Posts Tagged → rock
I-81, the 1950s relic
While making an epic deep-South deep-dive last week, I had the interesting experience of driving on a great long stretch of the I-81 interstate. Holy Moses. I have returned alive and in one piece to report back on this journey-by-traffic, and to ask a basic government policy question.
Originally started in 1957 to connect northeastern Pennsylvania to Upstate New York and southern Canada, for moose hunters, one presumes, today I-81 connects Upstate New York/ Canada with Tennessee, and in doing so it transverses New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, and penetrates deeply into Tennessee, where I-81 ends and I-40 then seamlessly takes up the west-ward flow of vehicles and young men.
In its day, it seems that much of our 1950s built infrastructure was considered grand, even sometimes grandiose. Sure, back then, the idea of paving hundreds and hundreds of miles of highway with bazillions of tons of mined quarry aggregate and petroleum tar probably seemed an achievement just short of landing on the moon. And indeed, building modern highways is still a real achievement of science and technology, as well as physical manpower.
After all, a road is nothing more than liquid rock, which was mined, picked, blasted, bulldozed, lifted, trucked, crushed, and re-constituted in heated form with tar that, when it all settles and dries, provides a comfortable high speed driving surface. It is nothing less than a miracle to remove millions of tons of rock from the ground, process it, then put it back on top of the ground so that humans can easily and smoothly travel.
Today, Americans take good roads, smooth roads, for granted. Probably like everything else in our lives, to be honest. But the harsh truth is that our road system is aging, and I-81 is a good example of both the old combination of muscle, modern science, and good government, in short a real miracle, meeting up with the harsh reality of fulfilling our dreams by failing to maintain the big investments of yesteryear.
What did not follow in I-81’s wake, in either functional or miraculous form, was the simple funding necessary to operate and maintain this and all of the other incredible roads that make up our interstate system.
The I-81 experience today of driving at modern posted speeds of 60-70 miles per hour, on a crumbling two-lane roadway, that is chock full of bumper-to-bumper traffic, sucks mightily. Such a wild experience begs the question: Why the hell is 2026-level traffic expected to safely transit from Canada to Tennessee on a crowded two-track?
Why the hell is I-81 almost entirely two lanes in each direction, for hundreds and hundreds of miles, with only a few three-lane passing zones on steep hills thrown in helter skelter? It is a study in modern combat driving. It is a study in strange political choices, funding priorities.
The same can be said for the two-lane I-78, which brings New Yorkers and New Jerseyites westward into Pennsylvania, where, after fleeing their fouled nests back east, they settle here and begin voting for the same damned failed policies and ideologies that fouled their nests and drove them out in the first place.
Come to think of it, keep I-78 at two lanes.
And now come to think of it, while remembering a couple of the conversations I had with locals in the middle of rural southern Tennessee farmland on the Mississippi border, maybe this is the reason why I-81 remains a two-track the entire damned way: Keeping the damned Yankees out!
And with that in mind, now I understand: The narrow road and the local Southern attitude are both relics of the 1950s. Yep, now it all makes sense.
I-81 in both directions is packed with high speed traffic
Not to be confused with Harrisburg, PA, but it happens anyhow
First and only Stars-and-Bars I saw the whole trip, and this in central VA. None in rural TN, where I saw they dominated the American flag forty years ago.
Southern humor. Works for me
Said living former PA politician texted back “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Different guy, same name.
Canada’s forest fires influenced life on Southern American roads
“Yankees”… talk about a 1950s Southern attitude…
On the 250th anniversary of America, this sign held special meaning to me
Southern humor. Note the “Dukes” sign
Southern rural TN is spectacularly beautiful
Climate Change’s Story, as Told by a Rock
The subject of climate change has been a political issue for about ten years. Before that it was called global warming. Before that it was called global cooling. Despite having dramatically different, even diametrically opposed, oppositional names, this subject of earth’s changing climate has been treated the same by political activists for about 30 years. No matter how different, under all rubrics it has been presented as a result of planet-altering human intervention into Planet Earth’s fundamental forces.
In all of the undocumented claims presented about this subject over the past thirty years, especially the fake junk science claims, the ignored elephant in the room has always been the very well and long-documented evidence of great periods of climate change pre-dating the appearance of humans on Planet Earth. In other words, climate change/ global warming/ global cooling did not automatically appear in 1985 because Al Gore wrote a book about humans emitting too much carbon dioxide. Nope. The scientific elephant in the climate change room was standing here all along, because decades of non-politicized scientific inquiry demonstrated how mile-thick ice glaciers covered northern America, Canada, and northern Europe and Asia many times over the past 100,000 years.
That is, a natural ongoing cycle of climate change, real dramatic alterations to the face of the planet, even without one human being present to contribute one breath of carbon dioxide to it.
Well, here is the short and easy story of actual, real climate change; the long documented climate change that shaped the land you are standing and driving on every day. This big story is told by a simple humble rock. Here is a picture of that rock (below), unearthed the other day. It was unearthed about 600 feet above the Pine Creek stream bed and channel. Until it was unearthed, it was entombed on a hillside way above the existing channel, in mostly clay dirt amid sharp shards of shattered sandstone, all jumbled together like a giant mixer had tossed them around.
Look carefully at this stone.
It is rounded, unlike most of the other rocks around it in the dirt from whence it recently emerged. Someone with a bit of curiosity would ask “Gees, this rock looks totally different from the rocks around it. It is rounded like a typical long water-washed and tumbled river cobble I can find in any stream bed in the world. Now why is this rounded rock sitting hundreds of feet above the Pine Creek river bed? How did it get all the way up here?”
Great question! In most American class rooms, asking this question might get you ejected, or a bad grade from a fake educator who doesn’t want you asking good questions, but instead you are supposed to repeat a mantra of junk science that ignores the actual science represented by this simple little rounded rock.
Pine Creek’s history is retold at Leonard Harrison State Park, in DCNR geology circulars available online, and in many other places and publications. It won’t be reiterated at length here. But we do provide a history lesson in a nutshell.
Essentially it goes like this: Until about 15,000 years ago, Pine Creek flowed northward into the Genesee River watershed. After the last glacial age ended 20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Glacier began to melt, as prior glaciers there before it had melted. As the glacier melted, a pool of water built up against an ice dam, which eventually broke from the weight of the water and the thinning ice. When the ice dam broke, an enormous torrent of water was unleashed southward as a tidal wave. As it raced southward, the tidal wave followed the landscape’s natural contours, including the river bed of north-flowing Pine Creek.
As soon as the tidal wave hit the Pine Creek stream bed, the tidal wave followed that natural channel southward, scooping up hundreds of millions of tons of stream bottom rocks, as well as surrounding ledgerock. We have seen the videos of the Japanese tsunami from several years ago, and this one probably looked similar. Thus, an increasingly muddy tumultuous mess of water, dirt, and rocks flowed southward to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. Along the way rocks like our little rounded river cobblestone here were picked up and deposited high up on the river channel’s slopes.
Even though the rock had come from deep down in the river bed, it remained in place on the hillside as the roaring water receded to the stream flow we know and love today. The rock is an artifact of climate change, real honest-to-goodness climate change, devoid of any human causation or intervention.
Our pet Pine Creek stream bed rock now in Lycoming County, PA, probably originating due north in Steuben County, New York, 15,000 years ago, already rounded from thousands of years of tumbling in a stream bed
Ever since that melting glacier released that tidal wave and placed our little rock here on the hillside, Pine Creek has flowed south, into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, and not northward into the Genesee River. And as a result of that huge rushing torrent southward, the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon was cut and shaped.
Climate change, folks. It is as natural as the Sun rising and setting on the Earth’s horizon. It can be real. It was real, and still is real and ongoing, even without human involvement. But you probably won’t find the real climate change science taught any more, because it is contrary to a radical political narrative that tells us modern capitalist societies are evil and destructive and must cease and desist, because we alone are destroying the Earth’s climate.
Which just goes to prove that Marxism really is anti-science, anti-truth, anti-fact, and anti-human. Shame on the Marxism Climate Change fraudsters who represent themselves as guardians of the environment. They are no such thing. They are destroyers of the environment, as every Marxist society’s destroyed environment demonstrates.
Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone you saw this, because the “climate change” activists will have me locked up for disseminating actual science!
All this climate change happened before humans were even present on the planet, let alone before we and our cows began farting so much and creating green house gases…
Be careful showing this glacial map to a New Yorker. They believe that New York City pre-dates all human civilizations and was founded by the gods, who would never let a mile of ice stand on top of their sacred ground.
Showing this image in a modern class on “climate change” is like showing a crucifix to a vampire, and you will probably be ejected from the classroom and declared unfit for indoctrination by the fake teacher. Be careful how you use this science.
Oh no, we did it, we showed New York City under ice. NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio will probably ban me from entering NYC henceforth.
