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[ Friday, August 31, 2007 10:20 ]

Legacy Journal: An August Update from the Heartlands.

Section:
Travel

Summary:
During the month of August, this writer has been on a minimalist kind of luxury vacation. No phone, not camera, no note pad, no guide books and no driving. The occasion was a relocation from Calilfornia to Rochester, NY. The mode of transportation was a live-aboard Green Tortoise Bus crammed with an eclectic group of 35 free spririts representing seventeen countries and seven languages outbound from San Francisco. Most of us had done the Bay Area tourist thing before departing for flight connects in New York City, Boston or Washington, D.C. for England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia or whereever.

Meanwhile is was close quarters in the bus on visits to the Rudy Mountains of Nevada, the Salmon River of Idaho, the great National Parks of Grand Teton and Yellowstone and the sweeping vistas of Wyoming, the five star destination spot at Cisco Hotsprings Resort in Paradise Valley on the Yellowstone River in the heart of cowboy heaven south of Livingston, Montana, the annual Biker rally in Sturgis and Lakota country in the Bad Lands of Rapid City, South Dakota, the farmlands and the upscale suburb of Egan near the Mall of the Americas in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Interstate Park of LA Croix,Wisconsin, the center of Chicago near DePaul University, Lake Michigan, the Turnpikes of Indiana, Lake Erie and Cleveland in Ohio, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Niagara Falls in Seneca country in northwestern upstate New York. Then it was then on to mid Lake Ontario, the Erie Canal, the lower Genesee Valley and the county’s first boom town, The City Rochester, NY. For some explorers, it was 13 states in 13 days. Whew!

Main:
What an opportunity to take the pulse of the county. The pulse of this youthful country is Strong, steady, vital and optimistic.

Impressions:

* Young non-American travellers see the country through different cultural prisms than do native travellers from the two coasts. Distance, the grandeur of big building, homes, rivers, lakes and mountains, open space, abundance, opportunity and prosperity impresses european youth. Many of them are young students working summer jobs in places like the Pharmacy in Wall, South Dakota, and the Yellowstone NP restaurants run by Xanterra, Inc of Denver, CO.

* Corporate America is not despoiling the environment and raping the landscape in the Heartlands. For example, in Wyoming, along I-90, local coal on mile- long hopper trains were supplying electrical generation plants suppled with local water from steam and cooling. Those plants were connected to the national power grid towers with pronghorn antelope, Angus cattle and quarter horses grazing in their shadow. BTW, energy associated state revenues in Wyoming have led to one of the highest rates of per capita public education spending in the nation. The results are eye-popping rates of graduating seniors enrolling in college.

* Along the high reaches of the Continental Divide, the watersheds of the Snake River to the Pacific and the Yellow Stone River to the Caribbean Oceans are well guarded and extensively monitored by multiple agencies and their professional staffs offield engineers and wildlife naturalists.

* Those literate folks who get most of their information about the country and the current state-of-affairs from their easy chairs and the media are missing an important and postive story. They become like many obese folks who accept norms via the recently described mechanism of social networking of a socially acceptable body image recently described in the NEJM. Independent observations by folks who put boots on the ground and do their field work tend to be optimistic and hopeful.

* Independent working people in the Heartlands do their jobs with the aid of machines, power equipment, trucks, vans, tractors, combines, tillers, service vehicles, school buses, snow clearing equipment, locomotives, airplanes, etc. They and their families are impacted daily by the price of natural gas, gasoline and diesel fuel. In addition, their electic bills reflect the mitigation legislation that targets coal fired electricity producers. Further, basic building and construction materials like lumber, cement, rebar and asphalt are impacted by rising energy prices.

* Yes, there is roadside evidence of wind farming and corn ethanol fired turbines along the Heartland gridway. But, but eco-friendly can extract a price. USA Today, this weekend reports the death of a worker in at a Wasco CO. Oregon wind farm site from a high speed windmill blade malfunction.

* Reports are that the prices for prime corn land have tripled over past five years. Agricultural commodities prices for meat, milk, eggs and corn meal have impacted the supermarket and restaurant checkout bill.

* Today in the online NYtimes, a regular columnist, David Brooks, sums it up well. Weary easterners tend to vacation at the beach. The vigorous and vital among us head for the high mountains. At altitude, in places like the the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the Grand Tetons, the Sierra, MT Shasta, the Cascades of Oregon and Washington, and Montana’s Glacier, NP, the air is clear, the climb a challenge, and the perspective refreshing and uplifting. Maybe that is why the the Directors, Governors and guests of the Federal Reserve System at their annual prelabor day meeting chose to head west to places like the Rerort Lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. While the air is bracing, an envionmental group and USA Today have labelled the Cowboys the worst per capita polluters on the planet. Meanwhile, construction jobs and fossil fuel fired electrical plants continue to boom in the Basin region as south California reports its annual late summer brownouts.

* Meanwhile, may the Americans who hew the wood and draw the water be included in policy debates that propose to adopt the EU model of energy taxation and the Chinese model of transportation.

* BTW, one notes that Rochesterian homeowners are plentiful, proud, and are frequent flag flyers, even when it is not Memorial or Labor Weekend.

* Local Labor weekend Sunday services included a visiting member of the United Universalist Service Committee based in Washington, D.C. The theme was the Jewish Holocaust, the Just Nations award in Israel, and the tribal conflict in the Darfur Region of the Sudan as widely covered by Nicholas Kristoff of the nytimes. None in the audience appeared to aware of of their former senior Senior’s book, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Oxford University Press, 1993. He and his coauthor described the rising tide of regional tribal conflicts that have come to define the destatification of current geopolitics.

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Footnotes:

Posted by: webscribe2 on 08/31 at 10:20 AM
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