Ridge Running
At 6am we flew our of the City through the Holland Tunnel. After cutting across New Jersey on Rt. 78. That takes us over the Delaware Water Gap into the business part of Eastern Pennsylvania, past the old mill towns of Allentown and Harrisburg. It is there that we connect with Rt. 81 for our ride south. I know Rt. 81, but I usually use it from Scranton to Binghamton for my rides up to Ithaca. Heading south on Rt. 81 feels both familiar and yet somehow different.
The great part of Rt. 81 is that it is one of those old Indian trails that followed animal paths that they used for both migratory purposes and to let animals (maybe originally buffalo or elk, but more recently most likely deer) travel between salt licks. Salt is one of the requirements of life. When you overlay the U.S. Interstate Highway System, built mostly in the 1950’s with long stretches of straight roads at the insistence of Dwight Eisenhower, who wanted the System as an alternative national defense asset capable of landing planes in a pinch, you see a network thst perfectly matches the old salt trails. Sometimes nature does the job better than any surveyor or civil engineer.
Rt. 81 follows the topography of Appalachia, down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia after hopping through a small piece of Maryland and West Virginia. This route runs the longest length of rural Virginia from Front Royal to Bristol. You can see the Blue Ridge Mountains on both sides of you while the road stays level as it diagonally traces the geological path of the thrusted Paleozoic Sedimentary Rock where it meets the Blue Ridge Metamorphic Rock. At the end of that track, you end up in the northeastern part of Tennessee, which looks very similar to Western Virginia.
For the most part, a road is a road and Rt. 81 is not much more. In its day, a four-lane Highway may have been a wondrous thing, but today it feels like a narrow chicane with trucks in all lanes. It seems that this is a major East Coast connection between Transcontinental Rt. 80 to the north and Rt. 40 to the south. That seems to mean that the trucking industry considers it owned by them. It’s nice to see that the concerns about an insufficiency of drivers in the new metrosexual non-driving youth world haven’t taken a big slice out of the interstate truck traffic. Based on the brazen manner of their driving, these truckers now drive like they are Tesla autonomous trucks, totally clinical and efficient and with none of the courtesy that characterized the truckers of yesteryear. As children, we all knew the hand signal to get truckers to pull their air horns. These days, I wouldn’t dare try that trick for fear that the drivers need both hands on the wheel of these careening beasts of the road.
Kim and I spent the day alternating between a John Grisham novel about seeking justice for wrongly-incarcerated death row inmates, and the MSNBC coverage of the entire House debate on impeachment. That means that we spent the day contemplating injustice in America. In the novel, Grisham shows us the balancing point between self-interest and justice. In Congress, both sides of the aisle would make the same claim on differing bases. Republicans feel that Democrats are conducting a sham against a President who they just don’t like. cDemocrats are appalled that a President who thinks he’s above the law can continue to exist. Listening to both sides for over six hours is enough to cause the top of your head to blow off. I used to say that in the army you needed to tell the. Three times to get it through. I will now use the House of Representatives since both sides feel the need to repeat the same thing two hundred times apiece.
As we were crossing out if Virginia and getting into Tennessee, specifically in Greenville, Tennessee, what should we see, but a sign for the National Historic Site of Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States and one of the two other presidents in our 231 year national history that has been impeached. That got me thinking, so I checked the map and we will also be going right past Hope, Arkansas tomorrow, the birthplace of William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States and the other owner of an impeachment asterisk in the record books. I didn’t plan this trip or time this trip to coincide with this impeachment theme and timing, but here we are.
I don’t know whether the house will vote tonight or tomorrow, but they will vote to impeach Donald J. Trump and pass the task of the adjudication of that claim to the U.S. Senate. There is a part of me that wants this action to stay in the House until the judiciary can opine on the need for Mulvaney et al to give testimony. It doesn’t look like that will happen, so the next chapter is likely to be in January under that bastion of fairness, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
The amazing thing isn’t that Republicans and Democrats are breaking their picks on one another, it’s just amazing that it’s happening over a boob like Donald Trump. I honestly don’t know how these serious men and women can stand and defend a man with the personal characteristics that would flunk a kindergartener. Steny Hoyer of Maryland says that he has never in his thirty-eight years in the House seen such a blatant presidential abuse or power of such extreme bad acts. This dean of the House was met by Republican hooligans trying to shout him down for stating his view of the facts. Such is the state of play in our politics at the moment.
Tomorrow we will head out into the Greet Plains and across the Mississippi. There will be a wholesale change of scenery, but I fear the impeachment scenery will remain unchanged. Today we ran the ridge line and tomorrow we break free and really head west. Today we were in mostly blue and purple territory. Everything we drive through tomorrow will be red, so let’s see what mood is in evidence.