, he’s younger than I am. I read a local newspaper. Story of a man honored for forty years of work at the New London water facility. A profile of an English professor at the Naval Academy, also in New London. One of his students, now a fleet lieutenant, told the professor how impressed the enlisted Latinos were with the lieutenant’s knowledge of Garcia Marquez. The Wall Street Journal picks the Giants to lose.

Clinton Historical District. A replica milestone says 25 MILES TO NEW HAVEN. The landscape out here reminds me of way out on Long Island, where I went for a wedding once: wide open marshes, ancient telephone poles, the occasional old man on a bicycle. Salt hay is a high-nutrient feed crop, it provided well for settlers. I take a detour down Grove Beach Street to the shoreline, look at the Long Island Sound for a while, and return to Route 1 via Menunketesuck. Private beaches, dead ends, low stone fences between charming houses sitting in sand. Breeze over the water, pulling clouds along to the East.

Steel-deck bridge over the meandering Patchoge River. Amtrak lines against a low hill to the north, across the marsh. 10 am.

THE BODY.

Bad pain in my left kneecap, and blisters. My body already feels wrung out, hot ears, dry eyes. Maybe pop some multi-vitamins. When I lie down there’s a tingling rush all over. Aw, what a pansy! The lesson of the other day (when I walked from Stratford to Hartford, CT) is, Don’t give up. But what a miserable condition to be in. [So nice to be comfortable and typing this up in my warm dining room.] I just want to focus on this landscape: when I crossed the Westbrook, everything turned beautiful, boat dealerships and wooded coastland under the warming white sky. Bad diarrhea.

Tough nap against a stone field fence out behind some historic house, closed for the season.

Interesting animals that live here: shad, alewife, eastern cottontail, mockingbird, box turtle.

Ah, the waste land segment of this Route 1 stretch, where all the motor vehicle sales lots are. Prices. Brand names.

Saybrook. A nice Slavic man, his wife at his side, stands before the vending machine in the Days Inn motel hallway. He holds up a coin in earnest and utters, slowly and fluently, a scintillating English sentence: “Can you break a dime?” The Days Inn is $64, it’s Saturday night.

 The motel clerk is from Bronxville, New York. He asks me what I do, seeing as I’m alone. I am unintentionally cagey. To another room go two big girls, one a Filipina taller than me. In the bathroom of my motel room I use a Days Inn ballpoint pen to pop a blister on my big toe. I have to really force it through, and a sudden jet of serum blasts me in the right eye. In my room I study an Old Saybrook tourism brochure. “The Fire Department owns such equipment as ‘Jaws of Life’ and a heavy-rescue unit.”

7am, I have an English muffin at the continental breakfast and leave the motel. Birds are singing. On the Baldwin Bridge, a vast arcing span, I stop to watch the morning light on the  Connecticut River. The sun has just cleared the hills. To the north, a vast span of power cables with the red and white marker-things strung on them, they look like volleyballs. They hang suspended in the pale dawn like planets. The river is pale blue without detail or depth. North upriver the land runs to hills, the town of Essex. (The Tylenol took away most of the pain in my ankle, but I wonder how far I will end up traveling.)

The river is flawless. –I have believed that I will go to Hell to suffer, for the sin of not allowing divine light through: not being fully hospitable to God’s grace and not living charitably. Moreover, not being aligned correctly in faith, not having PURE INTENTIONS. But, the admirable ones are those who continue on their path of righteousness and set aside the knowledge of their own mixed motivations and their baseness. The ones who push ahead anyway. (The walker- or else the steadfast one, who doesn’t leave but only moves forward in time, accepts the passage of time.)

Sun more full now. The flat winter hills repose toward the water, meeting it at a border of tawny marsh. South: the x-girdered truss bridge for the Amtrak and the Shoreline East trains. The marshes and the dark copses at the sunlit mouth, where the Algonquins made their base, and then the Seye-Brook Puritans built their forts, looked out with their guns—like the watch house that stood then on Academy Hill in Stratford (that frozen coppery grass).

New Haven to Boston, Part 1

-->

The wonderful mosaic of historical scenes at Acton Library, Old Saybrook, was funded by a summer resident from New York City. Reading the mosaic, I learn:

Connecticut became the fifth state in 1788.

The coat of arms on the state flag, adopted in 1897, is an adaptation from the original seal of the Saybrook Colony. The image is supposed to have come from a signet ring worn by the plantation governor Fenwick. The seal’s grapevines represent the fifteen patentees who settled the original Saybrook plantation under English colonial law. It was in 1620 that Lord “Seye, and Sele” of Brougton Castle in Banbury, Oxfordshire, decided to establish a Puritan plantation settlement. He received in 1631 a patent from the Earl of Warwick, a patent shared with Lord Robert Brooke.

The two lordly names were combined in “Seye-Brook”, the name of the plantation. Its settlers arrived in 1635 on the ship Blessing, out of the Massachussetts Bay Colony. Seye-Brook was established on the mouth of the Connecticut River, a good harbor that had been explored recently by the Dutch. In 1614, Adriaen Block (of Block Island, RI), became the first European to explore the Connecticut River. He named it “Fresh River”. He was hired to scout for natives to trade with.

The land had been inhabited perhaps since the beginning of terrestrial life.

‘Noah’s Raven’- The three-toed dinosaur footprints in the Connecticut River Valley, discovered 1802. This was the first fossil evidence of dinosaurs in the New World. Dilophosaurus, a medium-sized carnivore with an odd double crest on its skull.

‘Connecticut’ in Pequot means “LAND ALONG THE LONG TIDAL RIVER”.

1636-7 was the first Indian war in New England, fought against the Pequots at Saybrook.

At the mouth of the river (which flows from Canada), there’s a shallow estuary about a mile wide full of shifting sandbars. Because deep-draft ships can’t navigate here, the Connecticut is one of the longest US rivers without an urban center at its mouth.

December, 1718: “The Battle of the Books”

In 1701, the Connecticut Colony founded a ‘Collegiate School’,  with forty folio volumes donated by ministers. In 1714 the school got its big endowment, a donation of seven hundred books, including an autographed edition of Newton’s Principia. In 1716, the school was moved from Saybrook to the bustling commercial center of New Haven, some thirty-five miles west, where it would become Yale University. Residents of Saybrook rebelled against the move and attacked the carts transporting the library’s collection, destroying some 250 volumes. 

New Haven had been founded as a Puritan colony in 1638. In 1665 Charles II forced the town to unify with the Connecticut Colony.

Like a Beckett play

"Chinese authorities blanketed Tibetan neighborhoods with armed police in riot gear bearing fire extinguishers"

--
"In China, Self-Immolations Continue as Party Congress Opens", Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2012

"Use the Internet in a Legal Manner"

The 18th Party Congress convened yesterday in Beijing to anoint a new supreme leader. In the city center, construction projects are being halted and taxi drivers are being instructed to remove the window-rolling levers in their cabs. The shifts of giggling youths in charge of x-raying commuter baggage have put on grim faces. The censorship guys are going crazy. A notice translated at CDT:

 

Use the Internet in a Legal Manner
Strive to be an honest Internet user. Encourage the Internet’s civilized development. Strengthen civilized Internet awareness. Establish self-respecting, self-disciplinary and self-empowering awareness. Strengthen the ability to tell right from wrong. Strengthen one’s ability to protect oneself from negativity. Do not propagate illegal, criminal or false information. Do not use QQ, Weibo, forums, email or other Internet platforms to hurt others. Do not violate the privacy of others. Do not disrupt the order of the Internet. Do not casually meet Internet friends.
Self-respect and self discipline start with you. Let us join hands and work together to promote a civilized, safe and positive Internet environment. Let us provide a civilized, safe and green Internet for the 18th Party Congress.

Beijing City, Chaoyang District Internet Monitoring Team
Beijing Kangjing Property Management Company
Guangdong Yingxin Information Investment Company, Ltd. Beijing Branch
Guangdong Yingxin Information Investment Company, Ltd. Beijing Branch
October 23, 2012

... Fuck the 18th Party Congress.

Large Disparities

A press release from the Ministry of Environmental Protection:

"In Chinese cities, the evaluation of air quality is usually based on the concentration of 10-micrometer particulate matter (PM10). In Beijing, the American Embassy has been releasing its evaluation of the city's air quality based on PM2.5 for an extended period of time. This data and Beijing government's data usually showed large disparities, causing outcry and prompting the city authority to adopt the new standard."

A look at this contentious "disparity":

•  According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, today's air quality in Beijing was "slight [sic] polluted".
• According to the US Embassy's Beijing Air Quality Monitor webpage, it was "Very Unhealthy", verging on "Hazardous (Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors)".
• Today's been one of the days when you can stare directly into the mid-afternoon sun. (You probably shouldn't; you probably shouldn't live in Beijing.) It appears flat and featureless, like a full moon behind thick cloud. Opaque pale pink. I went jogging today, which was basically taking bong rips off a muffler. Still can't bring myself to buy one of the insect-like filtration masks you sometimes see rich foreigners wearing in the streets.