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The author on a blue background wearing Apple AirPods.

On Machinery

On Machinery – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.
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This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.

I am just old enough to remember life before the ubiquity of computers. I had access to our family computer as long as I can remember, and to my grandparents’ computer at their condo when we stayed with them in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. Yet even then my computer usage was limited often to idle fascination. I did most of my schoolwork by hand through eighth grade, only switching from writing to typing most of my work when I started high school and was issued a MacBook by my school. I do think that a certain degree of whimsy and humanity has faded from daily life as we’ve so fully adopted our ever newly invented technologies. Those machines can do things that in my early childhood would’ve seemed wonderous. Recently, I thought how without knowing how powerful and far-reaching my computer is as a vehicle for my research and general curiosity, I would be happy, delighted in fact, if my computer could conduct one function, say if it had the ability to look up any street address in the United States as a device connected to the US Postal Service’s database. That alone would delight me. Yet that is the function of not just one application on my computer but merely one of many functions of several such programs I can load on this device, and not only can I look up addresses in the United States but I can look up addresses in any country on this planet.

With the right software downloaded onto this computer I can read any document printed or handwritten in all of human history and leave annotations and highlights without worrying about damaging the original source. Surekha Davies wrote warmly in favor of annotating in her newsletter this week, and I appreciated her take on the matter.[1] In high school, I was a bit of a prude when it came to annotating; I found that summer reading assignment in my freshman and sophomore English classes to be almost repulsive because I see a book as a work of art crafted by its author, editor, and publisher to be a very specific way. To annotate, I argued, was like drawing a curly-cue mustache on the Mona Lisa, a crude act at best. Because of this I process knowledge from books differently. I now often take photos of individual pages and organize them into albums on my computer which I can then consult if I’m writing about a particular book, in much the same fashion that I use when I’m in the archive or special collections room looking at a historical text.

All of these images can now not only be sorted into my computer’s photo library, now stored in the cloud and accessible on my computer and phone alike, but they can also be merged together into one common PDF file, the main file type I use for storing primary and secondary sources for my research. With advances in artificial intelligence, I can now use the common top-level search feature on my computer to look within files for specific characters, words, or phrases to varying levels of accuracy. This is something that was barely getting off the ground when I started working on my doctorate six years ago, and today it makes my job a lot easier; just my file folder containing all of the peer-reviewed articles I’ve used in my research since 2019 contains 349 files and is 887.1 MB in size.

Our computers are merely the latest iterations of machines. The first computer, Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) counting machine worked in a fairly similar fashion to our own albeit built of mechanical levers and gears where ours have intricate electronics in their hard drives. I, like many others, was introduced to Babbage and his difference engine by seeing the original in the Science Museum in London. This difference engine was a mechanical calculator intended to compute mathematical functions. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) both developed similar mechanisms in the seventeenth century and still older the Ancient Greek 2nd century BCE Antikythera mechanism can complete some of the same functions. Yet between all of these the basic idea that a computer works in mathematical terms remains the same even today. For all the linguistic foundations of computer code, the functions of any machine burn down to the binary operations of ones and zeros. I wrote last year in this blog about my befuddlement that artificial intelligence has largely been created on verbal linguistic models and was only in 2024 being trained on mathematical ones.[2] Yet even then those mathematical models were understood by the A.I. in English, making their computations fluent only in one specific dialect of the universal language of mathematics making their functionality mostly useless for the vast majority of humanity.

Yet I wonder how true that last statement really is? After all, I a native English speaker with recent roots in Irish learned grammar like many generations of my ancestors through learning to read and write in Latin. English grammar generally made no sense to me in elementary school, it is after all very irregular in a lot of ways, and so it was only after my introduction to a very orderly language, the one for which our Roman alphabet was first adapted, that I began to understand how English works. The ways in which we understand language in a Western European and American context rely on the classical roots of our pedagogy influenced in their own time by medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment notions of the interconnectedness of the individual and society alike. I do not know how many students today in countries around the globe are learning their mathematics through English in order to compete in one of the largest linguistic job markets of our time. All of this may well be rendered moot by the latest technological leap announced by Apple several weeks ago that their new AirPods will include a live translation feature acting as a sort of Babel Fish or universal translator depending on which science fiction reference you prefer.

Yet those AirPods will break down eventually. They are physical objects, and nothing which exists in physical space is eternal. Shakespeare wrote it well in The Temepst that 

“The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (4.1.170-175)

For our machines to last, they must be maintained, cleaned, given breaks just like the workers who operate them lest they lose all stamina and face exhaustion most grave. Nothing lasts forever, and the more those things are allowed to rest and recuperate the more they are then able to work to their fullest. So much of our literature from the last few centuries has been about fearing the machines and the threat they pose. If we are made in the Image of God then machines, our creation, are made in the image of us. They are the products of human invention and reflect back to us ourselves yet without the emotion that makes us human. Can a machine ever feel emotion? Could HAL-9000 feel fear or sorrow, could Data feel joy or curiosity? And what of the living beings who in our science fiction retrofitted their bodies with machinery in some cases to the extent that they became more machine than human? What emotion could they then feel? One of the most tragic reveals for me in Doctor Who was that the Daleks (the Doctor’s main adversaries) are living beings who felt so afraid and threatened that they decided to encase the most vital parts of their physical bodies in wheelchair tanks, shaped like pepper shakers no less, rendering them resilient adversaries for anyone who crossed them. Yet what remained of the being inside? I urge caution with suggestions of the metaverse or other technological advances that draw us further from our lived experiences and more into the computer. These allow us to communicate yet real human emotion is difficult to express beyond living, breathing, face-to-face interactions.

After a while these machines which have our attention distract us from our lives and render us blind to the world around us. I liked to bring this up when I taught Plato’s allegory of the cave to college freshmen in my Western Civilization class. I conclude the lesson by remarking that in the twenty-first century we don’t need a cave to isolate ourselves from the real world, all we need is a smartphone and a set of headphones and nothing else will exist. I tried to make this humorous, in an admittedly dark fashion, by reminding them to at least keep the headphones on a lighter mode so they can hear their surroundings and to look up from their phone screen when crossing streets lest they find themselves flattened like the proverbial cartoon coyote on the front of a city bus. 

If we focus too much on our machines, we lose ourselves in the mechanism, we forget to care for ourselves and attend to our needs. The human body is the blueprint for all human inventions whether physical ones like the machine or abstract like society itself. As I think further about the problems our society faces, I conclude that at the core there is a deep neglect of the human at the heart of everything. I see this in the way that disasters are reported on in the press: often the financial toll is covered before the human cost, clearly demonstrating that the value of the dollar outweighs the value of the human. In abdicating ourselves to our own abstractions and social ideals we lose the potential to change our course, repair the machinery, or update the software to a better version with new security patches and fixes for glitches old and new. In spite of our immense societal wealth, ever advancing scientific threshold, and technological achievement we still haven’t gotten around to solving hunger, illiteracy, or poverty. In spite of our best intentions our worst instincts keep drawing us into wars that only a few of us want.The Mazda Rua, my car, is getting older and I expect if I keep driving it for a few years or more it’ll eventually need more and more replacement parts until it becomes a Ship of Theseus, yet is not the idea of a machine the same even if its parts are replaced? That idea is the closest I can come to imagining a machine having a soul as natural things like us have. The Mazda Rua remained the Mazda Rua even after its brakes were replaced in January and its slow leaking tire was patched in May. Yet as it moves into its second decade, that old friend of mine continues to work in spite of the long drives and all the adventures I’ve put it through. Our machinery is in desperate need of repair, yet a few of us see greater profit from disfunction than they figure they would get if they actually put in the effort, money, and time to fix things. If problems are left unattended to for long periods of time they will eventually lead to mechanical failure. The same is true for the machinery of the body and of the state. Sometimes a good repair is called for, reform to the mechanisms of power which will make the machine work better for its constituent parts. In this moment that need for reform is being met with the advice of a bad mechanic looking more at his bottom line than at the need of the mechanism he’s agreed to repair. Only on this level the consequences of mechanical failure are dire.

[1] Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).

[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

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A portrait of André Thevet from 1554

Why André Thevet?

Why André Thevet? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, the second in several scribblings about my research: why I chose to study André Thevet and build my career on the mound of his works.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, the second in several scribblings about my research: why I chose to study André Thevet and build my career on the mound of his works.

I initially chose to focus my dissertation on André Thevet (1516–1590) because of his account of the sloth and because he was French; I speak the language and therefore felt I would not need to learn another language to grasp the sources. Thevet is a figure who I’ve gotten to know over the last 6 years. I first encountered him in Dr. Bill Ashworth’s Renaissance seminar at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It was in a nice classroom in the southeast corner of the third floor of Haag Hall that welcomed in the midday light as the Sun arced across the sky. We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and often I would walk to class from my job working at a cheese shop, the Better Cheddar, at 49th & Pennsylvania on the Plaza. What I didn’t admit at the time but have freely regaled friends and family since is that on Tuesdays the shop’s sommelier would often stop by to offer those of us working at the time wine tastings of the latest vintages. I was hired by the cheesemongers there more for my knowledge of European wines, and because I spoke French, than for my far more limited understanding of cheese going into the job. So, I often went from a delightful morning tasting cabernet francs, pinot noirs, and syrahs to a delightful afternoon sitting in the back third of Dr. Ashworth’s class listening to his stories about the Renaissance.

By this point, I was still committed to a largely unfounded master’s thesis project studying crypto-Catholics in the English court of James I and VI, which was born out of a desire that I might find my way back to London perhaps to work as a curator at the Banqueting House or Hampton Court. By Christmas, that project had well and truly died, it was only several years later that I discovered the fantastic work of the late Professor John Bossey on persistent Catholicism in the North of England that I found the anchor and line that would’ve led me toward my original research project idea. As it turned out, I found my way to Thevet through a more traditional Renaissance history master’s thesis about English humanism, specifically the education of Margaret Roper (1505–1544) and Mary Basset (c. 1523–1572), daughter and granddaughter of St. Thomas More (1478–1535). As an English-speaking Catholic of mostly Irish descent, with a fair minority of English ancestors to boot, I was drawn to the More family as models of a Catholic conscience; it is rather fitting that the upsurge of English colonialism in Ireland coincided with the English Reformation. When I lived in London, while I usually attended Mass at the Jesuit church at Farm Street in Mayfair, I would occasionally go to the English Chant Mass at Westminster Cathedral near Victoria Station. All of this came together in my History master’s thesis about Roper and Basset, my second thesis after the one I wrote in London for my degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster.

A painting miniature of the family of Sir Thomas More held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
A painting miniature of the family of Sir Thomas More held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, c. 1527. Photo by the author.

Yet while I was working on this and writing good essays and papers, I kept hearing my friends talk about how the classes they loved the most dealt with the History of Science. One of my greatest regrets from my time at UMKC is that I didn’t take Dr. Ashworth’s Scientific Revolution class. It would’ve proved to be a good foundation considering I’ve taught essentially the same material since, and considering a great deal of the effort of my generation has been focused on deconstructing this perception of a revolution from humanism to science at the turn of the seventeenth century. So, when I discovered to my horror two weeks before leaving Kansas City to begin my doctorate at Binghamton that the thesis of the dissertation I intended to write had been published in a peer-reviewed journal a year before I took the chance to shift gears entirely and dive into the history of science. I used Thevet’s sloth as my diving board.

I met André Thevet in August 2019. We’d been introduced three years before by Bill Ashworth, yet besides the chuckles I gave at seeing his sloth engraving for the first time I turned my mind away from the Franciscan. Through Thevet I was introduced to the Renaissance notion of cosmography, a starkly different use of the term than how I’d heard it. To me, cosmos is most synonymous with Carl Sagan’s book and documentary series, including that series’ remake in the last decade by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan. I kept coming across the word cosmos throughout the years I was in Binghamton in a myriad of windows. On all of my long drives I listened to audiobooks, and I usually remember the books better than the drives themselves. They animated my existence for those days in the Mazda Rua, my car, crossing the eastern half of our country by road. The first day of my August 2021 Long Drive East was so animated first by Alex Trebek’s last book, which he and Ken Jennings co-narrated, and second after I finished that book on I-70 near the Indiana-Ohio border I turned on a reading of Sagan’s Cosmos read by LeVar Burton. I stopped the car at the Ohio Welcome Center, maybe an hour into the book, to try and get another stand hour on my smart watch and was struck at how brilliant the sky above me seemed that clear August night. That day I’d been running from a massive storm that bore down on Iowa, Illinois, and northern Indiana, a derecho, and for the first time all day I couldn’t see the dark billowing clouds with bolts of lightning shooting forth like thanatic trumpets reminding all in their path that we are mere lodgers on this continent owned by Nature itself. Yet in that moment there were no clouds, no storms on the horizon, only stars burning high above.

Myself in the captain’s chair at the Star Trek Tour in Ticonderoga, NY. Photo: Alex Brisson.

In another drive on a Sunday in late September 2022, at the end of a delightful weekend I spent with my friend Alex Brisson in Ticonderoga and Albany, I drove southwest through the rolling hills of Central New York toward Cooperstown to visit the Hall of Fame. While I was driving, I listened to Andrea Wulf’s biography of the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). On that particular Sunday, I listened as Humboldt’s own book Kosmos was described in depth. It felt to me that I could see some of the inspiration for Sagan’s Cosmos in Humboldt’s magnum opus, and I was left wondering how Thevet’s own Renaissance cosmography fit into this cosmic lineage. As it turns out, Humboldt was familiar with Thevet’s work, and didn’t care for it at all. The Prussian naturalist is one of the earliest figures in my dissertation’s secondary literature, and he is important because he largely dismissed Thevet’s contributions to natural history writing that his vision of the cosmos was too small to warrant that word.[1] In many ways, my approach to Thevet has always been bi-directional: I’ve tried to learn more about the man by finding the books which survive from his library and the books we know he translated while at the same time I’ve always had an eye on Thevet as a starting point for understanding a specifically non-Iberian understanding of the development of the natural history of the Americas beginning in the Renaissance. My own perceptions of natural history are shaped by my childhood introduction to this vast kaleidoscope of the human vision of the rest of nature on display in my hometown natural history museum, the encyclopedic Field Museum on the Chicago lakefront. While as a child I marveled more at the dinosaurs in their upper floor galleries, now as an adult I prefer to spend my time in the museum among the taxidermy and dioramas with one eye drawn to nostalgic escape and the other toward scholarship; the Field Museum contains a specimen of one likely candidate for the species of three-toed sloth that Thevet described in his Singularitez. By taking this multidirectional focus on the history of natural history, on the one side starting with Thevet in the sixteenth century and on the other with Carl Akeley and the collecting expeditions launched by the Field Museum at the turn of the last century, I’ve developed a particular perspective on natural history that is visible in both wide and narrow focuses.

Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. Photo credit: (c) Field Museum of Natural History - CC BY-NC 4.0.
Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. Photo credit: (c) Field Museum of Natural History – CC BY-NC 4.0.
A portrait of André Thevet from 1554
A portrait of André Thevet from 1554

In the six years since, I felt that I not only got to know André Thevet the cosmographer but something of Thevet the man. He was just a few years older than I am when he made his first overseas voyage from France to Constantinople, the Levant, and Egypt in 1551. The most famous portraits of Thevet were published in his 1575 Cosmographie Universelle and 1584 Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres. These two portraits show Thevet at the height of his career, the cosmographer royal, the keeper of an expansive cabinet of curiosities, and a close confident of the Valois royals. Yet there’s an older portrait of Thevet as a younger man which appears in his first book, the Cosmographie de Levant, published in 1554. In it, Thevet is shown not as the resolute man of his craft but as a humble Franciscan friar. It was a position that he was put in by his father when he was 10 years old in order to give the boy a chance at a good education. I see in these three portraits something of a desire for better and greater things. In the process he crossed some people the wrong way and got a fair few things wrong in his cosmography. I’ve learned to take what Thevet wrote with a fine grain of salt especially later in his life. I wonder though if some of the acrimony that Thevet’s reputation has faced since his death in 1590 isn’t in part because of his close ties to the Valois family who declined from power and were replaced by their Bourbon cousins the year before and largely by the Valois’ infamy in the history of the French Wars of Religion, in which the Huguenots who traveled to Brazil with Thevet in 1555 were so threatened by their country over matters of faith. I recently met a woman at a Kansas City Symphony performance who was wearing a Huguenot cross necklace, and it struck me how her ancestors’ experience living as Protestants in a Catholic state mirrored my own ancestors’ experiences living as Catholics in Ireland during the Protestant Ascendancy and Act of Union with the very Protestant Kingdom of Great Britain in 1800. Like her, I’d grown up with a sense of pride in my Catholic ancestors’ resilience at staying Catholic in spite of the state which ruled over them. Seeing the long shadow of the Wars of Religion which for my people didn’t really end until Good Friday 1998 from this vantage gave me tremendous perspective. How did Thevet view it all? He blamed the Huguenots in part for the fall of France Antarctique in his Cosmographie Universelle, writing that “little of this would have happened without some sedition among the French, which began with the division and parting of four ministers of the new religion sent by Calvin to plant his bloody gospel.”[2] Why did he choose to write that the way he did? Certainly, these religious tensions gave cause for the Portuguese to eliminate the French presence in Brazil, yet wouldn’t the economic threat of the French presence in Brazil toward Portuguese trade be justification enough? Could Thevet have been responding to the political situation he found himself in when he published the Cosmographie Universelle in Paris in 1575?

Thevet in 1584.

I like Thevet because I find the man relatable, I get the sense that we can relate somewhat; like him I’ve felt this constant need to prove myself to my peers. This need has waned somewhat as I’m moving along with my career. Yet I feel the younger Thevet depicted in his Cosmographie de Levant is more relatable to my life today in my early thirties. While not a cleric, I chose to not go down that path, I’m alone in my life with a strong sense of wanderlust. Those wanderings have taken me to Paris twice now in the last two years to get a sense of Thevet from beyond the printed books with which I’m most familiar. In October 2023 I followed a lead which took me to Rue de Bièvre, the street where he lived at the end of his life up to his death in 1590. I walked up and down that little street between Boulevard Saint-Germain and Quai de la Tournelle and stopped in the pocket park on the western side of that street. I felt that this was the closest I’d ever get to him, after all the church where he was buried, the Convent des Cordeliers, was desecrated during the Revolution of 1789-1791 and from what I’ve been able to gather, his tomb disappeared. Yet earlier this year while watching an episode of PBS’s science series NOVA about the graves found in Notre-Dame during its reconstruction, I noticed they pulled out a nineteenth-century book of old Parisian epitaphs. I did a quick search through the BnF’s Gallica database, and found Thevet’s own epitaph there transcribed from the original stone carved in 1592 that lay in the Convent of the Cordeliers. In the original French it reads:

Rue de Bièvre, where André Thevet once lived.

Cy gist venerable et scientifique personne Maistre Andre The-

vet, cosmographe de quatre roys, lequel estant aagé de LXXXVIII (88) ans, se-

roit decedé en ceste ville de Paris, le XXIII jour de Novembre M D XCII. –

Priez Dieu pour luy.[3]

In English, this translates as :

Here lies the venerable and scientific person, Mr. André Thevet,

Cosmographer of Four Kings, who was 88 years of age,

he died in this city of Paris, the 23rd day of November 1592.

God, pray for him.

A Tupinambá war club once called “the Sword of Quoniambec” that I’m studying. Thevet brought it to France in 1556.

On that same trip I visited a wooden Tupinambá club which the Musée du Quai Branly records was donated to the royal collections by Thevet and was given to the cosmographer by the Tupinambá leader Quoniambec (d. 1555). I figured this would be the only artifact I’d see that Thevet would’ve himself handled. Little did I realize that eight months later I’d be back in Paris, this time at the BnF’s Richelieu building in the Department of Manuscripts reading through Thevet’s own handwriting. I’d made a visit there that day to read through Thevet’s translation of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Sephardi Jew from the northernmost reaches of Al-Andalus which told the story of his travels around the Mediterranean world. Tudela’s wanderings took place three centuries before Thevet made his own voyage east into the Mediterranean in 1551. Here, through the window Thevet crafted with his pen over 470 years before, I was reading a story retold in Thevet’s words of events that occurred over 700 years ago. That sunny June day, I spent a few quiet moments reflecting on Thevet’s penmanship, his signature, and how familiar his writing seemed. I’ve read more of Thevet than many others, after all I’ve translated the entirety of his Singularitez, and so when I was working with his Tudela translation, I found the job was made easier by how I could recognize his voice in the flourishes of his pen. I felt that I knew the man, in spite of the centuries between us. Soon after, as I walked from the Richelieu building to a café next to the Sorbonne where I was meeting an editor for a project I’m contributing to, I reflected amid my quick steps crossing the Seine that I was walking the same streets Thevet once walked. They’d changed to be sure, but there were still monuments that he’d recognize, edifices of the Paris he knew.

I chose to study Thevet out of a drive for practicality, a quick solution to a pressing problem of finding a dissertation topic that I could move to when my original plans went up in smoke. In the years since I’ve become known as a Thevet scholar. I’ve given many conference presentations and lectures about the man and his contributions to Renaissance natural history. In fact, I’ll be giving one more on June 12th with the Renaissance Society of America’s Graduate Student Lightning Talks, sponsored by the RSA Graduate Student Advisory Committee. That talk takes a different perspective on Thevet’s sloth than any other I’ve yet given, approaching it as an example of animal intelligence. Tune in to learn more.

[1] Alexander von Humboldt, “Les vieux voyageurs à la Terre Sainte (du XIVe au XVIe siècle),” Nouvelle annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l’histoire 135 (1853): 36–256, at 39.

[2] Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, Vol. 2, 21.2, ff. 908v–909r.

[3] Émile Raunié, Épitaphier du vieux Paris, recueil général des inscriptions funéraires des églises, couvents, collèges, hospices, cimetières et charniers, depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Vol. 1–3, Paris : 1890-1901), 302, n. 1171.

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Speed Limits

Speed Limits – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some moderation in Maverick’s “need for speed.” — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some moderation in Maverick’s “need for speed.”

I’ll admit that I have never seen Top Gun nor the recent sequel. My best familiarity with the film is that I once had dinner at the Kansas City Barbeque restaurant on Harbor Drive in San Diego where they filmed one of the scenes in that film. At the time I was living in Binghamton, NY and out west for the 2021 meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and excited to see somewhere named “Kansas City Barbeque” in walking distance of my meetings. The sauce had a vinegary feel to it. Still, that “need for speed” that Tom Cruise’s character Maverick appears to have in the film is something that I can get in some regards.

I’ve been driving for close to twenty years now. When I was little I always wanted to drive the family car. To put a stop to this pestering, my Mom said, “You can drive when you can see over the wheel and reach the pedals at the same time.” Well, that happened when I was ten, and I quickly moved from being in the trailer with my Dad while we bailed hay in the summers on the farm we moved to in Piper, Kansas to driving the truck. It was one of the first really smart things I ever did. I got my learner’s permit when I was 14, my restricted driver’s license when I was 15, and my full driver’s license when I was 16 on St. Stephen’s Day 2008.

In those first few years that I was licensed I, like many teenagers, was thrilled at being able to drive fast. I learned to drive on highways before learning to drive on narrower city streets and country lanes, as I was driving daily between our farm and my high school, St. James Academy, a 30 minute journey south along K-7 on the western edge of Greater Kansas City. I have many stories from those early years driving that surely will make good blog posts in future, so I won’t tell all of them here. I learned early how to drive with greater caution in ice and snow, and in one instance did slide off a highway interchange ramp going from I-635 southbound to I-35 southbound in icy conditions. All the same, I got a sense of thrill from driving.

And yet, I wasn’t one who liked road trips all that much, something which changed out of necessity when I started making my 14 long drives east & west between Kansas City and Binghamton between August 2019 and December 2022. These long drives changed how I drive, and made me highly aware of what my car, which I’ve lovingly named the Mazda Rua, because it’s a red Mazda 3, does in certain circumstances. One of the greatest feelings when driving is when I get the sense that I can control the motions of my car with only the slightest movements, and when there’s a sense of connection between my thoughts and my car with my arms and hands as the conduits for that connection. In Binghamton, especially when I was teaching online and didn’t have many places to go to get out of my apartment, I would take long drives in every direction, just driving as far as I felt like I wanted to in a day and turning around. In one instance I made it east on I-86 (NY-17) as far as Hancock, NY in the Upper Delaware Valley, while in another I drove up the western shore of Cayuga Lake almost to the New York State Thruway at which point I decided to turn around and return to Binghamton for the night. I’d spend this time on the road listening to podcasts or audiobooks and exploring the world around me in ways I otherwise wouldn’t have done. I now know a great deal more about the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes than I ever would’ve otherwise simply by spending a weekend day driving around seeing what’s out there.

I’ve always known the speed limit to be more of the mark at which traffic tends to go, a number to aim for yet ideally not cross too much. Here in Kansas City, it felt reasonable to drive maybe 5 mph (8 km/h) over the speed limit but not much more than that. When I arrived in New York State, I was told by people I met there that it’s normal to go 10 mph (16 km/h) over the speed limit, and so I tried my best to keep up with the pace of traffic. It was even worse during my Longest Commute when while driving in Florida along I-10, I-75, and Florida’s Turnpike from Destin to Orlando when the traffic was moving closer to 20 mph (32 km/h) over the speed limit, and again I felt the need to keep up if only for my own safety. What struck me the most was that after the Pandemic the average pace of traffic in Kansas City has risen to 10 mph over the posted speed limit not only on the highways but in some cases on the larger city streets as well. I followed along at first, trying not to be run off the road by the more aggressive drivers tailgating me the entire way on Southwest Trafficway from Westport Road to 31st Street, for example, yet I knew that even then I would not have the reaction times I wanted and needed to be able to stop for the odd jaywalking pedestrian or animal, or other obstacle that fell into the street. Like that time a couple of years ago when I was driving on I-470 out to Lee’s Summit when I had to dodge a sofa that fell out of the back of a truck in the middle lane.

This stands in stark contrast to my experiences in other countries where the speed limits are adhered to as they are posted. As much as approaching a roundabout at 70 mph (112.65 km/h) in Milton Keynes was startling to say the least, the fact that my friend who was driving kept strictly to the national speed limit (and was driving a Tesla that has the breaking ability to slow down enough to make it to that roundabout) was a relief, if a bit of an anomaly in my driving experience. In some instances the posted speed limits don’t always make sense to me. In 2010, I was walking down a road in Gleann Cholm Cille, County Donegal, where the posted speed limit was 80 km/h (50 mph), which seemed far too fast for the width of the road in question. Now having driven in Canada, it seems even more silly considering the 401 Freeway which is the main highway in Ontario has a posted speed limit outside of cities and work zones of 100 km/h (62 mph). In what way does it make sense then for an old bóthar, a proper country cow-path in Donegal, to have a speed limit that’s only just lower than one of the highest trafficked highways in Canada? 

All of this got me thinking about how I drive here in America, and after I returned from this summer’s European tour, I found myself spending less time pressing down the accelerator and more time coasting; less time aiming for 30 or 35 mph (48 or 56 km/h) and more time enjoying and observing the neighborhoods around me, safely breaking for pedestrians, and not hitting animals.

On August 31st, the California Senate passed Senate Bill 961 which will require all new vehicles model year 2030 and beyond to have technology installed which will alert drivers if they are going more than 10 mph (16 km/h) over the speed limit. How this alert will function––an alarm bell, a verbal warning from the car’s computer, a vibration in the steering wheel, a slight electric shock to the hands––remains uncertain. Yet this bill made the national news because, like Wisconsin’s seatbelt requirement passed in 1962, it presages any federal legislation on the same speed limit technology. I know many people will be upset or angry about this legislation and will say that speeding is their right as an American, or whatever they will. I am in favor of the idea yet uncertain about the execution. For one, the 10 mph warning line ought to take local conditions into account, is the traffic around you going faster than 10 mph over the speed limit, and for all of us who will likely not be driving new model cars in 2030, how long until this law has such widespread effect as to be practical? Until earlier this year my Dad was driving a 1962 Ford F100 truck as his everyday car. My Mazda Rua is now 10 years old, yet it has always had a built in feature in the navigation system that will warn me I’m crossing the speed limit by turning the white speed limit sign on the screen red.

With all that I’ve written here about slowing down on the city streets, I still would probably drive faster on highways on intercity long drives, within reason of course. Today I don’t drive on the highways much, in fact I have a knack for actively avoiding the highways most of the time and taking the city and suburban street grid wherever I need to go in Jackson and Johnson Counties. Anywhere beyond that and I’ll usually have to get on a highway to at least cross the Missouri or Kansas Rivers. My point is that the circumstances of driving really will always depend on the moment in which I’m in. Here on my street, I’m happy to drive closer to 15 mph (24 km/h) instead of the 25 mph (40 km/h) speed limit. Perhaps the best we can do short of installing technology in cars that will slow them down to the speed limit, is doing the European thing of installing speeding cameras along all of our highways, roads, and streets which will send tickets by mail to anyone caught speeding. Here in Kansas City, Missouri our red light cameras were turned off in 2015 after the Missouri Supreme Court ruled them to be a privacy violation. These camera systems wouldn’t require officers writing tickets on the side of a busy street or highway. All that said, I don’t feel optimistic that the nigh libertarian political climate of either Kansas or Missouri will go for this.

That then leaves our speeding up to the individual drivers collectively creating a speed for the flow of traffic. I could say that this will help at least keep vehicles moving at roughly the same speed which will in turn keep everyone involved safe, but that again ignores the full impact of the human factor, my interpretation of chaos theory which I wrote about last week. At the time of writing, chaos might well be the best adjective for describing the streets and highways of Greater Kansas City. And that is proof, dear reader, that leaving the speed up to the individual drivers isn’t going to work.

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The Longest Commute, Part 2

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On Sunday morning, 31 July, I awoke to my first sights and sounds of the Emerald Coast. This particular stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast along Santa Rosa Island and Choctawhatchee Bay is famous for its rich green waters and white sandy beaches. The sight of the bay out my window was one of the first reminders of where I was, that I was not in fact back home in Kansas City nor in that modern hotel room in Nashville. No, I was now in the Gulf Coast, the southern seaboard, of the United States.

I spent the better part of the first day on our balcony attending to a series of morning Zoom calls, before heading out to the beach around lunchtime. In preparation for the beach, I replaced my usual slip-on shoes and black socks for a pair of brown leather sandals that I bought for a day-long float trip down the upper reaches of the Colorado River back in the Summer of 2018. Still, I retained my usual khaki trousers and summer golf shirt, lest I move entirely out of the realm of comfort. 

I quickly found that I had arrived at the beach well after much of the seashore fun had passed. The majority of my relatives had had their fun in the ocean waters that morning and were now returning to their rooms to beat the worst of the afternoon sun. So went most of that week in Destin. I found myself caught up in my own over-thinking more than in enjoying the moment, and never did go for that swim in the ocean that everyone kept talking about. The complexity of the idea left me hesitant and wandering that far from a place where I could dry off and change back into my normal clothes without potentially expanding the reach of the ocean or its sandy shores even further was my limit.

A dolphin cow and her calf swam up next to our boat.

On Monday I boarded one of two pontoon boats that carried the 24 of us from my family who made the trip to the seaside and traveled from Destin Harbor out to an apparently famous local haunt called Crab Island. I imagined it would be a large rock tethered to the ocean floor that would be just big enough to be a curiosity for all the tourists flocking to the emerald waters there and was pleasantly surprised to find that Crab Island was actually a shallow part of the bay which allowed for people to walk with ease through the water without much risk of drowning. As with my thoughts on Sunday, I did not join in the aquatics and remained firmly on the boat, but I still enjoyed the time out on the water.

That evening several from our group went to a local pub in the area called McGuire’s that reportedly has some of the best steaks in the country. I considered it but ended up trying their bangers and mash, which were so wonderfully memorable. While I was there, I participated in an unusual custom local just to that establishment of signing dollar bills and stapling them to the walls of the pub. In my own case, my dollar bill was signed “Bhí Seán Ó Catháin anseo, 1 Lúnasa 2022.” After the fact I kicked myself realizing I forgot a key part of the verb, which should have been written “Bhí Seán Ó Catháin anseo é, 1 Lúnasa 2022.” Still, should you be in the area and want to see it, my dollar bill is likely there stapled onto the lid of a very large barrel (I thought of it as a hobbit door) in the room behind the gift shop.

My dollar bill at McGuire’s Pub in Destin, FL.

On Tuesday I got to experience the power of the thunderstorms that build up on the Gulf of Mexico. Most of Tuesday the skies remained cloudy and gray, with various stages of rain from sprinkles to showers falling down on the barrier island that we were staying on. The island in question is the easternmost reaches of Santa Rosa Island, a long and skinny barrier island stretching from Pensacola Harbor in the west to Destin Harbor in the east. Yet as a great many cases in this country’s long history longstanding naming conventions couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of a good marketing opportunity, and in 1950 at the urging of a local developer the eastern 1/3rd of Santa Rosa Island was transferred from Santa Rosa County to Okaloosa County and renamed Okaloosa Island, the name you can buy on keychains, t-shirts, and tag on your Instagram stories when you visit.

We stayed in a beach resort on Okaloosa Island called Destin West. The resort is split between a bayside horseshoe and a beachside block. Our condo in the middle of that bayside horseshoe was a 7th floor penthouse with a neat rooftop balcony that provided marvelous sunrise and sunset views over both the Gulf of Mexico and Choctawhatchee Bay. What’s more, I was delighted by the visions of the night sky that flickered into view each night from that rooftop. On Sunday night my parents and I ventured up onto our rooftop and spent a good hour gazing up at the stars. The sky was first illuminated by the pinpoint of light that is Arcturus, roughly 36.7 light years distant from Earth. Thereafter we gazed up, me laying in a sun-bathing chair, as more and more stars greeted us as the light of our Sun faded further below the western horizon. My Dad and I saw an even better view of the night sky a few hours later when we wandered down to the beach to try and get some wave recordings for this podcast, seeing then the band of the Milky Way arc over our heads in all its nebular glory.

I’m sad to report the wave recordings came out as static. I guess I needed a better microphone.

The other great highlight from the week in Destin was all the time I got to spend with my family: parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and the young children of my cousins. Many of you are listening or reading this week, and I hope this makes my appreciation for all of you very clear. On Tuesday night, I went out on the town with some of my cousins, going towards Destin’s Harborwalk where we enjoyed some of the local music, some good food and drink, and for several of my kin a nice jump off a perfectly good tower. A few days later I returned with more relatives, this time parents and kids included, and got to rediscover that Harborwalk all over again in the daytime.

One of the more fascinating experiences that I had while on the Emerald Coast was visiting first the Native American mound located in downtown Fort Walton Beach, and secondly a sea turtle conservation center in Navarre Beach. The mound was likely built around 850 CE by a people identified archeologically as the Pensacola Culture (fl. 1100–1700). The mound builders in Fort Walton Beach were among a wider culture of mound builders extending throughout the interior of North America called the Mississippian Culture who dominated the Mississippi Basin from around 800 to 1600. Among the most famous Mississippian mounds is Cahokia, located just across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Illinois, which remains one of the top archeological sites I still want to visit. The Mississippians mysteriously disappeared just before the arrival of the Europeans in North America without much certainty as to why. I for one would love to learn more about them.

The Navarre Beach Sea Turtle Conservation Center has a lot in common with many a local science center that I’ve visited, including Broome County, NY’s Kopernik Observatory. It’s staffed by locals who clearly are not only dedicated to the center’s mission but are also themselves keeping the lights on, and it seems to be a focal point of a local advocacy message within the community. The Gulf Coast is home to a wide range of animals and plants, among which are several species of sea turtles. We got to see one green sea turtle named Sweet Pea who lives in the pool located inside the Conservation Center. Sweet Pea was found in Gulf Shores, Alabama with fishing wire stuck far down her throat and wrapped all around her body. In the veterinarians’ efforts to save her they ended up having to amputate one of her front legs, and she’s also missing a piece of her shell, but now she lives a happy life in her pool. Sea turtles are increasingly threatened by human activities along the coast, including fishing, littering, and the use of white flashlights on beaches at night which keep the sea turtles from laying their eggs in the sand out of fright. This is one area where sea turtle conservation and astronomy intersect, as in both cases red flashlights are far better to use than white or blue ones, as red is a cooler color and less blinding to the eyes of either a human or, clearly, a sea turtle.

Sweet Pea the Green Sea Turtle.

Over the last few days of my time in Destin I got to know the roads leading out of that resort town quite well, volunteering to drive a parade of relations to the local airport for their own flights home. On Friday morning, 5 August, I made my own departure from Destin, driving north toward Interstate 10 which I took east. I first stopped in Tallahassee, the state capital, with the sole intention of seeing the Florida State Capitol and then returning to the highway to finish my drive southeast to Orlando. As it turned out, I ended up getting lunch at a local Whataburger, refueling, and making a very brief stop at the State Capitol to photograph it, resulting in an hour delay in Tallahassee. This pushed my arrival in Orlando back from late afternoon to early evening, yet that was only the first delay.

One of the things I noticed foremost about driving on Florida’s highways is how aggressive the drivers in the Sunshine State are. In the Midwest if the speed limit is 70 mph the traffic might flow at around 75-79 mph, yet here with a similar 70 mph speed limit the traffic was staying steady if forceful at a grander 85 mph. I quickly caught on and kept up with the traffic, finding I was getting cut off and being honked at less by the locals and tourists alike, and after a few hours of driving I merged off I-10 and I-75 and onto Florida’s Turnpike, a tollway which runs northwest to southeast across Central Florida and then down the Atlantic coast until terminating near Miami. I was excited to see what this turnpike would be like, as every state tends to like to give their tollways their own particular flair. Massachusetts for one has grand signs arching over their turnpike at every service plaza, and Illinois––the state of my birth––used to have a network of toll oases that were glass bridges over the tollways, most of which are now gone, though they’ve kept the very large circular oasis building on I-88 in DeKalb. Florida’s Turnpike proved to be about as overstated as I expected, with its grand service areas that were advertised nearly once every mile. 

I wasn’t planning at stopping at any of them but ended up pulling over at the first one I came across because of a warning sign I saw almost as soon as I’d merged onto the turnpike: “All lanes blocked at US-27 due to wreck, find alternate route.” I checked my map and confirmed that US-27 was between where I was and Orlando. So, I turned to my car’s navigation system and found an alternate route that would take me off the turnpike before the wreck and back on again just after it. “Great!” I said, pulling back onto the highway. It was only a half an hour later when I was pulling off the turnpike and onto my alternate route that I began to realize how frustrating this would be, as that alternate route took me from a 70 mph highway onto a series of rambling backroads that led to the northernmost suburbs of Orlando where farm traffic mixed with the Mercedes and Volvos going to and from the new neighborhoods and resorts that were being built in those farm and swamp lands.

Finally, finally after another hour of meandering through the backroads of Central Florida I returned to the turnpike well past the wreck that had shut down “Florida’s Main Street” and into one of Central Florida’s famous summer thunderstorms. Now, I’m from Tornado Alley so I know a thing or two about thunderstorms, but I can swear to you now that these Florida thunderstorms are nothing like the ones that build up off the eastern face of the Rockies and rain down on the Great Plains. Oh no, these are tropical downpours that build up as the cold Atlantic air meets the warm Gulf air over Central Florida, itself a barely-above-sea-level peninsula and proceeds to dump all the water the heavens can muster onto anyone below. It reminded me of what the Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine say about the rains on their home planet Ferenginar, “No, it never rains, it only pours!” As a matter of fact, the hyper-profit hungry Ferengi may well be a good model for understanding Florida, or what I saw of Florida, a state that has a noticeable government bureaucracy (just look at all the tollways around Orlando) but maintains a strong “Survival of the Fittest” attitude about life. I even argued on multiple occasions during my time in the state that they ought to change their state motto to that: “Florida, the Sunshine State. Survival of the Fittest.” The remainder of my time in Florida was marked by the threatening clouds of its immense thunderstorms.

I stayed in the tourist area south of downtown Orlando near International Drive with the idea that if I was close to a couple major highways, I’d be able to get to my two main destinations on that part of the Longest Commute easier. Still, I was overjoyed to discover that I was effectively staying in a part of town that could be called Chicago South, for no sooner had I gotten there than I realized there was a new Portillo’s location just a few minutes’ drive from my hotel. For those of you who aren’t aware, Portillo’s is a chain of Chicago restaurants serving local favorites from the city of my birth like Chicago hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, Maxwell St. Polish Sausages, Italian Sausages, as well as burgers, salads, and Mrs. Portillo’s famous chocolate cake. And yeah, I may have eaten there a few times while I was in the area, seeing as I haven’t gotten back to Chicago since 2020 yet.

On Saturday, 6 August I decided to go into Orlando and see what there was to see in a city famous for its theme parks that wasn’t actually in a theme park. I was kind of interested to go to Disney World again, 25 years after my last visit at the age of 4, in large part because there was a rumor (I could never confirm it) that they have a toco toucan (Ramphastos toco), which is the one that’s at the center of the action in Chapters 5 and 6 of my dissertation. Yet with all that said it turns out that the Orlando theme parks are far too expensive to visit on a TA stipend, especially when you’re just going as an individual and not with a significant other or a group. So, instead I went to visit my two usual haunts in a new city: the local science museum and the local art museum. 

A vertical farming demonstration

The Orlando Science Center is located in a large round building on the edge of a city park that was built in the 1990s. It houses a lot of wonderful science exhibits aimed at introducing children to the main topics of the STEM fields, and it’s clear the children of Orlando get a lot out of that museum, which is wonderful. The one hall that I spent a fair bit of time in, the one hall that was the closest to what I’ve come to expect in a science museum, was the dinosaur hall, where a series of casts of famous fossils were found, including a cast of Stan the T.  Rex. That said, I was out of the Orlando Science Center in just over 30 minutes, having seen pretty much the entire place. Thankfully, my ASTC membership got me in there for free.

From the Science Center I decided to walk across the park to the Orlando Museum of Art, a pretty building set into the far edge of the park from the Science Center. I paid my admission fee and began to stroll around their limited galleries, finding one on Ancient American art especially fascinating, but the rest of it, a collection of contemporary art from around Florida, was not really my style. I do love some types of contemporary art, especially contemporary architecture and the smooth lines that evoke it in paintings and sculpture, but I’m not as fond of the imperfections that seemed to be glorified in the art on display in that museum. It’s just not my taste. A bit let down by that experience, on the walk back to the car I searched on my phone for another museum I remembered seeing when I was researching this trip, and while I thought I found it I instead ended up at the art museum on the beautiful campus of Rollins College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the South, and somewhere based on what I read and saw of the place I wouldn’t mind teaching at someday, perhaps.

The main reason why I chose to go to Orlando was to use that city as a launching off point for a day trip east to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Some of my earliest memories are of pictures from the Apollo program and of the space shuttles in books and on TV. Those of you who have read and listened to the Wednesday Blog (thank you!) will know that I’m a space nerd. So, when I heard we were doing a family trip to Florida, I first looked up how far our vacation spot was from the Cape.

I arrived at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex at 8:15 am, a full hour and 15 minutes before the gates opened, which meant I was also one of the first in line to go through those gates when they did open at 9:30 am. The opening of the Visitor Complex every day is announced by the playing of the national anthem over the PA system, in a rousing and triumphal manner that proved to be a sign of things to come. I began my tour of the KSC by catching the tour bus to go out to the Apollo-Saturn building a few miles northeast from the main Visitor Complex near the Vehicle Assembly Building, where NASA’s spacecraft are put together and stored before launch) and launchpads 39A and B where both the Apollo missions of 1969–1972 and the Artemis missions of my generation have and will launch from. At the time that I visited, 7 August 2022, Artemis 1 was housed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building awaiting its launch to orbit the Moon. The launch window is scheduled for 29 August at the earliest, a few days after this episode is scheduled to be released. So, fingers crossed that it works!

In the Apollo-Saturn building I got to see a mockup of the Apollo mission control, a Saturn V rocket, and an inspiring half-video, half-staged performance telling the story of Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon in the summer of 1969. I found all the videos that greet you when you enter each building at the KSC to be quite triumphant and grandiose in their tone and music. It’s actually quite fun, though a bit jarring in our current climate of division and fear in this country. 

A Saturn V rocket in the Apollo-Saturn Building.

The building I liked the most was the Atlantis building, which houses the Space Shuttle Atlantis and honors the space shuttle and ISS programs all together. As much as Apollo and Sky Lab were the space programs of my parents’ youth, so the Space Shuttle and ISS were the space programs of my youth. It was quite moving for me to finally see a space shuttle up close, and the feelings of bitter sadness that I felt when the shuttles were retired in 2011 returned ever so slightly. I was almost moved to tears seeing the memorials in that building dedicated to the Challenger and Columbia crews who lost their lives in 1981 and 2003 respectively. Many people in my parents’ generation have said that they stopped watching space launches after Challenger broke up upon liftoff, and as for myself I can remember when the news bulletin came in on NPR announcing that Columbia had broken up upon reentry into the atmosphere on that warm Sunday, 1 March 2003. 

The Space Shuttle Atlantis

My Dad and I were out in the fields on our farm, doing what I can’t remember, and he kept the radio running in his truck that time. As I heard the news I remember looking up to the south and seeing a jet trail far up in the sky. Now, I know that Columbia broke up over Texas, not Kansas, but in my memory that jet trail was Columbia in its last moments. It’s a memory that will always stick with me.

After a nice lunch in the Cosmic Café, I returned to my touring, visiting the Mars building to see the end of an inspiring video telling us “The first human to walk on Mars is living among us today!” with a NASA employee up on the stage pointing out into the audience saying proudly “and that person could be one of you!” I for one am curious about the idea of going up into Space, maybe someday I’ll do it, but for now I don’t think I’m healthy enough for it. From there I walked over to the new Gateway building, which houses a collection of new and newly proposed spacecraft from NASA’s commercial partners including SpaceX, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, among others. One example from a company whose name I can’t remember was an expandable space habitat which at its full size is 3-storeys tall and can serve as a home, workplace, and laboratory for the astronauts onboard whether in orbit, in transit, or on the surface of another world.

My final stop at the KSC was in the Heroes building, an exhibit which honors the NASA and allied astronauts who have ventured up into Space over the last 60 years beginning with the Mercury 7. The building culminates with the NASA Astronaut Hall of Fame, at the center of which stands a fine statue of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to leave our home planet in 1961.

I left the Kennedy Space Center at 3 pm, a good 6 hours after I first passed through the entry gates, having fully enjoyed my day. The one thing, after leaving and now writing about that experience that I wish I’d done is bought a pack of NASA themed playing cards that were for sale in the gift shop.

The following morning, I was up at 9 and out of my hotel by 10:45 for one of the most memorable legs of any trip to date. I was leaving Florida not by road but by rails. At 12:30 I had the Mazda Rua loaded onto the car-carriers attached to the rear of the Auto Train and boarded it myself at 15:30, sitting happily in my sleeper compartment, my roomette, when we pulled out of Sanford, Florida at 5 ‘o clock that evening. I enjoyed the complimentary dinner service in the dining car, choosing the Amtrak Signature Flatiron Steak with green beans and a baked potato, along with a starter salad with Newman’s Own Light Italian dressing, a dinner roll, and a glass of Chardonnay. The 3-course meal was finished off with a slice of cheesecake, a sign of where I was headed, back to the Northeast after an overnight stop in the DC area.

I fell asleep on the night of Monday, 8 August somewhere in southern South Carolina to the gentle sound of the rails beneath me, the soft swaying of the Superliner sleeper car an old and comfortable feeling to me, having experienced it a handful of times on the Southwest Chief between Kansas City and Chicago. Sleep came late, with dreams of an old Mozart tune floating in my head. “Bona nox …”

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The Longest Commute, Part 1

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Over the last 3 years I have driven between Kansas City and Binghamton, New York twelve times, that adds up to around 15,600 miles of driving in total. It’s a lot of time on the road, and in the last few weeks I’ve begun to think of this period in my life as my Years of Wandering, a period when I have been practically migratory in how I’ve moved across the country so often. Surely at this point the postal workers in Binghamton and Kansas City recognize my name for how frequently I’m asking my mail to be forwarded from one address to another. Still, I am in a far better position professionally today than I was after my first master’s degree in 2016. And looking ahead now, the future really is bright for me. I’ve got a lot of opportunities over the horizon.

With all this in mind, I woke up at the reveille of my 06:45 alarm on Friday, 29 July 2022, as is usual, and ruminated on a strange dream I had been having involving, people singing the Internationale while making strange hand gestures and being overly polite, all as a part of a protest over fish. Must’ve been the wine the evening before. Regardless, I woke up that morning knowing exactly what I needed to do: it was time to strip my bed, start my regular morning routine, and begin packing up the car for the next Long Drive East.

To date this drive is the earliest I’ve ever left to return to Binghamton for the Fall semester. Its predecessor in that record was the original Long Drive East on 1 and 2 August 2019, after which I decided I would never again make that trip so early in August again. I intended to keep that promise, even through the period of 14-day quarantines in 2020, yet here I was, on the 29th of July packing the car for the Long Drive East, a drive that would end in a muggy humid valley in Upstate New York that feels about as far from home as it could be while still being in the Lower 48. So, after a quick breakfast of sourdough French toast, scrambled eggs, and hash browns with some friends, I left home at 10:00, bound for my first refueling stop in St. Louis.

The normal Long Drive East has four refueling stops, one every four hours. Typically, they are St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, and Erie. That is if I take the fastest out of the possible 10 different routes. In this instance, I intended to keep to form and barrel my way across Missouri without stopping between Kansas City and St. Louis, so as to get the trip off to a strong start, and maybe to make better time at my overnight stop. But, as things have happened so often this summer, the first day of the trip didn’t quite go to plan. Rather than making it all the way to St. Louis without stopping I decided midway across the state to make a lunch stop in Columbia, home of Mizzou (the University of Missouri to the rest of humanity not from the Midwest). Already by that point I was beginning to feel pretty tired, and knew I needed at least a few minutes of a break. With that in mind, I made an early stop, and shrugged it off, opening the door for even more unscheduled stops over the rest of the trip to come.

This particular Long Drive East was different from every other one that I’ve done over the past few years. Sometimes, I might include a day or two of sightseeing along the way, as an extra bribe to myself to go through with driving so far for so long. The last time I did that was in January 2020 when I stopped in Pittsburgh for a couple days to see the Carnegie Museums. In the years since I’ve allowed myself half-day stops here and there, like at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in August 2021. In all of those occasions I rarely detoured from the general Great Lakes region that lies between the Great Plains where Kansas City blooms and the Appalachians where Binghamton is nestled among those low mountains along the banks of the ancient Susquehanna River.

This time I was taking a long way around, not exactly what I’d call “the long way around”––that would be driving to Binghamton via Alaska––instead, I planned to return to Binghamton via the South, the one region of the country (besides Alaska and Hawaii) that I’ve spent the least amount of time in. Why would I add an extra 1,430 miles (2,301.36 km) to my route just to do a bit of sightseeing? Family, that’s why. This year my family decided to hold a reunion in Destin, Florida, a small resort town on the Emerald Coast of the Gulf of Mexico that lies about halfway between the larger Northern Florida cities of Pensacola and Panama City. 

Of the 24 of us who went to Destin this Summer about half made the trip by air along various routes, while the other half of us drove. I decided from the first moment I started planning this trip that I wanted to stick to the interstates as much as possible, seeing as I memorized most of those over years of staring at maps during road trips as a kid between Chicago and Kansas City. Most of the drivers chose to take a slightly faster route on US Highways through the Ozarks stopping overnight in Memphis and Tupelo, Mississippi (Elvis’s two hometowns). In my case, my goal for the first night was Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb south of Nashville along I-65. So, naturally as I drove across Missouri, I was repeating from time to time the general route I was following on that first day: I-70, I-64, I-57, I-24, I-65. As long as I kept those numbers in mind, I knew I’d make it to Franklin eventually.

I arrived in St. Louis around 13:30, about 2 hours later than I usually would on a Long Drive East. Granted, I also left Kansas City 2 hours later than usual, choosing that wonderful breakfast at Eggtc. over the typical simpler breakfast at home or the quick sandwich & doughnuts that I’d normally pick for such a trip. In the days before I left, the St. Louis area had been badly flooded by heavy rains, with some places in St. Charles County even seeing a foot of rain (30 cm) fall in the course of a day. The reports showed homes inundated, metro stations submerged beneath 21st century ponds, and highways deep under water. I was concerned that the aftereffects of the flooding might close some of the highways I needed to take, particularly I-70 in St. Charles County and I-64 across St. Louis County and City, but thankfully it was smooth sailing the entire way to the Arch.

I crossed the mighty Mississippi on the Poplar Street Bridge and left Missouri behind for the second state, the state of my birth, Illinois. Now the thing to say about Illinois from the start is that as much as it is the state of my birth, there is a tremendous difference between Chicago and the rest of Illinois, just as there is between any metropolitan area and the rural countryside in between across the United States. So, as much as I do kind of feel at home even there in Southern Illinois, it’s still not exactly the same as the place that I still call my original home a couple hours’ drive to the north of St. Louis. This trip marked the first time I drove southeast out of St. Louis on I-64, which is the main road between St. Louis and Louisville, continuing on from there eventually to Richmond and Hampton Roads, Virginia. I was only on I-64 for a short time, little more than an hour, when in Mt. Vernon, Illinois I left that east-west route and turned south on I-57, a highway I usually encounter in Effingham, Illinois, to head towards the furthest reaches of that state of my birth, to a place I’d long heard of and wondered about.

When I was 5 or 6 my parents bought a beautiful cloth-bound hardcover photographic atlas of the United States that was probably a special millennium edition. I remember the inside cover had a photo of a mountain climber scaling an ice-covered cliff on one of the mountains either out in the Rockies or up in Alaska. But as I drove through the southernmost reaches of Illinois, what came to mind the most was the photo of the Fall colors in Shawnee National Forest, which covers 280,000 acres (1,100 km2) of woodlands near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. As a child, I always was amazed that there was a national forest in Illinois, I had only ever encountered national forests out in Colorado, and so to me that meant they must be truly wild places with great mountains and old trees and lots of animals. Shawnee National Forest certainly has some hills, the Ozark and Shawnee Hills to be precise, but the years since has tempered my initial surprise through time spent in the national forests of the Appalachians.

I crossed the Ohio at Paducah, entering the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I last visited Kentucky in September 2018 when I attended the Midwest Conference on British Studies at an Embassy Suites in Lexington. My experience of the state this time was largely the same as that time, only I’m happy to report I-24 is far less potholed than I-75 was the last time I drove it between Cincinnati and Lexington. I crossed Kentucky quickly, I-24 crosses only 93 miles in that state before entering Tennessee. While in Kentucky though I did see the first big dark clouds that marked the latest round of flooding, this time not in St. Louis but in Eastern Kentucky.

As I left Kentucky for Tennessee, I began to enter a far hillier area that makes up the northern rim of the Nashville Basin, a great bowl surrounding the state capital. Traffic picked up as I descended into the bowl, reaching the I-24/I-65 junction north of Downtown Nashville. Back in Kansas City I had chosen to enter the address of the top site on my tourist list in Nashville into my navigation system, and so I left I-65 early of my hotel for Centennial Park and the Nashville Parthenon. This building is a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon located on the Acropolis in Athens. I arrived at 19:00, sadly a few hours after the interior had closed to visitors, and thus could not enter the building. Nevertheless, I gazed in wonder at the reliefs and ornate ceilings of the porticoes and stoas.

After a quick stop at the Parthenon, I made an even quicker stop at the Tennessee State Capitol, wanting to avoid the ire of the state police for spending too long on their property, and by that point having been on the road for a full 9 hours, I really needed to get to my hotel to sleep. With those two stops in Downtown Nashville done, I returned to I-65 and made quick work of the drive south to Franklin.

The following morning, I woke with my 06:45 alarm and staggered upright after the usual vivid and surreal dreams. There were images of me in quick step striding my way across a white sand beach on the Gulf Coast, dressed in a full business suit beneath the midday Sun. In my left hand my briefcase, my right hand raised aloft trying to catch some phantom bus that was due to roll onto the shore. Riding atop my head was my cat, Kitty, lazily lunging on my scalp as if unconcerned by the precariousness of her position.

I remembered what I had to do and quickly got ready for another day of driving. While the first day had taken me along roads I knew all too well, this day would pass along many roads I’d only ever looked at on the map. I left my hotel in Franklin at 08:00, stopping for a quick breakfast before turning my attention once more to I-65 and the continuing road south. The Tennessee hills glowed in the morning Sun, their green cover of foliage marking the southern end of the great Appalachian Mountains that I knew well in New York. 

I made quick progress along I-65 to the Alabama border and soon found myself facing a Saturn IB, a NASA rocket built in Huntsville, Alabama. I pulled over into the Alabama Welcome Center parking lot and briskly walked over to the base of the rocket to take some pictures before returning to my own chariot for its continuing voyage rocketing ever southward toward far greener shores.

Alabama struck me as in some ways old fashioned, in other ways brilliant, as in how they included the mile markers on each bridge, a great way of calculating distances as I crossed the Heart of Dixie. After about an hour I entered the great valley where Birmingham was built, the largest city by far in the state. In Birmingham I began to truly notice that I was moving southward as I crossed over Interstate 20.

Here in the US, the Interstate highways are numbered in an ingenious way to help navigation: east-west highways are even numbered with the lower numbered highways in the south and higher numbered in the north, and north-south highways are odd numbered, with the lower numbered in the west and higher numbered in the east. Thus, with Interstates 5 and and 8, San Diego is the 0/0 point of the Interstate system, while Boston with its Interstates 95 and 90 is the exact opposite. There are some exceptions to the rule (I’m looking at you, I-99 in central Pennsylvania and New York), but by and large it’s a rule that’s followed nationwide. So, when I saw the signs for I-20, I knew I was making progress, especially when I started the trip in Kansas City on I-70.

Birmingham seemed like an interesting place, and while I didn’t stop there this time, I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to having a conference there in future years, if that happens. Nevertheless, I passed it on by and continued south toward my first waypoint of the day in the state capitol Montgomery. Yet after leaving Birmingham I was baffled to be stopped by bumper-to-bumper traffic that had occurred for no apparent reason. I sat in the southbound lanes crawling behind semis, RVs, boats on trailers, pickup trucks, and suburban soccer mom tanks (aka minivans) with every state’s license plate imaginable adorning their rear bumpers. The heavy traffic continued for the rest of the day’s drive until I reached the Gulf Coast late that afternoon.

I reached Montgomery just before noon and drove straight to the main site I wanted to visit. The National Memorial for Peace & Justice opened in April 2018 to much press. A review at the time from The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott called it “one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation.” I read all about it when it opened, and even looked into how I could travel to Montgomery to visit it. When I did arrive, I wasn’t disappointed. The memorial honors the African American victims of racially motivated lynchings that took place between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. The memorial is made up of a series of 805 hanging rectangular steel pillars representing each county where an African American was lynched in this country during that 73-year period. I was quiet walking up to the memorial, stunned by the sight of it. I knew what to expect, but I didn’t really grasp the power of that vision until I actually saw it in the flesh. How such racially motivated terror was, and frankly remains so common in this country is sickening. 

My eyes stayed wide as I gazed first at the pillars that hung along the entry to the memorial and then slowly turning upward as I walked down into the heart of the site, a trench that was dug deep into the ground like some vast communal grave into which all these tormented souls were buried. Some of these pillars have been taken down from their original places aloft and placed on the ground in a series of rows like in a cemetery, those that have are the ones that represent counties that have established their own memorials to mourn those who were murdered this way locally. My own home county––Jackson County, Missouri––was included among those that have erected their own memorials, in our case to a man named Levi Harrington who was murdered on 3 April 1882 on a bridge in the West Bottoms. In June 2020 the monument in question was thrown down the cliffs on the western side of Quality Hill soon after its installation by several unnamed individuals. At this moment of writing, I can’t remember if it was replaced and fixed.

I left the memorial and drove into downtown Montgomery hoping to find lunch and make a stop at the Alabama State Capitol. Yet of all the things that could be confounding the parking situation was what kept me from making more than just the one stop on the capitol grounds. Every parking meter I stopped at had a red “Expired” sign waving like a most unwelcoming of flags before me. So, I decided the best place to risk getting ticketed for illegal parking was the State Capitol itself.

The Alabama State Capitol has a checkered history in my book. On 22 February 1862 it was the scene of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States. While I was taking pictures of the capitol building’s white façade a guard walked over to me and asked, “You should get pictures of the statues as well, like Jefferson Davis over there?” I turned to the guard and quickly replied, admittedly without thought, “I don’t take pictures of traitors.” Alabama to me is the South personified, it was home to the first capital of the Confederacy, and the heart of the old Jim Crow South that perpetuated the evils of the old Southern way of life for generations after they were defeated in battle by the Northerners and Midwesterners. I myself didn’t have any ancestors who fought in the Civil War, they were all either too old or too young for the draft, but I do remember hearing stories of the anger towards the South in the younger generation that lived through that war, whose lives were scarred by the horrors of a war fought over the elites of one half of the country’s inability to consider an entire group of people as anything more than property. This is the reason why I’ve generally avoided the South, especially Alabama, which to me is the beating heart of that infernal system.

I left Montgomery and continued ploughing my way ever southward toward the coast. I followed I-65 for another 90 minutes of steady traffic until turning off and onto a series of smaller country roads at the town of Georgiana, birthplace of Hank Williams (1923–1953) one of the most influential country singer-songwriters of the last century. From there the road took me ever deeper into the hardwood swamp forests and bogs of southern Alabama, typified by the woods of Conecuh National Forest. As I drove through the forest the first sign that I had entered Florida was that the highway name had switched from an Alabama state highway to a Florida one. Naturally at that point I lost my data signal and briefly lost navigation and communication on my car’s computer. 

But after a good 15 minutes it all began to return as I left the thick forests of the far northern reaches of the Florida Panhandle and crossed over I-10, better known in California as the Santa Monica Freeway. After another 20 minutes I was in Fort Walton Beach approaching Destin with seemingly nearly everyone else from the Midwest and Deep South. The streets of Fort Walton Beach were packed to the gills, leading to the last mile of the drive taking a full 20 minutes to complete. Regardless, I was now in sight of the Gulf of Mexico, the second arm of the Atlantic I had driven my car, the Mazda Rua, to. It was surely the beginning of a beautiful relationship.