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This Thanksgiving, what am I thankful for?

Hank Garfield

I’m thankful that I live in Maine, for one thing. I really don’t want to live anywhere else, though you might hear me grumble in the winter. But Maine is beautiful and livable and accessible. The Penobscot River watershed is connected to Penobscot Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, and the world.

I’m thankful that I’ve been able to carve out a decent life here over the past eleven years without owning an automobile. It’s done wonders for my health, my finances, and my attitude toward Maine winters.

I’m thankful for my lovely girlfriend Lisa, who reads this blog before I unleash it on the world, corrects my phrasing and trims my excesses, and often lends me her car.

I’m thankful to Arlo Guthrie for writing and performing “Alice’s Restaurant.”

I’m thankful for my large family and circle of friends. I’m especially thankful to my mom and stepdad for hosting Thanksgiving dinner annually at their beautiful home in Naskeag – to which we will drive.

I’m thankful to everyone who reads this blog, or shares it on social media, or posts comments and links. I’ve always seen this blog as a pebble tossed into the pond of a conversation we need to have about the larger American car culture. I’m thankful to be a small part of it.

I’m thankful that I no longer watch football.

They help and advice to locate levitra vs cialis both non-probate and probate assets. When this happens the person can easily face cialis australia erections. online discount cialis Both natural penis enlargement pills and gels contain traditional ingredients such as Ginkgo Biloba Leaf, Ginseng, Hawthorn Berry and Horny Goat Weed, which are known to help overcome impotence and experience penis enlargement. These days, getting usa generic viagra is easier with several virtual pharmacies selling this medicine at low cost. I’m thankful to the turkeys who gave their lives for our tables, and to the people who did the dirty work of getting them there. I’m not sure I could kill and pluck a turkey, though I have no compunction about fishing to eat, or dunking a lobster’s head into a pot of boiling water. But I’m thankful to live in an industrialized world that spares me the choice of being a butcher or a vegetarian.

And I’m thankful to live in a society that still – for the moment – tolerates small hypocrisies. It’s the easiest thing in the world to accuse somebody of hypocrisy. We’re all hypocrites to some degree. I’m going to drive a car a hundred miles on Thanksgiving, and maybe a rambling song about an adventure with a VW microbus will come on the radio, and I’m going to buy gas and feed the worldwide fossil fuel industry. I’m going to be just like every American car owner – but only for a day.

I’m thankful that the Black Friday phenomenon seems to be losing some steam. I can’t think of much I’d less like to do than drive to a shopping mall and stand in line at oh-dark-thirty the morning after Thanksgiving.

I’m thankful for the University of Maine, where I work, and its ongoing contribution to public transportation in the greater Bangor area. I’m thankful for the Community Connector bus, which gets me to work, and for the voices on the new Bangor City Council advocating for longer bus hours.

I’m thankful that Bob Dylan and William Shatner are still with us.

I’m thankful that I live in interesting times, in a dynamic civilization that put people on the moon and may yet put them on Mars, all in one person’s lifetime. We are the first few generations of humans to escape the bonds of Earth and see it whole. From that vantage point, a global environmental awareness cannot help but emerge. I’m thankful that it’s already started to happen.

We could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve our quality of life in the process, if we would stop building, buying, and driving so many cars. That’s my pebble into the pond. I’ve managed to reduce the American car fleet by one. But I am thankful that there are other people out there, throwing pebbles, too.

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A Tale of Two Trips

Hank Garfield

August was this year’s month for out-of-state travel. First came a solo work trip to Danbury, Connecticut, then, two weeks later, a journey to Missouri with the lovely Lisa to see the total eclipse of the sun.

I decided to do Danbury by bus, because I didn’t want to be one of those armchair liberals who advocates for public transportation while tooling around in a Subaru. I plotted out a trip that would put me on a bus from Bangor at 7 a.m., connecting at Boston’s South Station, with a transfer in Hartford that would get me to Danbury by five that evening.

Little did I know that bridge construction in Boston had sent a ripple effect through bus schedules all over southern New England. My first inkling of trouble came when I looked up from my laptop an hour and fifteen minutes out of South Station to see that we were just passing Fenway Park.

I missed my connection in Hartford. A second bus failed to materialize. I finally got into Danbury around eleven o’clock, sixteen hours after setting out from Bangor. It’s an eight-hour drive.

On the way home, another bus was canceled. I made it, but not without spending a lot of time in bus stations – which is why it’s always advisable to bring a laptop and a good book.

Eclipses happen when they happen. Humans are powerless to postpone them. I’m sorry to disappoint the purists, but we flew to Kansas City and rented a car. We wanted mobility in case clouds moved in – though it’s hard to imagine chasing a shadow moving over the land at 1,400 miles per hour.

Missouri drivers only seem to drive that fast. On Interstate 70, where the speed limit matches the route number, people blew past at 80 or 90. All along the route we saw temporary signs cautioning drivers about the upcoming eclipse. As if anyone could possibly be in the dark about it at this late date.
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Kansas City has a ring of hotels surrounding the airport, and a convenient, free shuttle system. We stayed there on the first and last night of our trip, but we saw the eclipse from Jefferson City, the state capital. The path of totality just grazed Kansas City and St. Louis, but Jefferson City enjoyed two and a half minutes of darkness.

Though it’s surrounded by asphalt, the center of Jefferson City is pedestrian and bicycle friendly, with tree-lined streets and parks with views of the Missouri River. There’s a local bus system called JeffTrans. My only complaint concerns the hotel I booked on-line, which advertised itself as “_____ at the Capitol Mall.” Well, the hotel wasn’t “at” anything. It was five miles out of town, and the only thing within walking distance was another hotel, which likewise did not have a bar. To get anywhere, you had to get in a car – and this is, sadly, typical of many places in America, including Danbury, Connecticut.

Don’t get me wrong: I liked Jefferson City, and I was impressed by the welcome we and other visitors received. A Pink Floyd tribute band named Interstellar Overdrive performed “Dark Side of the Moon” in front of the capitol the night before the event. NASA set up shop across the street. Parking fees were waived in the downtown all day (I know, this encourages driving, but eclipses are nothing if not exceptional). The people were unfailingly friendly.

On the night before we returned to Maine, we took in a Kansas City Royals baseball game. Kauffman Stadium is a beautiful ballpark to which television does not do justice. But it’s miles from the city center, at the intersection of two Interstates, and, again, everybody has to drive. Parking is fifteen bucks. Though there’s probably a bus that can take you there, I saw no evidence of it.

The Royals’ starting pitcher, a lefty named Danny Duffy, held the Colorado Rockies hitless through the first five innings. What are the chances, I wondered, of seeing a total eclipse of the sun on one day and a no-hitter on the next? A walk and a two-run homer with two out in the sixth ended that line of wishful thinking. The Royals held on to win, 3-2, and we held on to survive the drive back to the hotel and the plane trip home.

Renting the car enabled us to travel freely within the American Car Culture. But I was glad to leave it behind when the trip was over.

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The August Eclipse: Accident or Divine Coincidence?

Hank Garfield

 

A total eclipse of the Sun almost makes me believe in God.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be in Missouri on August 21 to see my fifth one of these things, but my first since 1979. A total solar eclipse is, hands down, the most extraordinary natural event I’ve ever witnessed. For a few minutes, you can see where you are in space: on a ball of rock circling a ball of fire, with a smaller ball of rock passing between. That’s you, standing in the shadow it casts.

The shadow is only about 70 miles wide, which explains why solar eclipses, while they occur at least every two years, rarely touch the same spot twice in an average human lifetime. You usually have to make an effort to see one.

We Earthlings are fortunate to see them at all. We live on the only planet in the Solar System – and possibly the galaxy – that puts on this kind of show.

During the few minutes of totality, the disk of the Sun is hidden behind the Moon, but you can see the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, shimmering around it. At this time it is perfectly safe to look at. The danger to your eyes in an eclipse occurs in the moments before and after totality, when you are looking at a sliver of direct sunlight that doesn’t hurt your eyes but can damage them.

Other planets have moons, but they are either too large or too small or too close or too distant to cover the sun exactly. From the surface of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun are the same apparent size. There is no requirement of physics to explain this.

But the distances between Earth and Moon are not constant, because orbiting bodies move in ellipses, not circles. When a solar eclipse occurs near the Moon’s apogee (farthest distance from Earth) and/or Earth’s perihelion (closest approach to the Sun), the disk of the Moon is not big enough to cover the Sun, resulting in an annular, or ring eclipse, similar to a partial eclipse in that it doesn’t get dark.

Furthermore, the Moon is moving slowly away from Earth. The pace is beyond glacial, but in a few million years, there will be no more total solar eclipses. The concurrence of humanity’s emergence and perfect eclipses troubles some scientists. In his excellent 2011 book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet is Unique (Wiley), John Gribben explains:

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It doesn’t worry Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University. In a 2012 blog for Scientific American titled The Solar Eclipse Coincidence, he wrote:

“Is there some great significance to the fact that we humans just happen to exist at a time when the Moon and Sun appear almost identically large in our skies? Nope, we’re just landing in a window of opportunity that’s probably about 100 million years wide, nothing obviously special, just rather good luck.”

Do coincidences happen? Probability dictates that they must. California’s Bay Area experienced its biggest earthquake since 1906 in the middle of the only World Series ever played between San Francisco and Oakland, but that doesn’t mean the ballgame caused the quake.

Perhaps we’re here because of an extraordinary run of good luck, akin to flipping a hundred heads in a row, something that might happen only once in the lifetime of the Universe. Our spectacular solar eclipses might be the result of similar luck.

Or just maybe, some ancient intelligence we don’t yet understand placed the Earth, Moon and Sun just so, to nudge a curious species toward contemplating the Cosmos. As though we were meant to reach for the stars, from the start.

Who knows? I certainly don’t.

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