The Delaware Water Gap: A Few More Scenes

Along many points in the great ridge walls of the eastern Appalachian front are passes, or as they are referred to locally, gaps.  Many of them, while noticeable, are also quite high and more akin to saddles on the great ridges than actual breaks in the mountains.  A few of them were much lower and afforded an easy way for people to pass between the ridges rather than take the arduous journey over them, most notably Cumberland Gap.  Many such gaps contained rivers which cut such passes through the mountains.  In some cases, the rivers were even older than the mountains (the New River in West Virginia is reputed to be 300 million years old) and were able to cut down the mountains rather than flow against them because they carved into the rocks as they uplifted.  In the case of the Delaware River, particular combinations of rocks and minerals as well as glaciation during the recent ice ages allowed the waters to punch a hole through the ridge here. 

I'll let the pictures do more of the talking, starting with a more primitive view than I-80 currently allows:

During the summer months the view would be largely obscured except in nearby exposed outcrops, leading to a more dramatic view as one suddenly came upon the river and found the gates to a world further north and west ahead.  In winter, though, seeing the gap filtered through the trees and wondering what could give the mighty Appalachians such an interruption would surely only heighten the excitement of finding such a place.  Think about this in light of the fact that in the majestic forests of early colonial times, the trees were often as strong a selling point as the landmarks.  A great ridge ahead would not come as a huge surprise to one who had already been given a taste of Appalachia on a trip into the backwoods, but a conquering sky like this?  Definitely a distraction from the trees.  Grandeur.  Ease of passage.  Opportunity.

Surely even the most economically motivated explorer would have stopped making marks on the map for a little bit, though.  Pressing inland from incredible beaches, vast swamps, towering forests, and even a little bit of prairie patches, one suddenly came across rock and lots of it.

One would also see the open scale of some of those trees previously seen only from strictly below.

And in some places, one would watch as even the giants would be dwarfed by a continent that preferred to do nothing the small way.

Then the land would be moved from mystery to frontier, and later considered a patch of hard to develop land between the prosperous coast and the fertile Lakes and Midwest.  Grander vistas out west would become the new frontier and the Gap and places like it still a convenience, but also more of a memory of a difficult past overcome.  What's the Gap in the face of so many deeper western canyons?  Well, for one, I doubt that many people who pass through here don't at least temporarily feel small and a part of something greater.  At any rate, the Gap is certainly more impressive a welcome sign to either Pennsylvania or New Jersey than some road sign. 

I-80 Across New Jersey

Believe it or not, one of the most ecologically diverse states in the eastern United States is New Jersey.  The Garden State, while often reviled as a toxic waste dump fit only for the conducting of business related to organized crime, is actually the east in miniature:  lovely beaches, dunes, barrier islands, coastal pine forests, the mixed white pine forests of New England, and the Appalachians, complete with masses of rhododendrons, can all be found here.  As always, though I insist that the best way to discover a place is on foot or in a canoe, a drive across cutting across the state can get one a decent glimpse of the variety of landscapes that it has to offer.  Today we get to see what a trip across New Jersey on I-80 westbound is like. 

I-80 is the second longest interstate highway in the United States and was built to be the high-speed upgrade to the Lincoln Highway, the first road to stretch across the country.  Much of I-80 is actually quite dull in comparison to the other transcontinental routes; I-90 and I-70 pass through much more dramatic portions of the Rocky Mountains, I-40 heads on through the most scenic parts of several mountain ranges including the Great Smokies, and I-10 is very very fun, getting through the best of the swampy south and cactus land over in the southwest.  I-80 passes through, well, a lot of farmland.  This is not to say she is boring at all, passing through Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevadas and such, but the highlights are a bit more subtle in many places.  New Jersey, where the westward trek begins, is probably one such place.

If one enters I-80 from its glorious starting point on the George Washington Bridge, one is probably already very angry and frustrated from driving in some of the most annoying and dangerous traffic in the country.  The scenery is hardly spectacular either, as all around is an urban landscape that refuses to yield anything green for quite some time.  One tends to be more concerned with all the road signs telling the driver how to escape the NY metropolitan area.

Fuzzy driving pictures.  I should probably invest in one of those mounted dash cameras.  Even the steady hand of a passenger is no substitute for a mount.

This is not to say that things are boring around here.  This is one of the biggest urban areas in the world, after all, and within spitting distance and sometimes even visual range are historic landmarks like Paterson Great Falls.  This is about where the road climbs off the Atlantic coastal plain and into the foothills of the Appalachians, albeit very gradually.  The odd rock cut here and there is the only sign that this is happening.  In general, the first leg of the trip is very flat, and all of a sudden...

Very forested.  The trees are nothing unusual, and the whole affair is largely a hardwood event, sort of the northernmost extensions of the Piedmont.  The presence of both the city and the coast disappear almost with the passing of a few miles.  Then those rock cuts show up again.

With them comes the great Eastern White Pines which tell the traveler that the last bastion of the southeastern world must give way to the northeastern and Appalachian world.  

Then mile by mile, the rolling terrain gives way to a bit more relief.  If one travels in the winter, the relatively warmer temperatures of the lower country turns into something more befitting the northern states.  In many ways, by terrain, climate, and even developmental signs, the eastern interior knocks away the heart of the Thirteen Colonies and even in this day and age, the result is more wilderness than settlement.

This is not to say that the urban northeast is left behind, as the exit signs indicate.  People have settled and moved into every square inch here that they can.  Yet even these days the ridges of the eastern Appalachian front remain largely undesirable for development.  The Great Eastern Wall remains the first bastion of a still relatively wild continent.  The first true measure of this comes along in the sputtering remains of the Blue Ridge where it is intersected by the Delaware River in a place known as the Delaware Water Gap.  The great ridge comes up almost suddenly into view, albeit from a distance long enough to really get absorbed into the contrast of scale between here and the other side of the state.

The water gaps are places where rivers managed to cut their way through the parallel ridges of the eastern Appalachians.  They often allowed for early travelers to make their way past these walls further into the interior, even as they allow I-80 to do so today.  New Jersey comes to a glorious western end here at the river.  Next post we will take a closer look at this beautiful place.

Seeking A Pleasant Climate?

Tired of persistent heat, cold, rain, drought, dust, overbearing weeds?  Looking for the perfect place wherein one can keep their windows open all year, day after day, without fear for sudden rain or the sudden dash to stop a thermostat from taking control?  Do you wish to never experience anything remotely connected to "seasonal" again?

Look no further than the San Diego-Tijuana international metropolitan area!  January days in the mid 60's, July days in the mid 70's, and almost no variation otherwise!  Only 10 inches of rain a year!  Temperatures moderate enough to keep one from ever worrying about either frost or drought again!  The swaying palms of the tropics combined with the great frigid swimming pool of the California Pacific right off the backyard!

OK, so its covered in a nice layer of haze and smog much of the time and the water bills tend to be a bit extreme, but for anyone who wants a truly "in between" climate, coastal Southern California is the place to be.  The risks involve potential water hardships if California keeps overdrawing its reserves from farther afield than they ever planned to ship water in, not to mention earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, insane wildfires (at least with the current wildfire management strategies), and, you know, forgetting that the rest of the world exists, but climate wise the place can be pretty nice. 

There is probably no better place outside of Hawaii and southern Florida for growing a large assortment of palms and even quite a few tropicals.

Having the Pacific Ocean for a backdrop is also pretty nice.  Big blue moderates the temperatures and is amazing water to swim in.

That said, the environmental damage in southern California is catastrophic.  Development has almost completely changed the world there, in many cases actually adding significantly to the natural disasters, especially where wildfires are concerned.   Outside of the North American prairies, there has probably been no place worse affected than here because of the removal of native flora and fauna.  Part of this lies in the fact that precious little room is available for continued expansion (the same problem that southern Florida faces); miles inland lies the beginnings of the deserts of the interior, and even walking a few blocks away from the beach turns up the temperature a few degrees.  Still, people will keep moving to sunny Cali so long as the natural living conditions keep remaining so amazing.  Midwesterners, Lakers, and Northeasterners often look on at such places in envy for the lack of general extremes they have, especially when contending with too much or too little of the good things like moisture, chills, and heats. 

Still, you can never slide down a hill on a sled here in the wintertime.  You can't have many kinds of fruit trees that need a little winter chill to properly fruit.  You can't even make good wine when the heat turns up (not that I am... heh... in any way unappreciative of California wines.  Napa can still manage to get the heat when it needs to.  You know, if you want to make pretentious statements about superiority.)!  Eternal spring is not for everyone or everything.  I often remember this when I feel gloomy over a Michigan late spring, early frost, baking July, or overly frigid January.  We do, after all, have amazing forests, prairies, and water that could make even the majestic Pacific blush.  Perhaps the best thing to do is appreciate what one has and try to make the most of it and learn all one can about it.  The pleasant climate might just end up being the one where the most familiar things flourish. 

GAAHHH! TORNADO!

Two years ago I was passing through Joplin, Missouri.  Only a month had passed since the town was almost entirely destroyed by an F-5 tornado.  Like most people everywhere else, I was nothing but full of sympathy for what had happened to the people there, but like most people, I also let the event slip into the back of my mind as the weeks went on.  I was very sharply reminded about what had happened; most hotels in the area were either closed, packed full of relief workers and displaced locals, or no longer standing.  What had seemed like a convenient stopping place for the night on a long trip from California to Michigan turned into a reminder that we live on a continent that is very, very naturally destructive.  Overhead information signs directed a ton of relief workers into action, with an entire exit off of I-44 dedicated just to outside assistance entering what was left of the city.  I took no pictures of what little could be seen from the interstate, which was horrific.  Trees, buildings, everything... flattened. 

So how does the sort of thing happen, how did people in the past deal with it, what should we do about it, etc?  I figured I would wait to post anything about tornadoes until the media hysteria had died down regarding the recent Oklahoma disasters, but seeing as how I just encountered a weak tornado of my own a few days ago, now seemed to be as good a time as any.  Tornadoes, more than most natural disasters, seem to make people rubber-neck and dive into as much information on the matter as possible.  The press, therefore, jump all over the tragedies involved as fast as they can and a lot of rapid speech and decrying of the fury of nature runs out of the mouths of many a reporter.  For the most part, though, they get their facts straight. 

Tornadoes are the result of colliding air masses within a larger storm system causing a bunch of air to rapidly rotate.  The winds that result within really powerful tornadoes, such as the one which hit Joplin, are among the most powerful winds on our planet, making hurricanes seem mild in comparison.  Hurricanes, in fact, can spawn multiple tornadoes within them, something which happens often in the Carolinas and Georgia when the storms make landfall there.  While one imagines a tornado to suck everything out of existence, its damaging effects are actually the result of the rotating winds knocking around debris which can include entire houses, trees, and trucks.  Nevertheless, as I can confirm from personal experience, one does feel as if one is being sucked off the ground into the blue, or rather gray and lightning illuminated yonder. 

(Before anyone asks, this happened on I-80, at the only tollbooths in Illinois for I-80.  The car I was in was lifted a few feet off the ground before it was thankfully plunked back down just a foot or so in front of where it lifted off.  Yes, I thought I was going to die.  I have also been within a few hundred feet of an F-5 tornado at the corner of where Nebraska and Colorado meet near Ogallala, Nebraska, and more recently a small rope tornado near Whitmore Lake, Michigan.) 

So why do they happen so often here?  You know that bit about air masses doing a dance?  It just so happens that North America is one of the most chaotic battlegrounds for air masses coming in contact with one another.  In the north we have Hudson Bay, which together with our large continental mass (oceans tend to moderate temperatures, dry land tends to let them go nuts in one direction or another) extends cold air masses much closer to the equator than anywhere else on earth.  Frosts have been reported as far south as Tampico, Mexico, clearly in the tropics.  During the last ice age, the frigid Hudson kept pumping out glacial masses of ice that extended closer to the equator than any other non-alpine location on the planet.  In the other corner, the Gulf of Mexico is a heat and humidity factory wherein the great global ocean thermal conveyer belt (say that five times fast) suddenly turns from deep and cold to shallow and hot.  It produces the Gulf Stream which tends to make Europe a pleasant place in terms of temperature moderation.  It also gives the eastern part of our continent our amazing forests and plentiful water.  It also gives us summer days where we can practically watch the paint peel off of the walls because everything is so damn sticky. 

Now, put the two of these together and we get amazing storms.  Make the already very different layers of the atmosphere dance with even greater surface extremes between those larger air masses and we get our destructive tornadoes.  Sure, they get them in Europe now and then, they get them in China (where they have a scaled down version of our hot-cold fight between Siberia and the South China Sea), they get them in the tropics, and they even get them on top of mountains, but nowhere near the intensity and frequency with which they happen in central North America.  Oklahoma is the worst place to be for this sort of thing.  A small part of the state's southeastern corner has a climate and landscape very similar to the rest of the classic "South", complete with palmettos and bald cypresses.  The middle of the state is a rapid transition between forested east and dry open plains, so much so that the space of a few miles can actually turn from big sky country into "hey, where did these trees pop up from?", and that big sky country out west is really dry compared to the eastern side. Winter time can feature decent 50's near Arkansas to sub-zero chills in the panhandle.

Texas panhandle, near the Oklahoma border, US 83 southbound. 

I-44 between near Oklahoma City, not much over 100 miles east and a very different world.

As a result, the winds tend to dance a lot in Oklahoma.  The process does happen just as violently, however, in the rest of the area of the great meeting of air masses.  Though not nearly as frequent, tornadoes are a good possibility during the summer storm system all the way up in Ontario and Pennsylvania.  The Ohio and Tennessee river valleys, full of rolling, wooded landscapes, are hardly what people think of as a prime tornado region, and yet the get tornadoes that can sometimes stay on the ground for well over a hundred miles. 

So good grief, we say, and why do people live there, we ask?  People have lived there for over 10,000 years actually.  The practice of living was a bit different, mind you.  The Pawnees, Osage, and other prairie peoples tended to be a bit more mobile than modern prairie people tend to be.  The main reason for this was a food culture based on the plentiful game of the prairies and one in which the drier region could not necessarily be counted on to offer the same bounty as the corn and squash fields back east could.  Even in the lush climate times of the middle ages, when peoples in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southern Great Lakes were building sizable cities with elaborate earth works and farming quite a bit, the plains peoples kept on following the buffalo.  Why?  Probably because a giant hand would come out of the sky and flatten everything in sight.  The Lakota, who originally hailed from Minnesota and northwestern Ontario, abandoned their more permanent settlements when they got chased onto the plains hundreds of years ago by the Ojibwe.  This didn't last forever, of course.  The second born came from the east and started planting permanent settlements.  I often wonder if the first Euro-Americans would have stayed had there been F-5 tornadoes in Jamestown or Quebec...

Initially settlers built half-buried, sod topped houses.  They were easier to make without having to haul in wood from the east, tended to be cooler, and in some cases even afforded a little bit more protection from the violent storms of the great big open sky.  The early prairie pioneers were a tough sort of folk, and many would-be Kansans and Nebraskans turned away screaming when they had to deal with the rugged life on the plains.  Some went back east, many just passed through to places with more promise like California.  Eventually, however (this is the WHY do people live there now bit), improved plows made farming a simpler affair, the legendary tough tallgrass sod being broken by the steel hand of Mr. John Deere.  Free land through the homestead act made the region increasingly attractive, and, well, money talks.  There are cities there now, rather large ones, and economic opportunities keep calling people away from the unemployment of the rust belt. That aside, the area is incredibly beautiful.  Long, open sightlines and a grand drama of the sky, which as you can see in the Texas picture above, is often far more inviting than it is discouraging. 

People tended to bring with them the comforts of home when the wild west became a bit less wild.  Wood frame houses sprang up, and planted trees made little towns feel more like the beloved Virginia or New York that had been left behind.  Yes, storms and drought came along to spook people, but many stayed and some even returned when they became complacent and forgetful.  Like I noted, it took less than a month for Joplin to sit in the back of my mind.  I dare say that is pretty average for people who don't get affected by tornadoes, and I have actually been intimate with three.  Besides, some towns have been around for quite some time and managed to either survive or not see large scale destruction.

Elk City, Oklahoma, main street.  Many of these buildings are from the early twentieth century and look like they have made it OK.

 People recover.  People rebuild.  Plains people and (true) Midwesterners are built from tough stock, so the saying goes.  What can we do about them, or better put, what we can we do in such regions to better handle the big wind?  As any southern Floridian can tell you, wood does not cut it in the face of powerful forces.  While Miami is turning just as wood frame and vinyl sided as the rest of the country, the historical trend for building to resist hurricanes down there was concrete construction.  Sure, an F5 is an F5, but concrete can handle way more than fragile wood can.  In the meantime, donate to the Red Cross to help those who got a pretty potent reminder that we are not always in charge of the world around us.  Better yet, donate in a month's time when the need will still be great and the money flood will slow to a trickle because we all forget about what happened. 

And again, yes, tornadoes are terrifying to be in, and yet also strangely beautiful.  That's how I feel about them anyway.