January 2011

Longfellow notwithstanding, precious few of us leave footprints in the sands of time. Even today, while our names will probably remain, buried in such things as old phone books and Social Security records, most of us will be utterly and forever forgotten within a generation or two of our deaths. Like it or not, only the great and the infamous are remembered.

Every now and then, however, an ordinary person somehow slips by the bouncer outside the nightclub of immortality and joins his betters inside. Perhaps my favorites in this category are A, B, C, D, and E. They were the typesetters who set the First Folio of Shakespeare, printed in 1623. In the centuries since, scholars have pored over each page of it with such intensity that they have discerned their existence and were able to determine which of the five set which page by their characteristic spellings and typos.

Though much of it is excellent, the article by T. A. Heppenheimer entitled “Build-down” (December) disturbs me. It goes along with the widely touted notion that “we will no longer arm ourselves against a Soviet enemy that now is no more” and that “the new challenges are regional.” Isn’t this naive when the Russians still have all those long-range missiles? And now Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose party has emerged as the strongest anti-reform group in Russia’s new parliament, wants to become president, wants Alaska back, spews anti-Semitism, calls for absorbing Finland and the Baltics, threatens Germany (and Russia’s “enemiesÝ) with nuclear annihilation, and the like. This is not a time to “build down” unless we do it with the utmost care.

When J. S. Cartier’s article about the Western Front today (November) mentioned a German monument to their dead still “carefully maintained by the local French” people, it reminded me of a World War I battlefield tour I took shortly after the end of World War II. While I was exploring Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry I visited the American Cemetery and met the caretaker, who turned out to be an American himself.

In your November issue you printed a short piece under “My Brush With History” about New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio.

It is certainly possible that, as a schoolboy, DiMaggio was able to throw with both hands. It is also possible, however, that the mind can play tricks on you after the passage of more than half a century. That is because, throughout his professional career, DiMaggio’s strong right arm was well respected by baserunners.

In an otherwise good article about Ruffian (September), Gene Smith really missed the boat with this statement: “It has nothing to do with male chauvinism to point out that male horses are stronger, even as male baseball players are stronger, as evidenced by no woman’s ever having played for the New York Mets or Los Angeles Dodgers or any major-league team in any city between the two.”

To argue that the absence of women in baseball is proof that they are unable to compete is ridiculous. I would suggest that the lack of women in baseball is, at the moment, evidence of their lack of welcome at all levels; it is only in the last decade or two that girls have been allowed to play in Little League. Girls/women are not welcome on the hardball diamond. Until they are, at all levels, we will not know if they can compete with men in the “bigs.” I suspect that this is one sport in which some women can do quite well, since, for the most part, it does not require brute strength pitted directly against brute strength.

ORGANIZED AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM IS HARDLY older than this century, and most of its current concerns are younger still. Some of the resources it now tries to protect, in fact, were among its original targets. To the conservation movement of the early 1900s, clearing a forest was a public offense, but draining a marsh or a swamp was a public duty. Even for conservationists, swamps still evoked the reactions they had evoked in the colonial period: disgust at their sight and smell, fear of malaria and yellow fever, and unease about rich resources running to waste within them. For the government scientist and prominent conservationist Marshall O. Leighton, writing in 1911, their drainage was the moral equivalent of war. He asked his readers to think of them as “a wondrousIy fertile country inhabited by a pestilent and marauding people who every year invaded our shores and killed and carried away thousands of our citizens, and each time shook their fists beneath our noses and cheerfully promised to come again.” Then we learned to stop worrying and love the swamp.

From Interstate 25, we took the exit for Trinidad and pulled into a McDonald’s on the edge of the commercial district, near the Colorado Welcome Center and the local chamber of commerce.

We interpreted that welcome center’s newness and imaginative design as a good sign. Places that tourists already flock to don’t need such establishments. They are usually the goodwill gestures of state governments to regions where the old tax base of manufacturing, mining, or agriculture has disappeared.

And of course, a McDonald’s is always a good omen. Years ago, the proof of a community’s connection with the modern world was a railroad station. Now, it is an interstate exit and a McDonald’s. There was therefore hope for Trinidad, although the coal mining that had made it thrive at the turn of the century was greatly diminished and the blast furnaces of Colorado Fuel and Iron, in Pueblo, where Trinidad coal had gone, now stood cold and silent, if they stood at all.

For statewide information call 800-544-1800. More specific material on the city can be obtained form the Seattle Visitor Information Center (206-461-5840).

Travelers to Seattle would be well advised to begin their visit where the Dennys started out, on the shore at Alki Point. There is a long, lovely sandy beach, occasional surf when the freighters pass, and across Elliott Bay the skyline looms, as stubborn and implausible as Doc Maynard’s own dotty dream.

A small commemorative obelisk bears the names of the Denny party—the men’s and children’s, anyway; each of the desolate women who drooped ashore in their drenched bonnets is memorialized merely as “wife.” In 1926 the American Automobile Association added a chunk of Plymouth Rock to the monument for good measure at the close of the first transcontinental automobile caravan.