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

[Keith Davis]

Nice. Stephenson?

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 12:15 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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....
>



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