Road Tripping Part II

by Doctor Science

Part I was New Jersey to Ithaca, NY.

We stayed overnight in Ithaca, visited Cornell the next day, then left in the afternoon to drive to my parents’ place in eastern Connecticut. We drove back on NY 79, then took NY 206 east.

Google Map with Terrain, showing our route on the second leg of our trip. I've removed most of our route inside CT. Click for full version, 1517x561px.

Google Satellite view of the second leg. Click for full version, 2250x914 (1.8Mb).

We passed through the village of Greene, which has a very Western-style center of town: a very wide "Main Street", lined with buildings with slightly built-up fronts, with parking in the center of the street.

Photo by Geraldine Clark

The "Wild West" feel was only appropriate, given that Chenango County is on the Marcellus Shale, and is one of the centers of fracking in NY state. There are a lot of signs up about fracking, pro and con, home-made or slick, especially as we headed into Otsego County, where there are many bans, moratoria, and discussions going on.

The economic motivation for fracking couldn’t be clearer – the rural poverty is very stark. "Drill a Gas Well, Bring a Soldier Home" is also a very understandable slogan, especially given how often joining the military can seem like the only way out for an unemployed young person.

However, when we got on I-88 and found ourselves in the Susquehanna River valley again, I couldn’t help noticing that the water sometimes looked a most unnatural shade of bluish green. I really hope it’s just an early bloom of blue-green algae or something similar, because the combination with fracking is rather ominous.

This part of the Susquehanna River valley is very beautiful, more open and rolling than the valleys further west. Soon we passed into the Hudson River basin, and the land opened up still more as we headed toward Albany. When we came out into the Hudson Valley proper, around Cobleskill, we could see the ridges of the Taconic Mountains rearing up 50 miles away.

Schematic picture of the Northeast Appalachians, showing the mountains where we travelled. Created by a Wikipedia user.

We passed signs for Howe Caverns, and I realized Sprog has never been in a show cave. I promised to take her to a least one when we go out to the Midwest in the summer for more college visits. I wonder which route we should take across Pennsylvania, I-76 or I-80? There are caves available either way.

Traffic of course became much heavier in the broad, rich Hudson Valley, as we swung around Albany. It wasn't too bad, though, until we crossed the Castleton-Hudson Bridge.

I really don't like heights, and I *really* don't like bridges when I'm driving. Crossing this one takes a while, and I had to do yoga breathing and focus on the car in front of me to get across safely. I go over the Tappan Zee Bridge fairly frequently and it doesn't bother me that much (any more) -- but I now see that the Castleton Bridge is about as high as the Tappan Zee, but for *much* longer, so it wasn't my imagination.

In tracking down these links I learned about the Walkway Over the Hudson, a railroad bridge that is a good deal higher still and which has been converted into a foot-and-bicycle path, 170 feet over the river. Walking over that would be a literal re-enactment of one of my worst nightmares, about as bad as you can get without special effects -- and yet, other people do it for fun! I will never get over human diversity.

We were now on I-90 East, heading up from the Hudson over the Taconics and into Massachusetts and the Berkshires. There started to be patches of snow on north-facing slopes, then as we got higher all of a sudden there was a light coating of snow *everywhere*, on tree trunks as well as the ground.

So of course this song was running in my head, and I sang it for Sprog, who didn't know it:
 
Direct YouTube link

Sweet Baby James, by James Taylor. This is him performing live with the Dixie Chicks.

Now the First of December was covered with snow
And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frostin'
With ten miles behind me
and ten thousand more to go ...

The heights of the Berkshires are definitely northern, ecologically: many stands of white birches, many spruces. But the human landscape is very different from even the Poconos, much less the Allegheny Plateau. We saw very little that is hardscrabble or broken-down, everything has the look of "a nice place to get away from the city". There are even fewer farms than in the hills of Pennsylvania or New York, not because the soil is *that* much worse but because cultivating tourists pays so much better.

But I wonder how much the cultural differences David Hackett Fischer described in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America have to do with it. Towns in Puritan Massachusetts were always much more communitarian than in the individualistic Border culture towns of the Alleghenies and Appalachians. Massachusetts communities made more laws to control their members' behavior, but they also didn't let people slip through the cracks as often. And they're much less likely to tolerate something like fracking, in which individual property owners get the short-term profits while the problems are pushed into everybody's water supply.

When we got out of the Berkshires, we came to Springfield and turned South on I-95. We followed the Connecticut River south, crossing back and forth several times, passing through Gun Valley, the United States' first military-industrial zone.

Not far from Hartford along I-84 there are now malls and development, where I remember seeing some of Connecticut's last working shade tobacco farms in the early 1970s -- one of my best friends had a summer job there, sorting leaf. I wonder if someone is going to try to revive Connecticut tobacco, calling it something like "artisanal" or "heritage" smokes.

Comments

[bob_is_boring]

I'm not a cigar guy, but as a pipe guy I run into them fairly frequently; I think CT shade tobacco is almost exclusively used for cigar wrappers.

eta: Wikipedia corroborates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_shade_tobacco

Also: I-80 is a quicker shot across PA IIRC, but 76 has more tunnels. I think. Which is cool.

[liberal japonicus]

You a James Taylor fan, Doc? I'm a big fan, and will just note that his son sounds exactly like him in this song. I'm not sure why in that song, he sounds so much like his father, in his other stuff, you can hear the family resemblance, but in that cover, I thought he was his father when I first heard it.

[cleek]

ah... I88. how i love I88.

when i was young, i lived in Corning NY with my mother. and my father lived 45 min north of Albany. a few times a year, i'd go up to the north country to hang with dad. and at the time, there was no I88. so that drive from Corning to Albany was on rt7, a two-lane road which follows pretty much exactly the same path as I88 - but it took six or seven hours, depending on traffic. you get to see a lot of small-town NY Main Street on Rt 7 ! Cooperstown, Oneonta, Cobleskill, Duanseburg, etc..

now, that drive takes about 2.5 hours. it still blows my mind a little bit every time i do it. what do you mean we're here already? it's only noon!

[hairshirthedonist]

I've found I-80 to be more scenic and less monotonous than I-76 (tunnels aside) - and less planned, as in, "by a turnpike authority." It's more northern wilderness than I-76, or was when I was traveling to and from Ohio in the mid 90s, both in terms of scenery and lack of turnpike-style rest areas.

Now that I'm thinking about it, there was talk of I-80 becoming part of the PA Turnpike system some time ago (I think...?). I don't know if that ever happened, but that's why God made Google.

[hairshirthedonist]

It was considered, but never happened.

[Donald Johnson]

Didn't comment on the earlier post, but when you mentioned Tolkien and his loving descriptions of scenery I was right there with you--it's one of the things that makes his fantasy world work for me. Anyone can write battle scenes and invent scary monsters, but putting it in a world with hills and hikes through woods complete with thorns and biting insects and for me it comes to life. I always had this thing for scenery and also for topographic maps--when I was a child and we visited national parks I usually tried to purchase the plastic "bumpy" maps that they sold back then (don't know if they still do). I had one for Rocky Mountain National Park, the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone--Yellowstone was disappointing to me because the vertical scale was exaggerated (factor of 2) and as a kid I didn't like the inauthenticity of it. The Grand Teton one was neat, because the mountains were nice and dramatic and really were that tall ((an inch or so on that scale, iirc). Of course Yellowstone covers so much area you have to exaggerate the heights of the mountains or they'd barely show up, but as a child I was quite unforgiving of the dishonesty.

But yeah, scenery fascinates me-I could get excited over almost any terrain, except the utterly flat soybean and/or rice fields of eastern Arkansas. But those would have been cool if they were still covered with forest and swamp. And further south, if they also had alligators. (We visited a wildlife refuge in Arkansas once that was all boardwalks and swamp, but too far north for alligators. What's a swamp without alligators? Disappointing, that's what.)

On the bridge phobia, I knew one other person like that. I don't have that particular fear, though I am afraid of heights. But it's a more subdued phobia, apparently--I won't walk up the edge of a cliff if it doesn't have a guardrail or something similar, but will get down on hands and knees and peer over.

[Donald Johnson]

Someone still makes raised relief maps of the National Parks, though these aren't the ones I remember (the ones we bought were smaller)

link

[Donald Johnson]

I didn't know about the Boston bombings when I wrote all that--not that I have anything to say about the tragedy, but I wouldn't have been writing about scenery and plastic relief maps if I'd been aware of it.

[Priest]

There was a time when the Connecticut Valley and Gadsden County, Florida were reputed to be the only places in the country where shade tobacco was grown. We left the Hartford area before I turned 4, so I don't have any memories of seeing growing areas up there, but after we moved to Tallahassee we would regularly go to south Georgia to visit relatives. Which meant driving on US 27 through Havana, outside of which were many tobacco barns, and fields beyond. The barns are mostly or all gone now.

[geographylady]

JT and the Dixie Chicks? not bad. and the son does sound amazingly much like dad.