Gloriously Green Highways
The lush green trees and bushes that line the highways of the mid-Atlantic states are absolutely beautiful: oak and sassafras; white ash and black cherry; yellow poplar and red mulberry; winterberry, inkberry, chokeberry, and sweet pepper bush.
Japanese friends once taught me a phrase that translates back to English something like “bath in green1,” meaning to go out into a beautiful verdant place and immerse yourself in nature.
Somehow, magically, the Transportation Departments in Virginia, DC, and Maryland have managed to make driving along state highways feel like a bath in green.
Neil and I were both astounded by the vibrant, vital green space that lines major roads in Virginia when we moved there in 2003. In fairness, we had been living in Texas, where a tree is as rare as a Democrat2. When we left the flat, dry, unshaded expanses of Texas we were positively thirsty for trees.
The broad leafy trees of the mid-Atlantic states are just as much a change from the the beautiful coniferous (needle-bearing) forests of British Columbia where I grew up, too.
The picture above, of a stretch of Maryland interstate highway we drove down on Friday, may not seem all that exciting to you—my limitations as a photographer are at fault, not the state of Maryland, I assure you. (Don’t worry, your monitor isn’t dirty: those streaks in the picture are (former) bugs on our windshield.)
These green-lined highways are just a pleasure to drive along. Thank you to whomever’s foresight made all this beautiful green space possible.
[This post is in response to a request from our friend Ian, who emailed me and asked "What does Baltimore look like?" Neither Neil nor I are shutterbugs and we're trying to get into the habit of taking more pictures. In the meantime, if you would like a picture of anything in particular, please let us know! We're happy to take requests.]
- I have forgotten the original Japanese words for “bath in green”. Does anyone happen to know what it is? [↩]
- For our non-American readers, Texas is the adopted home state of Connecticut-born Republican George W. Bush, the birth place of Republican dirty-tricks strategist and Bush advisor Karl Rove, and the testing grounds of a lot of Republican political shenanigans before they are rolled out across the country. Trying to find a Democrat in Texas is a little like looking for an NDP supporter in Quebec, or a Green Party voter at an oil industry convention. Good luck. [↩]
2 Trackbacks/Pings
- 1 Carnival of Maryland XXXVI « ROTUS { 07.27.08 at 6:11 am }
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[...] from Texas “Where a tree is as rare as a Democrat.” is impressed with Maryland’s Gloriously Green Highways. Here’s wishing Shaula and Neil a pleasant time in The Land Of Pleasant Living and both good [...]
- 2 Carnival of Maryland XXXVII « ROTUS { 07.27.08 at 6:15 am }
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[...] from Texas “Where a tree is as rare as a Democrat.” is impressed with Maryland’s Gloriously Green Highways. Here’s wishing Shaula and Neil a pleasant time in The Land Of Pleasant Living and both good [...]
34 comments
Hmmm, I think you CAN find Democrats in Texas; they just happen to be politically similar to Republicans in other parts of the country.
I want to add, that growing up driving up and down the Mid-Atlantic stretches of I64 and I95, I absolutely hated the monotony of the trees. At least until fall, when they turn magnificent colors.
Hooray! Nice to see you here, John.
The first (Democratic!) campaign I worked on in Texas had a deputy campaign manager who was a REGISTERED, card-carrying Republican. No one had thought to check. (Needless to say, the campaign was a disaster.)
The turning of the leaves blows my mind, because I didn’t grow up around it. Browning pine needles just aren’t as aesthetically explosive. We’ll do our utmost to capture some good fall pictures. (Gambarimasu yo!)
I think you’ve identified the magic of travel: seeing and appreciating things in new places that would probably bore you to tears if you had lived there all your life.
Growing up up and down the Eastern Seaboard, I remember the monotony of the trees, too. And I remember losing that sense of monotony, driving through cornfields in Ohio. =]
If you want a sense of monotony, try taking a train across the Canadian Shield.
When I took ViaRail from Montreal to Salmon Arm, I thought the Prairies would be bad, but Ontario went on FOREVER.
(And yes, Neil: I look forward to taking the train across Canada with you some day!)
Yeah, the Canadian shield is pretty dismal. Spent some summers there. It doesn’t have nothing to reccomend it, but, blech. Especially if you grew up in a rain forest.
OTOH as a kid, I used to collect rocks and the shield was a great place for that.
Ian, why not just drop in and see for yourself what Baltimore (Bal’mer) looks like? Then you can see how well travel suits Neil and Shaula.
Hooray, Janet! It is an honour to get a comment from our favourite lurker.
(We assume all of our lurkers are fabulous but because they are, you know, lurkers…we don’t know much about them.)
How kind of you to invite Ian to stay with us! We’d love to have him come down, but perhaps not while we’re staying in someone else’s house; maybe if we do pick up a sublet for a while in a nice location.
And the next time we get Ian down to the metro DC area, we’d love to introduce you.
Wish I could Janet. I may be going down to the states sometime in the next couple months. May try and intersect with our two travelers then.
Well, to be technical, “coniferous” means cone bearing, not needle bearing. Also, for a cool drink why not do what my family (and thousands of others) did when they came out west? That is, you fill a radiator travel bag with water and strap in onto the front of the radiator. Travelers used this as drinking water in addition to radiator coolant during the depression when traveling those long hot miles.
Speaking of long, hot miles… (looking at Shaula, then at Neil ]}:-)… two of my favorite travel movies are Rain Man, Thelma and Louise, Seven Years in Tibet (okay, not really a travel movie per se, but I think it’s something you can definitely relate to regarding the “stranger in a strange land” theme you two got going. Who’s stranger than you guys?!?!?!?
Mia culpa… I’m posting out of topic here. Is there any fast rule for posting on blogs when your comments cover many different areas? Not that I give a crap, but it’s always good to know when one colors outside the lines. :-)
The rules are simple: John=’color outside the lines’
I’m actually not familiar with radiator travel bags (but wouldn’t it get warm, rather than cool? Could you make tea in it?) although I will note that cooling technology has changed a lot since the tall, convection radiators of the depression, and a bag that would strap to a Mini radiator wouldn’t hold enough water to keep a cactus alive in a bog.
To answer your question, John: while there are no rules (Neil and rules in the same place? please!), the general conventions of blogs, just like the BBS’s that they grew out of, are that you add your comments in to post to which they are relevant.
The reason why: people get to blogs through all different paths, and may not read posts in the same order that you have. The conversation gets a little disjointed, especially for newcomers, if comments spill from one post to the next.
Will you get spanked around here for commenting out of turn? Of course not!
But out of consideration for others, and in order to make the conversations easy to follow, making multiple comments that stay on topic is the cultural norm of blogistan.
(Since you asked.)
I’m more familiar with them now; although the type of camping that makes use of handcuffs is not one I had come across. (Perhaps camping warrants another look.)
I liked Neil’s answer better, but I had a feeling that Shaula’s concise report on blogging etiquette was correct. Okay, a radiator water bag is a flat canvas bag about 12″ x 12″ with a rope so you can hang it off of your radiator filler neck. When you were driving your car across the desert you would fill one with water and hang it in front of the radiator to aid in cooling the air entering the radiator.
To answer whether the water remains hot: it doesn’t. It cools due to wind chill factor. Wind chill remains in the equation whether one is in Michigan in mid-winter, or on the surface of the sun.
Now back to grilled cheese sandwiches. Which is where this all started (along with the frozen fruit from another topic on YMMV). You can certainly melt them on a manifold. But to get that truly grilled thing going you need to toast them a bit on your hood or roof. Do you really care about your mini’s paint job?
A radiator water back sounds pretty smart to me. Does anyone make any small enough to work with the Mini? We’re going to have to investigate.
Great minds think alike, John. I was discussing manifold grilled cheese sandwiches just this afternoon. I’ve never tried it, but I’m hoping we can do some experiments with full range of manifold cuisine on this trip.
Manifold Destiny was the first book I know of to actually give you recipes for road-food (they actually work, although times may be different depending on your
ovenengine.And the bikers seem to have perfected it, somewhat . . .
Well I’ll be darned… radiator water bags are all OVER eBay. I would be happy to purchase one for my favorite travelers, if only you’d stay in one place long enough for them to ship it to you!
Yeah, I found the pictures on eBay, I just liked the one from Australia, more. Plus, as I mentioned, for a Mini, it would be more of a water-baggie =]
And you bring up an interesting point: as we tell people we are getting rid of all our belognings, and driving around, an amazing number of them try to give us stuff . . .
I would gladly unburden you of the water bag that I give you when you’ve gotten to where you’re going. :-) Actually, my dad has the one my grandparents used on their trip to Cali from Maine in ‘58. He’d miss it somehow though. And One… Last… Thing… on water bags that is: you don’t need to hang ‘em off your radiator anymore. They have anti-freeze now oh-worldly-one. This means that theoretically, you can hang two dozen of them off the Mini during your travels. I’d love to see THAT picture!
For the sake of my marriage, John, PLEASE do not issue dares to Neil. PLEASE.
;)
OK, but one more question; the bag on eBay was corked. The one from Australia looks open, like a…bag.
Is the one your dad has open, or stoppered? I can see the benefit of having an open bag of water, and gaining some evaporative cooling (ie, artificially making the radiator sweat. It would also probably improve the performance of the engine due to passive water ‘injection’). I’m just having trouble with this if it’s a sealed bag.
You’re not strong on physics, are you?
The one we have has a cork stopper. But you see, as the bag gets cooler (from the aforementioned wind chill factor) they sweat. The *radiator* doesn’t sweat you @#$(*@! It’s the water bag sweat that flies off into the radiator. Thus cooling it.
The water inside the bag doesn’t evaporate at all. It remains perfectly clean and potable.
And, of course, cold.
Just try this experiment: Tie an animal to the front of your car and drive 5 miles at highway speeds. Damn if the sweet thing isn’t shivering when you stop to check it.
Case closed.
About the animal tied to the front of your vehicle….
I better not find my moose missing in the morning.
Signed: the Manager of Moose Horn Valley
Good Nite
Hey, I might take a comment like that from Mike V (he confuses me. He’s known to unfairly throw facts into a debate, almost willy-nilly) but I feel oddly confident in this case.
Bud, clearly I have a broad blind spot; I’ve been missing all those bikers running around in the summer wearing parkas. You’ve explained why my dog kept getting frostburn on his face; clearly I was neglecting to suit him up before he stuck his head out the window of the car.
BTW, I used the term ’sweat’ in the context of ‘evaporative cooling’, and I stand behind the analogy. You’ve (with an astounding grasp of biology) conflated ’sweat’ with ‘condensation’ (hint, animals don’t do both). And, yes, if you throw water on a hot radiator, it carries off heat as it evaporates (which is the function of sweat).
OK, joking aside (well, mostly), there’s a lot of misconception to fix, here.
A bag of water doesn’t build up condensation in the air, unless it is colder than the air (that’s why it condenses). Also, the air has to be sufficiently humid, but let’s just give you a mulligan on that. Condensation is exactly the opposite of evaporative cooling in that the cold thing will gain heat from the air (which makes water vapor become liquid), and warm up (sweat cools you down; condensation looks like sweat, but warms a thing up). Remind me, and we can make up an ‘evaporation demonstration’ the next time we’re both around some alcohol ; ]
Air cooling (or cooling with any fluid-like substance (which covers my bases from air to glass)) is based on mass, thermal transfer rate, flow,temperature differential…the more mass you have to take heat away, the more heat it can transfer. You can effectively increase the mass by increasing airflow (so, increase the amount of the mass that contacts the heat) provided you don’t exceed the transfer rate. But, it all boils down to “heat will move over to a colder thing”. What you can’t do outside of Star Trek is violate the laws of thermodynamics. Heat has to go somewhere (ie, it’s ‘conserved’). In the case of your bag of water, the bag approaches ambient (air) temperature, but it isn’t going to get appreciably colder than the air. Any of the Southerners in here can confirm that if it’s hot out, a fan can only cool you off so much. Not necessarily enough to sleep.
Wind Chill is perceptive, not actual (hint it affects things that sweat, not condense). If you take a bottle of water and drive it around on a 34° day, it won’t freeze. You will feel like you are, but you are not a bottle. This is one major reason why we don’t have to scrape icicles off the side of the car every time we stop. Even in the North.
So where we run into problems is where we assume we have a sealed bag (ie all the water that’s in stays in) that will a] stay cool and b] cool something else. A or B, I could have stuck with you, but A and B you’re going to have to argue better. Will a bag of cold water in front of the radiator cool it off? Sure, for a while. Will it simultaneously stay cold? Nope; not cooler than the air. Will a bag of warm water in front of a radiator affect the temperature of the radiator? Catastrophically, yes. In cold climates (like england) they sell little curtains you can mount in front of your radiator. You draw a cord, and the curtain closes, so the engine will run warmer. You’ve built the waterbed-equivalent to that.
Now, if water comes out of the bag because the canvas is porous, that’s a different thing (and not a given). But you didn’t say it was a ‘leaky canvas bag’, so we didn’t go there. It’ll also probably work well if you periodically stop and drink/change the water (which you also didn’t mention; almost as if you don’t believe it’s necessary).
Will it work under other conditions that I haven’t considered? Probably. At least for a while. I’m just saying it doesn’t work the way you think it does (magic). As with most depression-era things, I suspect there’s some labor involved.
BTW, you’ve given the poor little animal hypothermia, which doesn’t require actual cold. You can cause hypothermia with temperatures just below body temperature.
I propose an experiment: we get together and reopen the case (or a case). We tie a bag of corn alcohol to the hood of the car, drive around, open it periodically and see how long it takes to disappear. How is that related to this debate? Well, it’ll make us forget the whole thing . . . =]
I’ll be brief:
1. There was no “conflated” verbiage on MY part — animals do both sweat and have condensation. (Think about all “states of being” an animal can be in.) But yes, I meant “evaporative cooling.”
4. I assumed that since we were talking about having a “nice cold drink” while traveling, you would have figured out that whole purpose of this exercise was to stop periodically and drink (and replenish) the water. That was shortsighted of me.
2. Don’t talk to me about thermodynamics young man. I’ve read “A Brief History of Time” cover to cover. The fact that I only understood what I read on the covers… well that’s moot. :-)
3. Back in 11th grade I once had a date with a girl named Susie. Everything was going great: Fine dinner, nice party, she had imbibed a bit, looked like it was going to be “my night”! On the way home we ran into some of her girlfriends who (while I was busy with something) told her that I had recently slept with her sister. Taking her home was THE longest drive of my life. And yes, I DID have to scrape icicles off the side of my car after she got out!
5. The shivering of the poor animal strapped to the front of the car wouldn’t necessarily have come from any temperature conditions
6. I agree to your proposed experiment Neil. Wonderful idea! And I will do one on my own: see if those water bags are porous.
And as you can see… I’m also an arithmetician!
A friend has gone to great lengths to track down a translation for me and sent this by email:
“If it is to be in woods, the known term is “shin rin yoku,” its literal translation is bathing a forest. I can’t think of a good way to say “bathe in green” that will actually sounds right in Japanese. You could say “midori wo abiru,” which translates to take a green shower. You could also say “midori ni somaru,” which means to soak up green.”
1. An animal who is hosting condensation has probably ceased to be an amimal, and has committed to being dirt (in the sense of ‘we commit you to the soil.)
Perhaps you’re thinking of ‘condescension’ (not the collective term for actors) which Susie and the aforementioned animal would, I’m sure, share in regards of you.
2. I presume you read an early revision. Later revisions would necessarily be “A Slightly Less Brief History of Time”. What you obviously haven’t read is my doctoral thesis, “Wind Chill on the Surface of the Sun: How We Can Land on the Stars, if We Just Keep Moving Fast Enough”, along with the record of the disastrous experiments that followed.
6. Excellent; scientific method. If it isn’t porous enough to lick the licquor off, remind me to bring straws for the experiment.
Neil, if you can convert all this knowledge to dealing with the world-wide problem of menopausal flushing,
I think you will be a nobel prize winner.
Again, Good nite
BB in BD
Oh, he’ll have to deal with that one day, Beth…but hopefully not for a few years yet!
Actually, Neil does a GREAT job of applying all of his wide and varied knowledge to playing mad scientist to my various ailments.
For example, my blood pressure can get quite low, low enough that it is hard to wake me up in the morning. So, he has worked out various rigs to elevate my legs (including slipping an ironing board to use like a jack under the end of the mattress), and it helps get me jump-started in the mornings.
I am sure that menopause will be a great big adventure for the two of us, too.
I just hope the experiments don’t include driving around with me strapped to the hood of the car. (Then again, if it helps….)
I’ve recently acquired a range of peltier plates (small, electronic heat pump plates).
I’m working on it…
OMG… what have I started?
So sorry Shaula. But I believe you’re in good hands with Neil. (No, really!)
This odd acquisition of Neil’s peltier plates may in fact kill several birds with one stone, so to speak. Oooops! Bad choice of words. Again sorry! As peltier plates are known to cause (drumroll please…) condensation!
So there you have it merry travelers of the world: simply strap two dozen water bags to your vehicle, add some peltier plates, add an animal (preferably NOT Shaula — but situations do vary) and presto! Cold drinks, cooled radiator, and increased blood pressure all around! With the added plus that it will make people smile which is good for the collective soul of the planet.
you are so killing our mileage…
And we /do/ aspire to be good for the collective soul of the planet.
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