31 March 2006

Fire in the Hole

Spring broke out in the three days I was in Tidewater. The dogwoods are out, even as the cherry blossoms pass their prime and turn to green. There are golden banks of forsythias, and the discontent with the long gray winter has caused an incipient riot in the diverse family of azaleas.

It's Andrew Marvel's Birthday today, and I intend to raise a glass to him once I have put the car-keys somewhere safe. He is most famous for his poem “To his Coy Mistress,” which is the only English Restoration poem posted in full on the front of my refrigerator.

Andrew was most interested in overcoming the resistance of his paramour to the blandishment of the flesh, but on the way to her maidenhead, he wrote of “Time's Winged Chariot” bearing down on his back.

I can hear the thudding of the hooves myself, and view Andrew's defense of the Puritans as a temporary aberration that lasted all his life.

I had several moments to consider time as I hurtled back into Spring. I was on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. The Ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought not far from where I was standing, next to my car, in the middle of the fast lane of the expressway.

Three Nimitz-Class aircraft carriers were over my left shoulder, vast bulks of gray hugging the piers at the naval base.

I was making good time, and hit the two-mile-long causeway out to the tunnel entrance at speed. Never live on the wrong side of a bridge or tunnel from where you work is what Mother use to say, and she was right.

She also cautioned me not to drink anything green and sticky, and I think she was right about that, too. I was able to do something about the latter, but there is nothing that can overcome the dread power of a narrow span, or a deep tunnel except your own boat.

The transit from merrily motoring along to dead stop was not quite instantaneous, but close enough to get my attention. I was very near in time to whatever had happened ahead, within the first few dozen people to arrive on the scene.

Soon I as joined by thousands behind me. I sat in the car, waiting for news or portents. There was nothing, only a stocky women in an orange vest and dour expression holding a large square caution flag. The adit to the two-lane tunnel was empty, traffic stopped just before a short access ramp from the maintenance yard on the Norfolk side.

The minutes passed. People left their cars and walked to the Jersey barrier. I wandered to the other side of the road. I looked at the old fortification on the island that marks the end of the causeway and the beginning of the tunnel under the shipping channel.

Normally you don't get to see that, only a flash of concrete as the road plunges down and light turns to darkness.

Presently, a State Patrol Car appeared from the Newport News direction, swerving across the median and down into the tunnel. Then a fire truck, lights flashing, followed by an ambulance.

Something bad had occurred down there, a fire in the hole, and I was thankful that my fellow travelers were not down there in the dark, with smoke and fumes and the litter of broken vehicles spread across both lanes.

Time stopped. There was no information, no prognosis, no prospect. There was no way to turn back, since traffic would be jammed for miles back beyond the approach to the bridge. I began to contemplate the prospect of firing up the laptop and plugging in the wireless card to send an e-mail that I was not going to be back in the office that day, or perhaps ever.

The sun was bright and glinted off the short green waves. A container ship piled high with empties impassively passed over the tunnel. Gulls cawed harshly in the wind. I thought about sunscreen, in the survival context, and reviewed my options.

I resolved, perhaps for the thousandth time, that I should really travel with some bottled water and emergency rations. Maybe the Government should mandate it.

The engine on the car had long been shut down, but I gambled that the wait would be short enough that the battery would not fully discharge. There was an interview in progress on the radio, and I reclined the seat to listen, helpless in the face of a malfunction of a large and fundamental instrument of our national infrastructure.

A fellow named James Lovelock was talking about his contention that we are not seeing a phenomenon called “Global Warming.” He terms it “Global Heating,” and the image formed of the moment when the water in the lobster pot first begins to produce wisps of steam, and the crustacean within begins to think that something is seriously wrong.

Lovelock claims that an abrupt and radical climatic shift is about to happen, describing in a dry English accent that “nothing so severe has happened since the start of the Eocene Epoch, fifty-five million years ago….”

He described a sort of "fire of the whole." and he was not optimistic about the future of civilization. In fact, he advocated the immediate construction for new nuclear power plants since he thinks we are going to need power, and a lot of it, if anything is going to survive.

That was an interesting context for my current predicament. I smoked a cigarette, looking out at the water all around me, and the snarled steel of the traffic jam. They say Lovelock is a defeatist. I tossed the butt in the direction of one of the seagulls.

I had the better part of a pack of butts, and that meant I was good for most of the afternoon. Short term, I was in good shape.

They have been saying that the end is near for a long time, and it is the fate of humankind that our individual ends are riding just ahead of marevl's poetic hooves.

I tend to think that Lovelock is a bit of an alarmist, and so do the environmental activists that his science would seem to support. They think something can be done, if we take stock and look at the situation rationally.

It is entirely possible they are both right. What I crave is a better definition of the term “rapid,” in the geologic context, as applied to the life of a middle-aged man.

Precision in the unknowable is important for planning.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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