jrnl: added greenfield village post

1 files changed, 97 insertions, 18 deletions

diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 312a154..bf135c3 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -234,24 +234,6 @@ People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun.
 
 ## Before The Motor Laws
 
-After last summer's sprint north, we swore we'd never try to move that fast again, and we're not. We said goodbye to our friends, and to Lake Superior, and then we meandered south, down from Copper Harbor, taking our time, driving a day, exploring for a day, and then on again. It was a nice mix of the road and relaxation with no need to be anywhere beyond escaping the weather.
-
-We took a week to slowly working our way down out of the UP, along Lake Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge and down into The Mitten. We hugged the shores of Lake Huron, one of the Lakes we've visited the least.
-
-Every other time we've left Lake Superior we've gone west, out into the Dakotas. Once through South Dakota, and last year through North Dakota. This year we're headed the opposite way, east and then south. 
-
-When you head west out of northern Wisconsin the notable change is that the trees fall away. After a day of driving you're out of the boreal forests and into the vast nothingness of the plains. What doesn't change is the way people live. Going west, while the landscape changes, you remain in remote, rural areas. 
-
-Going east is roughly the opposite. The trees never stop, but over the days we slowly emerged from the rural world we spend most of our time in to the suburban, to, eventually, the city of Detroit. The boreal forest does fade and give way to a much more mixed hardwood forest, but what's much more noticeable is how you slowly return to... not so much civilization -- that's nearly everywhere -- but modernity, which, from my point of view, driving, is most notably, the world of people in a hurry. 
-
-
-
-
-Though we slowed down there was still a lot of driving, and it was an interesting route.
-
-
-
-
 
 
 Electric cars are limited to a city for the most part. I don't think this is a design flaw. I think this is a design intent. Kill the ability to take to the open road and you kill the myth of the open road and the myth of the open road is the quintenssential myth of america. It is, I would argue, the entire idea on which america was founded, long before the road was paved or had cars on it. The electric car is designed to castrate that idea and the current reality along with it.
@@ -458,6 +440,103 @@ https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
 
 # jrnl
 
+## Greenfield Village
+
+It's always seems slightly perverse to me to head east in a country that once lived by the slogan, go west. Whatever the case, we're eastbound again and when planning our route we ran across something called Greenfield Village. 
+
+Greenfield Village is difficult to describe, but it's what happens when someone with resources (Henry Ford) decided to try to preserve some relics of American history. Since one of the reasons we're going east was to show the kids early American history, we stopped a couple nights in Detroit to visit Greenfield Village.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_085338_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3691" class="picwide" />
+
+What appealed to me about Ford's approach to preserving history is that his view of history mirrors my own: that the things we record in books and celebrate with monuments rarely have much impact of the lives of ordinary people. The things that actually mattered to people of the world before us are usually glossed over by what we call history.
+
+> When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk and I think so yet. <cite>&mdash; Henry Ford</cite>
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_104935_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3699" class="picwide" />
+
+Ford started small, collecting things from his own childhood. In 1919 he found out that his birthplace was going to be destroyed for a road so he moved his childhood farmhouse and restored it to the way he remembered at the time of his mother’s death in 1876. The he tracked down his one-room school, the Scotch Settlement School, and then the 1836 Botsford Inn from Farmington, Michigan, a stagecoach inn where he and his wife Clara had once gone to dances.
+
+Then it started to spiral out of control and next thing he knew, Ford had built his own village, a kind of semi-living monument to the everyday life of Americans over the centuries. By then people were bringing projects to him and he ended up moving Edison's Menlo Park lab here and rebuilding it, and later he added other things like Noah Webster's house, tidewater home from Maryland, a Cotswald cottage, farms from various parts and times in America.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_112036_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3700" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_093652_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3695" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_092335_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3694" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_091352_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3693" class="picwide" />
+
+Today Greenfield Village is over 80 acres with everything from Edison's Lab to the Wright brothers original bike shop to the oldest working carousel in the United States. It has so much in fact that that is my only criticism: it was overwhelming. Fun, but sometimes almost too much.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_085810_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3692" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_123030_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3704" class="picwide" />
+
+We managed to squeeze it all in, though we did come back to the carousel several times since it provided a kind of break from history. Or perhaps a reminder that relics are supposed to be fun.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_104321_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3697" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_123543_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3705" class="picwide" />
+
+The most fascinating thing to me, and I think for the kids, was the glassblowing workshop, which is used daily to produce things that are for sale in the shop nearby. I had never seen anyone blow glass before and despite the heat of the workshop we spent a good half an hour watching a shapeless lump of molten glass get shaped into a drinking glass. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-30_114640_greenfield-village.jpg" id="image-3702" class="picwide" />
+
+
+
+
+
+## Drive My Car
+
+After last summer's [sprint north](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/going-up-north), we swore we'd never try to move that fast again. We are heading back down south for the winter, but we're going to take months to get there. We're going to wander, at a leisurely pace, stopping frequently, the way we traveled when [we first set out](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent).
+
+We said goodbye to our friends in Copper Harbor, and to Lake Superior, and then we meandered south, taking our time, driving but also stopping to explore, and then on again. It was a nice mix of the road and relaxation with no need to be anywhere beyond escaping bad weather.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-25_074936_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3681" class="picwide" />
+
+We took a week to slowly work our way down out of the UP, along Lake Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge, and down into The Mitten. We hugged the shores of Lake Huron, one of the Lakes we've visited the least.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_093330_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3683" class="picwide caption" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-25_161946_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3682" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_095626_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3684" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Every other time we've left Lake Superior we've gone west, out into the Dakotas. Once [through South Dakota](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/wall-drug), and last year [through North Dakota](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/ease-down-the-road). This year we're headed the opposite way, east and then south. 
+
+When you head west out of northern Wisconsin the notable change is that the trees fall away. After a day of driving you're out of the boreal forests and into the vast nothingness of the plains. Going east the trees never stop, the boreal forest does fade and give way to a much more mixed hardwood forest, but it's still mainly trees unless you stick to the shoreline. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_110008_driving-out-keewenaw.jpg" id="image-3685" class="picwide caption" />
+
+I love to drive, I always have. I got my driver's license at 15 and a half and never looked back. At 19 I dropped out of college and went on a three month road trip around the United States. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/crossCountryTrip_-_09.-11.jpg" id="image-3689" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Had I been born a century or two earlier, I suspect I'd feel about the horse the way I feel about the automobile. Both are, on one hand, ways to get down the road, and on the other, things that human being obsess over in their effort to go farther.
+
+I haven't ridden horses enough to know how I'd feel about them, but the car quickly came to feel like a natural extension of my body. There's an interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about how, per kilometer a human being isn't very efficient. The most efficient animal per kilometer is the Condor. But, and this is the part Jobs zeros in on, put a human on a bicycle and he becomes astronomically more efficient than any other human. 
+
+What Jobs doesn't mention, but any cyclist can attest to, is how the bicycle quickly becomes more than a tool, turning rather to an extension of the body. This also happens with cars and is, I think, more than anything else, is why I like driving *older* cars -- they are more directly connected to you and your decisions, they are more fully an extension of the body.
+
+There is very little abstraction in vehicles from the 1970s and earlier. The mechanical workings of an old car form a clear picture in my head at this point -- I know what happens when I push on the gas pedal. I know the entire chain of connection from the pedal to the piston compression to turning that detonation into rotational energy that actually moves you down the road. This clear picture in turn (I feel) gives a deeper connection between driver and machine.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_170422_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3686" class="picwide" />
+
+When you stop and think about it, an engine is a miraculous creation. Every time one breaks down on me I find myself amazed that it ever ran at all. 
+
+An engine is a hunk of metal with holes in it really. A piston moves up and down through those metal holes. Cylinder if you want to get more technical. On the down stroke the piston rapidly increases the available volume of the cylinder, which creates a vacuum. Remember high school physics? Nature doesn't like vacuums, she fills them. In this case she fill the vacuum with a mixture of air and atomized gasoline, which comes in through an open hole. That hole then gets closed, and the piston changes direction, moving up and compressing that mixture of fuel and air, and then, right about at maximum compression, the spark plug sparks. Boom. Gasoline has more energy per unit of mass than TNT[^1] and it sends the piston back down the cylinder, which turns the crankshaft. This is the step where we get the rotary motion necessary to actually move down the road.
+
+With an old engine like the bus you're much closer to all of that. I can feel it through my foot, and hear it roar. I push a little harder, the pistons move up and down a little faster. It's a very direct, unmediated connection, at least relative to more modern engines. I can feel the road through my foot, I can sense what the tires are doing from the way the steering wheel feels in my hand. Driving the bus thus becomes an almost entirely intuitive operation, I don't sit around thinking about what to do, I just do what *feels* right when I am driving.
+
+When I stop and think about it though, all I ever think is how miraculous that an engine just does this over and over again, thousands of times a day, millions of times, possibly billions of times in its life. It just keeps doing it. What else has humanity ever built that does that?
+
+Maybe that's too much for some people. A lot of people just want to get somewhere. I understand that I guess, but it doesn't make for a very interesting experience. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-27_171228_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3687" class="picwide" />
+
+Still, the further we got from the UP, the more we re-entered the world fast drives. Everyone who lives near a city seems to be in a hurry. All the time. At least to judge from how they drive, which is the chief way I have to observe city folks at this point.
+
+We are incredibly fortunate to live a life where we are very seldom in a hurry, and I always look at the cars darting around me on larger highways and think, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you have have to rush about. I wish I could give everyone the time to slow down, take a deep breath, relax, try to enjoy the fact that your engine is working, you hurling down the highway at speeds unthinkable just 100 years ago, that everything around us is in fact miraculous.
+
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-09-28_154106_harrisville-sp.jpg" id="image-3688" class="picwide" />
+
+
+[^1]: Contemplate this for a while and tell me again how we can replace fossil fuels with "clean" energy (which is nothing of the sort, but we'll leave that alone for now).
+
 ## Copper Harbor
 
 After getting [kicked out of our site in McLain State Park](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/09/stop-breaking-down) we weren't thrilled at the prospect of more time in a Michigan State Park, but there's not really anything else in Copper Harbor. We pulled in around 3 and asked for a site. The woman at this check-in station was very nice and told me to drive around and pick what site I wanted.