This week on the Wednesday Blog, I want to air a pet peeve of mine about stories taken out of context.
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In late December 2017, during one of my family’s regular Christmas trips back to Chicago, my Dad and I were walking along Wacker Drive (upper, not lower) past the Herald Square Monument on the northwest corner of Wabash and Wacker. The monument depicts George Washington with two of the principal financial backers of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. I took a picture of the monument with the Trump Tower looming in the background, a pairing of two presidents who in many ways could not be more different in character from one another. My Dad suggested I should learn more about the monument before posting my picture and get the full context of why it’s there in the first place.
As it turns out, the inscription on the monument’s base “The Government of the United States which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support,” was what made my picture seem so poignant in the first place, and likely had the same effect on many pocket photographers who had walked by in the years since 2016 with their smart phones at the ready to capture the world as they saw it.
That inscription, I learned later that day when we returned to our hotel, was from a letter President Washington sent to the Jewish congregation of the Turo Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island affirming their religious liberty and emancipation from any separate law code contrary to the custom in most western countries at the time. The context fit the story I was hoping to tell with my picture, yet I was appreciative of the advice to learn more about that monument before making a statement of my own with its picture.
I have many pet peeves, most of which I don’t talk about out of respect for everyone else. I’d rather be known as someone who has positive things to say rather than a complainer, and in those moments when I find myself overly melancholic or acting in a “woe is me” manner, I tend to annoy myself a fair bit. So, it takes a lot for me to want to say anything terribly negative, yet this matter of context is key to something that does bother me. I am annoyed when stories are taken out of the context in which they were created.
This usually doesn’t happen with novels or movies or TV shows, except now with the deluge of memes using images and moments from these stories to express emotions. I do see this trend played out more in music where the original story of a song might not be as familiar to the people listening to it, yet they sing the words all the same. Context provides so much more color and energy to a story that turns it from a linear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end into a vibrant world crafted by a storyteller that began as a mere idea in their mind.
Pulling a story out of its original context robs the listener of a chance to appreciate the whole depth of the yarn being spun, to see every last fiber of that tapestry being brought together in a great work of art that is inspired by the ideas of its creator. When we break ourselves off from the context of life, we lose a great deal of the beauty of the Cosmos around us. This is why we can sit back and do too little to help our planet as the climate crisis grows ever dire day by day. Last week, several researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute reported their findings that the Atlantic’s currents could stop moving this century, as soon as 2025, due to rising sea temperatures; earlier in the week the National Weather Service also reported that water temperatures over 100ºF (38ºC) were recorded for the first time off the Florida coast. The currents feed the very life we have evolved to depend on and to be an integral part of. By focusing just on our own story, we have lost the context of the greater world of stories that ours inhabits.
Here in the Midwestern United States the weather tends to move in cycles with some wet years followed by some dry years. In my adult life we’ve seen three wet cycles so far, with heavy flooding on the Missouri River around the years 2011, 2015, and 2019. Since 2019 we’ve been in a drier spell, with some seasonal thunderstorms but not the great floods of years past; yet these last two summers the Midwest has been inundated with flood after flood, striking different regions at different times. Over the 4th of July weekend, there were rainfalls in Chicago that dropped as much as 8.96 inches (22.76 cm) of rain on the western Chicago suburbs of Berwyn and Cicero. A few weeks later on 14 July, Kansas City experienced a storm line that produced minimal tornadoes, what we’re more used to here, but instead a line of storms over 40 miles (64 km) long from north to south which produced winds reaching at least 75 if not 80 mph (120.7–128.7 km/h) winds that brought down trees throughout Kansas City, knocking out power lines and leaving much of the metro in the dark.
I for one am used to thunderstorms, they’re quite exciting to be frank, yet this one scared me more than any other I’ve watched from the safety of a well-built house. What scared me most was that the windswept rains reminded me of video I’d seen of the Category 1 hurricanes that hit the East Coast every Fall. To me, this proved that the story I’d been hearing my whole life about the weather here in the Midwest was truly changing, that it was not a couple of bad years followed by a return to milder weather. The baking summer heat that followed that Friday afternoon storm, which last week left portions of Kansas City reading heat indices of over 120ºF (49ºC), was the flip side of the same story we heard in December when the extreme Arctic cold winds that swept down from Canada and locked much of the continent in an ice box settled on Kansas City. That weekend we were treating our garage like an air lock, closing the interior house door and making sure everyone who was going outside had all their skin covered before opening the garage door to the -30ºF (–34ºC) blistering wind to go shovel out our driveway of snow and lay down kitty litter (our preferred road salt) to try and break up some of the ice that had formed.
Without the full context, we cannot see the future we are creating for all life on Earth. Visitors to my favorite place on Earth, Chicago’s Field Museum, will likely go see their fossil halls, an exhibit now called Evolving Planet, in order to see the famed dinosaurs––and especially SUE the Tyrannosaurus Rex––who live in those galleries. I love going in there for many reasons, which if I haven’t written about before on the Wednesday Blog, I’ll be sure to write about the next time I visit. Yet, the Evolving Planet exhibit ends with a counter showing the number of species that have on average gone extinct over the course of any given day. The later in the day you leave that exhibit, the higher the number is. In all our other problems, and especially in all our distractions, we forget that we need all the other life that evolved on this planet with us. We forget that their stories are important to understanding our own.I know a great deal more about the history of the Turo Synagogue after stumbling into Sam Aronow’s Jewish History series on YouTube just before Christmas in 2021. Learning other peoples’ histories allows us to have a better appreciation for the entire tapestry of humanity. For me, it presented a greater sense of respect in President Washington’s words engraved in the base of the Herald Square Monument at the corner of Wacker and Wabash. That context only strengthens the story of our national experiment at citizen-led representative government, now nearing its 250th anniversary.
I had a restless night on board the Auto Train, from the flashing lights to my right as the curtains in my roomette with the rocking of the train, to the audible voices in the corridor beyond, to the frequent bumps and lurches on the rails. Still, after about 7 hours I decided to get up, shower, and get dressed for the day ahead. I had breakfast in the dining car as we crossed the James River and rolled through Richmond, Virginia. That capital city was radiant in the morning sun.
Crossing the James River.
At 9:30, a good half-hour ahead of schedule, we pulled into the northern terminus of the Auto Train in Lorton, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC nestled in the hills near the Potomac. I stepped down onto the platform soon after, collected my car, and drove into the Virginia morning bound for my main stop of the day. Virginia is one of the two oldest English colonies in North America, founded in 1607 with the establishment of Jamestown. The Puritans of New England, better known as the Pilgrim Fathers, didn’t arrive until 13 years later in 1620. Whereas the Puritans established a theocracy in the North, here in the South the Virginians established a plantation society focused on wealth and farming.
The plantations of Virginia inspired the culture and social order of the rest of the South down into the present. In some ways, these plantations are akin to the ranches of the Southwest and haciendas of the old Spanish colonies because they are all focused on the same overarching thing: using the land for its profits.
It was one such plantation that I was driving towards that morning as I passed Fort Belvoir, Mount Vernon, the home of the first President of the United States: George Washington. I’ve spent a lot of time in DC compared to the rest of the East Coast, but in all those trips I’ve never made it out to Mount Vernon, largely because I haven’t had a car on most of those trips to make the journey, or because I just couldn’t fit it into a busy schedule. So, upon seeing how close the Auto Train station in Lorton is to Mount Vernon I knew I had to fit a stop in.
Mount Vernon.
Mount Vernon sits on high ground overlooking a bend in the Potomac about 15 miles downriver from Washington, DC. The mansion house itself was first built by Washington’s father Augustine Washington in 1734 on land that the Washington family had owned since 1674. George Washington began inheriting parts of the estate in 1754 before becoming its sole owner in 1761. The image of himself that he most wanted to be remembered by, that of Farmer George, is best realized there at Mount Vernon, which has been carefully and diligently restored to its appearance in 1799, the year of Washington’s death, by its current owners the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
Washington’s Tomb.
Arriving on the grounds I first made my way towards Washington’s tomb, wanting to see as much of the outdoor things to see there in the morning before the afternoon heat index well over 100ºF set in. At one point there was talk of burying Washington in the crypt beneath the rotunda of the US Capitol building, yet ever the one to avoid grandiosities Washington instead insisted on being buried in a new vault on Mount Vernon, the place he loved more than any other. His tomb is fittingly simple, a vault with an iron gate in which he and his closest family are buried. Outside of it are two obelisks which mark the graves of other Washington relatives who died in the 19th century. A short walk from Washington’s grave is another memorial marker, this one honoring the enslaved African Americans who worked on Mount Vernon. Both were somber sights to behold, the former a tomb of a man who did so much in his day to establish the precedents of our government still in place, the latter a marker of horrendous evils inflicted by that same man upon those who he relied on.
One of the great highlights for me was that afternoon when I took a guided tour of the Mount Vernon mansion, a Palladian structure that has been often used as a model for many later neo-colonial buildings to the point that the layout and interiors seemed almost familiar to me. In some respects, it reminded me of the big farmhouse that I grew up in from the front hall to the social rooms on the ground floor, which in my old house were largely all one big room, to the formal dining room off to the side. On the upper level the idea of having guest bedrooms is something that was very real to me, as we had more sleeping space for guests in that farmhouse than we had for ourselves, though there was only 1 guest bedroom in the place. On the upper level I saw the room where Washington died, restored according to a painting from the 1830s that used eyewitness testimony to be accurate to how the room had looked 30 years before.
After the deaths of George and Martha Washington and their immediate relatives Mount Vernon fell into disrepair, owing in part to changes in the plantation economy and soil exhaustion in those well-settled parts of Virginia. I was touched to learn how the estate was honored and protected by both sides during the Civil War, being one of maybe only a handful of places considered neutral. This saved and preserved Mount Vernon from meeting the same fate as many of its peers throughout the South which were often burnt and ransacked by the passing armies.
I left Mount Vernon after a good 6 hour visit and made my way northwest across northern Virginia to my hotel for the night near Dulles Airport. In general, when it comes to a bigger city like DC, if I have my car with me, I usually prefer to find hotels that are outside of the center but close to a train or metro line so that I can leave my car in a park-and-ride for the day and go into town, while not having to pay downtown hotel or parking rates. I had some ideas of going into DC on this trip, perhaps to visit the National Zoo, but ended up choosing not to, instead staying out near Dulles both that evening due to exhaustion from travel and the poor sleep the night before, and out of an eye for budgetary frugality.
The following day I did make one tourist stop at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center, a massive hangar near Dulles that houses the Smithsonian’s impressive aircraft and spacecraft collection. There’s an old Air France Concorde in there, as well as the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The Space Shuttle Discovery is also housed there, in its own wing of the hangar surrounded by other spacecraft, including John Glenn’s Friendship 7, and a collection of German, American, and Soviet rockets. They even have Chuck Yeager’s Glamorus Glennis, a Bell X-1 in which Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier in 1947, traveling at Mach 1. I wandered around these feats of human ingenuity and engineering so excited to see each and every one of them. But I knew I needed to be moving again, back on the road north, hopefully to make good time in reaching that night’s hotel.
I left Dulles at around 13:30 that afternoon, driving around the western and northern sides of the Capital Beltway to I-95 and aiming my car northeast along that great artery of the Interstate system that parallels the Atlantic coast from Miami to Maine. Today though I would only be passing through four states, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. As I was driving through Baltimore, taking the Fort McHenry Tunnel under Baltimore Harbor, I decided to adjust my route a bit and not go straight to my hotel in suburban Philly but instead to make a stop at Pat’s the King of Steaks in South Philadelphia because “it’s on the way.” I made it to Pat’s just after 5 pm, as the glow of the evening sun seemed to be like twilight as it shone between the old brick buildings around the intersection of S. 9th St, Wharton St, and E. Passyunk Ave.
Provelone without
The last time I was in Philadelphia in October 2019 I made my first visit to Pat’s after it was suggested to me as the best option for a cheesesteak by the park rangers at Independence Hall. I found it to be as good as I was told, a wonderful steak sandwich that was one of the easiest meals I’d yet found to order. In my case, I get the “Provolone without,” that is a provolone cheesesteak without onions. On this visit I was happy to be able to have Pat’s again after the pandemic kept me from traveling throughout the East for much of 2020 and 2021. These sorts of steak sandwiches, invented by working class immigrants and their children in the big old cities like Chicago and Philly are a real wonder for American cuisine. I’d compare the influence of the cheesesteak to that of the Italian Beef, a Chicago invention that is more slowly expanding in reach beyond that lakeside metropolis to be known and loved throughout the US.
While waiting at a traffic light near the old docks on Columbus Boulevard, I looked off towards the banks of the Delaware River at the great wharf buildings that were once the beating heart of that city’s international trade. It was through one such building that my 2nd great-grandfather Edward Maher arrived in this country in 1878, receiving an honorable discharge from the British Merchant Navy in which he had served for several years. Though I don’t know which wharf or which dock was the one that witnessed his arrival in America, I felt that the sorry pair I spied that evening in their faded grandeur could well serve as proxies for the spot where that one of my own ancestors first set foot on these shores.
The idea to stop at Pat’s on the way into Philly was good from a geographic perspective, but as soon as I’d left Pat’s and made my way back onto I-95, I quickly found that from a time and traffic perspective that it wasn’t my finest moment. I crawled through Philly that evening, making it to my overnight hotel after an hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic. By then I was just as exhausted as the night before, and not in the mood to try or do anything fancy. So, I sat down on the sofa in my hotel room, turned the TV to WHYY (Philadelphia’s PBS station) and spent the evening watching Nature and NOVA, two of my favorite shows on the air.
The next morning, I woke early, and quickly packed up my things, checking out of the hotel by 8:45. I made it to the 9:10 train at the Norristown Transportation Center with a good 15 minutes to spare, enough time to buy a new Key Card, the local transit smart card issued by SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) and boarded the regional service bound for the Center City. The plan that day was pretty simple: I wanted to visit the Academy of Natural Sciences, my favorite stop on my last trip to Philly in 2019, and then get back out to my car in Norristown to begin the last leg of the trip with a drive up to Binghamton. As luck would have it, nothing went wrong with the trip that day. I made it into Philly by 10:00 am, and walked from Suburban Station to the Academy in good time, arriving about 5 minutes after they opened their doors for the day.
The Dinosaur Hall.
The Academy of Natural Sciences is, in my humble opinion, the best natural history museum in the East. When it comes to natural history museums, I’m especially fond of the dioramas, the displays of taxidermied animals on naturalistic backdrops, of which the Academy has plenty spread out across 3 floors. Their dinosaur collection is smaller than either the American Museum in New York or the Smithsonian’s in Washington, but when it comes to dioramas Philly has them both beat in how they’re laid out and how intimate they seem. This is especially true compared to the ones in New York where the rooms are so dark that it almost feels hard to really get an appreciation for the animals on display. My two favorite natural history museums in the US are my “home museum” the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, both of which ought to be the poster children, or better yet the type species of American natural history museums in how they set the standard that other museums ought, in again my humble opinion, to follow.
While I was at the Academy, I noticed there was a film crew in the dinosaur hall. I looked to see who was on camera and was surprised to find it was British documentary filmmaker Dan Snow. My general rule when running into famous people is to treat them like anyone else, give them their space, and don’t disrupt what they’re doing. How would you feel if you were working, and some random guy walked up to you and started chatting? I later had a very short but pleasant exchange with him on Twitter about seeing him there. Nice guy.
I wandered around the halls of the Academy of Natural Sciences for a good two hours, just soaking all of it in. When I first agreed to come to Binghamton for my PhD, one of the big things I agreed to myself was that I’d take advantage of being so close to so many wonderful cities with astounding museums to visit as many of them as I could. Because of the pandemic I haven’t been able to be as thorough at that promise as I would’ve wanted, but I’m confident in the future as I find my way into better jobs that I’ll be able to afford the odd weekend trip to see places such as this.
From the Academy I went down into the subway under Market Street and took the trolley to 30th Street, exiting at Philadelphia’s grand Amtrak terminal, where I had a quick lunch of a chicken teriyaki bento box and looked into how to get back to my car in Norristown. I could either wait an hour and catch the same train I took that morning back out to the suburbs, or I could take a timelier route on Philly’s L and interurban services and get there far sooner. Naturally then, I chose the latter, returning to the subway to catch the L to 69th Street, where I transferred to the Norristown High Speed Line, a 13.4 mile (21.6 km) interurban that runs by, among other things, Villanova University. So, at 12:40 I found myself back in my car in the Norristown Transportation Center’s garage, quickly writing out some postcards and setting my navigation system to take me north to my final stop on this Longest Commute, my place of work itself, Binghamton, New York.
The last leg of the trip was the shortest, a mere 2.5 hours between Norristown and Binghamton along the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike (Interstate 476) to the northern edge of the Wyoming Valley just outside of Scranton and then a quick jump up Interstate 81 and across the New York border to the Susquehanna valley and Binghamton. I finally arrived at my apartment at 4:30 pm on Thursday, 11 August, a full 14 days after leaving home.
Elements of this trip have been in the back of my head for a while. Over the past few years, I’ve considered driving back to Binghamton via DC or Philly, having usually done so via Cleveland or Pittsburgh. There are places in all these cities that I’ve wanted to see for a long time, wishes that my younger self had that I’m finally fulfilling. This longest commute took me through 14 states (Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, & New York). The trip in full saw me travel 3,022 miles (4,863 km) across much of the Midwest, South, and Northeast of this country.
So, that’s it. That’s the story. To those of you who have been listening and reading over the last 3 weeks, from the bottom of my heart thank you, thank you, thank you. This episode, no. 39, marks the end of Season 1. I started The Wednesday Blog on a whim one morning after a sleepless night in March 2021 after I decided I wanted to write something personal and non-academic for a change. At the time I said I’d stick with it as long as it was fun and not tedious. Well, that first run of 38 blog posts set the stage for the podcast, which I started on another whim after dinner one night in November 2021. About halfway through the first season of the podcast, I decided I’d call the season over after a max of 40 episodes, to try and keep things even with the number of blog posts I published before the podcast started. So, here we are. I hope “The Longest Commute” has been as fun for you to hear as it was for me to experience and later write.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 