Underground

These glass squares (discolored to purple by the weak Seattle sun) are set in the sidewalks of downtown Seattle.  They provided light down to the cavernous underground tunnels that lie under Pioneer Square.Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour starts with the ominous assertion that Seattle’s founding fathers were “from the Midwest and didn’t know anything about building at sea level.”When the tide would come in, it flooded the streets and pumped the city sewage back into town.The Great Seattle Fire of 1889 gave them a chance to start over when the entire town was burned to the ground.Engineers came up with an elaborate plan to run sewage and water lines down the middle of the road at the old street level.  The new city’s ground floor would be the old city’s second floor!The old, original ground floor storefronts can still be seen.After the streets were filled in, building would use the abandoned underground first floor for storage.During Prohibition, the tunnels were also used by bootleggers.After major earthquakes, debris would often be “swept under the rug” and dumped underground.Graphically, the whole place is like Steampunk heaven.

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Honeybee

I reconnected with my friend Lisa on this trip after not seeing her in a decade in a half.  But in Seattle, I was able to have lunch with my old friend Melissa who I probably haven’t seen in over two decades.  In a transparent attempt to keep me from losing touch with her for another two decades, she had baked me cookies.  Well played.

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Authentic

This was the restaurant attached to the Ramada in Tukwila where I stayed when I was visiting friends in Seattle.

“O’Beer” is a family name, right?  This the O’Beer family’s pub, passed down from father to son, right?  Generations of O’Beers have worked behind the bar, drying mugs with a rag, always quick to lend an ear to a local so they can unburden themselves of their troubles, right?  It isn’t just some horrible, Simpsons-caliber corporate eatery with an intentionally bad name?

Right?

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Lodge

Don’t think I’m going to finally get a chance to stay at the Timberline Lodge in northern Oregon, but I did stay at this nice lodge on Mt. Ashland in southern Oregon.  Just wish the skies weren’t so clear.  Yuck.

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Northbound

Having completed the CA/NV/UT/CO/KS/MO/IA/IL/IN/MI/Ont/NY/PA/DE/MD/VA/WV/NC/TN/AR/OK/TX/NM/AZ/CA leg of my road trip, I’m ready to continue northward for the CA/OR/WA/OR/CA leg.

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World

When I’m home, this is my world.

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Montage

I’ve shot a lot of pictures on my trip thus far.  This is a montage of my favorites.  Enjoy.

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Parks

I’ve always appreciated the good taste and consistency of the National Park Service brochures.  (Laid out roughly geographically from my trip.)

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Peregrination III

Back at home, briefly, to do laundry and catch up with people before I continue my trip.  To quote yet again the wise words of Indiana Jones, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.”

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Array

With my uncanny ability to stumble on things I wasn’t looking for, heading west after visiting Trinity Site I found myself driving through the Very Large Array.  (Never realized that the dishes were on train tracks.  They can not only swivel but translate.)

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Priesthood

Serendipitously, I was driving around New Mexico while re-listening to a Seminar About Long Term Thinking that Neil Gaiman had given several years ago.  It reminded me about the Human Interface Task Force which the U.S. Department of Energy had formed in 1981 to develop long-time nuclear waste warning messages to warn off generations in the distant future from digging up radioactive waste that we bury today.

Linguist Thomas Sebeok‘s proposal was the creation of an “atomic priesthood” who, through ritual & myth, would preserve knowledge of off-limit sites where nuclear waste was buried and the dire consequences of transgression.

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Electrical

Saw this DeLorean in the parking lot at Trinity Site.  “Are you telling me this sucker is nuclear?”

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Mushroom

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first man-made nuclear detonation occurred when the Manhattan Project successfully tested a nuclear bomb in a remote location in the deserts of New Mexico.  Oppenheimer codenamed the test as Trinity.

Twice a year—the first Saturday in April and the first Saturday in October—the U.S. government opens the White Sands Missile Range opens to visitors. Thousands of people come each year to visit Trinity Site, ground zero of that first nuclear explosion.A memorial plinth of black lava rock stands at the exact hypocenter.Pictures decorate the fence enclosing the area for the “open house”.The Manhattan Project developed two different types of bombs simultaneously.  One had a complicated implosion-type mechanism and was nicknamed “Fat Man” after Sydney Greenstreet‘s rotund character in the movie adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. The other had a straightforward gun-type mechanism and, because of its long, thin design, was nicknamed “Thin Man” after the eponymous character in another Dashiell Hammett novel.  (In fact it was so straightforward that it wasn’t deemed necessary to test it!)  However, the original Thin Man design had an unacceptably high risk of predetonation and might “fizzle” so a  safer version nicknamed “Little Boy” evolved out it.

“Little Boy” would end up being dropped on Hiroshima.  The “Fat Man” design was tested at Trinity Site and “Fat Man” would be dropped on Nagasaki.I first learned about trinitite in Douglas Coupland‘s debut novel Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture.I took a shot straight down at the ruddy, sandy soil.  This is what the heat of the Trinity test melted into trinitite.All (known) trinitite at Trinity Site has long-since been secured by the U.S. Government.  However, they did have a folding table with a box of samples.They also had several Geiger counters at the table for people to try out.  You could wave them over the samples and see that they are still slightly “hot”.

However, the overlapping clicks from multiple Geiger counters going off stressed me the fuck out.  A lifelong diet of science books & apocalyptic media had conditioned me to know  that that much clicking meant we needed to get out of the area immediately or we’d all die from radiation sickness.  It filled me with a nagging, primal dread.  I was stressed out the entire time I was walking around Trinity Site.  The. entire. time.I tried to regain my composure by looking out past the barbed wire at the beautiful desert landscape surrounding ground zero, stretching out to the distant mountains.There was an optional bus tour to visit McDonald Ranch Home where the bomb was assembled, but—just like with the Geiger counters—I’ve been conditioned to not allow soldiers to round me up and put me on an unmarked bus.The other thing I couldn’t stop thinking about during my visit was how the sun must look down and scoff at our dabbling with nuclear fission.

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Highway II

Like the highway looking down toward White Sands, but this time looking down toward the Valley of Fire.

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Cottonwood

It has taken me way too long to figure this out.  The Alamo means “The Cottonwood.”  Los Alamos means “The Cottonwoods.”  Alamogordo means “Fat Cottonwood.”

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