Back to AtD. "Kind of like Omaha", p945

[jochen stremmel]

Speaking of grids, Mark, there is a nice passage in the new Stephenson
novel about the impossibility of them laying out the roads in the
Midwest:

"The first and last thirds of the route were entirely over mountains.
The middle third traversed the irrigated basin around Grand Coulee
dam. No matter how many times Richard flew it, he was always startled
to see the ground suddenly level out and develop a rectilinear grid of
section-line roads, just like in the Midwest.  Early on, the pattern
was imposed in fragments scattered over creviced and disjoint mesas
separating mountain valleys, but presently these flowed together to
form a coherent grid that held together until it lapped up against
some terrain that was simply too rugged and wild to be subjected to
such treatment. The only respect in which these green farm-squares
differed from the ones in the Midwest was that here, many of them
sported inscribed circles of green, the marks of center-pivot
irrigation systems.
Richard could never look at them without thinking of Chet. For Chet
was a Midwestern boy too, and had grown up in a small town in the
eastern, neatly gridded part of South Dakota where he and his boyhood
friends had formed a proto-motorcycle gang, riding around on homemade
contraptions built from lawnmower engines. Later they had graduated to
dirt bikes and then full-fledged motorcycles. The world’s
unwillingness to supply Chet with all the resources he needed for
upkeep and improvement of his fleet of bikes had led him into the
business of small-town marijuana dealing, which must have seemed dark
and dangerous at the time, but that now, in these days of crystal
meth, seemed as wholesome as running a lemonade stand. Chet had logged
a huge number of miles riding around on those section line roads,
which he preferred to the state highways and the Interstates since
there was less traffic and less of a police presence.
One evening in 1977 he had been riding south from a lucrative
rendezvous in Pipestone, Minnesota. It was a warm summer night, the
moon and the stars were out. He leaned back against his sissy bar and
let the wind blow in his long hair and cranked up the throttle. Then
he woke up in a long-term care facility in Minneapolis in February. As
was slowly explained to him by the occupational therapists, he had
been found in the middle of a cornfield by a farmer’s dog. It seemed
that his nocturnal ride had been terminated by a sudden westward jog
in the section-line road. Failing to jog, he had flown off straight
into the cornfield, doing something like ninety miles an hour. The
corn, which was eight feet tall at that time of the year, had brought
him to a reasonably gentle stop, and so he had sustained surprisingly
few injuries. The long, tough fibrous stalks had split and splintered
as he tore through them, but his leathers had deflected most of it.
Unfortunately he had not been wearing a helmet and so one splinter had
gone straight up his left nostril into his brain.
The recovery had taken a while. Chet had gotten most of his brain
functions back. He had not lost any of his wits, unless discretion and
social skills could be so designated, and so he had devoted a lot of
attention to the question of why the transit-brandishing pencilnecks
who had laid out the section lines a hundred years ago had been so
particular about sticking to a grid pattern and yet had perversely
inserted these occasional sideways jogs into the grid. Examining maps,
he noticed that the jogs only occurred in north-south roads, never
east-west.
The answer, of course, was that the earth was a sphere and so it was
geometrically impossible to cover it with a grid of squares. You could
grid a good-sized patch of it, but eventually you would have to insert
a little adjustment: move one row of sections east or west relative to
the row beneath it.
It being the 1970s, and Chet being a high school dropout with a
damaged brain, he could not help but perceive something huge,
something cosmic, in this discovery. Nor could he avoid coming to the
conclusion that the mistake he had made on that beautiful moonlit
night had been a sort of message from above, a warning that, during
the grubby, day-to-day work of small-town pot dealing, he had been
failing to attend to larger and more cosmic matters."

I hope you enjoy it.

J

2012/8/6 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>:
> p. 945 Sofia: Goes back in sources to 59 B.C. always a major crossroads, transportation route.
>
> Population remained small until Turks gone in 1879 "a city reimagined in the thirty-odd years
> since the Turks had been driven out, winding alleyways, mosques, and hovels replaced with
> a grid of neat wide streets and Europeanized public works on the grand scale.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia
>
> We know how TRP prefers 'winding alleyways' over the rationalization of grids...with a
> slam at the State and its helpful "works'
>
> I'll also add this as more circumstantial evidence that TRP likes (as vision) small is beautiful
> over larger when rationalization often takes over......I might say TRP believes in human-sized
> cities and comparing Sofia w Omaha--no wikilink, you can find---shows accuracy (In a
> comparison only he--and Calvino?--might make on paper?)---with gridness as Omaha's
> way as well..........Omaha as the heart of America...rationalized, rich, Puritanical, non-showy
> just 'pragmatic' in the narrow meaning of that word in America?
>
> So what Sofia was turned into after 1879 until this point in the novel....