The Charlotte News

Wednesday, October 13, 1938

ZERO EDITORIALS (For now)

Site Ed. Note: There is no editorial page from this date available for you at present because it is not contained on the extant microfilm; again, if anyone has it in their personal archive by happenstance, we would appreciate the gift of a copy. But otherwise, until then, this space shall have to remain blank as to October 13, 1938.

So, for want of anything better to put here in the way of some good news, we thought we would lay on as to some bad news in the world, the violent 7.6 Richter earthquake out in Pakistan, killing upwards of 30,000 to 40,000 people in a few seconds of the earth's violent shaking this week, this past Saturday.

It is a long way away from where we sit. We have never been to that part of the world, maybe. Yet we feel the shake and the rumble and the shattered lives and world around them, the transitory world around them.

We empathize with all of these hearty people of that region who are enduring Nature's aftermath there, who still live and breathe.

As we have mentioned before, we endured a 7.2 earthquake in downtown San Francisco ourselves back a few years ago. And we remember the day all too well. We missed by the sheer happenstance of taking one leg of a road rather than another perishing as to this earthly existence that day. Some did not take the other leg of the road and can no longer speak for themselves, unless we choose to look and listen to them, that is.

That night, after the quake, the crumbled layers which had violently and suddenly shaken themselves to the foundation pins appeared grey and alone under the beam of the searchlights. The sounds and smells from that moment in time remain. Sounds of electrical generators whirring to otherwise deathly silence, as a bee might interrupt the cascading air over the mounds of a cemetery in the nighttime. The perpetual, pervasive odor of smoking rubber, as if hundreds of brakes had at once come to a halt and continued screeching, hour after hour. The look of tired rescuers risking their lives to climb amid the unstable rubble to try to save any still breathing in the cavities of the stack of jagged rebar and crushed mixture of gravel, lime, water, sand and Portland cement, that is the mixture which when hardened performs, to the touch, a tough substance, yet only as tough as the granules of dried mix retain their solidity. Disintegration of which comes easily when shaken asunder by any sufficient force, be it wind, quake or typhoon wave. All three. Force beyond anything man can make or would ever dare to try to make. Titanic force. Force beyond comprehension. Force to take away comprehension. Force beyond control of man, whether Hitler or Mussolini or any other who has ever sought through will to achieve that power of godlike force. Force which no man, no collectivity of man, no army, may have.

But mostly, about that earthquake, in the hours of its aftermath, we remember the stunned silence of the people. The feeling engendered by the collective witness of such Force. The recognition of that lack of control over the environs. The look of immediate empathy which most had for each other for the most part, a few desperate souls, with plenty to make from a disaster, to the contrary notwithstanding. Humanity at its best helping other humanity to get on to the next day without crumbling, as the concrete pilings had amid the inexorable Force.

We remember a truck driver from the Pacific Intermountain Express, as we re-visited the scene again next morning in the daylight. And how, in response to our telling him our little story of being on it by happenstance, 45 minutes before, heading to San Francisco for a chore we could have skipped, but had we, then to have headed the other direction toward Berkeley and into the certain delay of time, ensnarled, winding around the long curve which collapsed in that Force, a curve built three and a half decades earlier, intersecting an old neighborhood with this raised platform of sand, gravel, water, lime and Portland cement, noisy, congested, daily rush, thump-boom, thump-boom, rumbling with the constant thump-boom, thump-boom of the car treads hitting each interconnecting section, those sections which separated in the earth's rumble when the muddy fill soil on which the foundation sat, once a wetland, became a sea of violent, churning mud down deep for 17 fateful seconds and stirred all there up top to its foundations, how this truck driver, spoke to us childlike, stunned, as we were stunned at the daytime viewing of this silent grave of crushed dust and torn wreckage of that which a day earlier had been the means of conveyance for the bustling many to and fro, work or play, home or away--thump-boom, thump-boom, thump-boom.

We remember this truck driver who told us, in response to our telling him that we had driven over the structure just two weeks earlier in a pick-up truck, that we had felt a strange undulatory, sea-like motion on that long, elevated, stretched curve, something we had never sensed before apparently because we didn't normally drive a pick-up and had just bought this old beater to carry materials to add a couple of rooms to our house. We remember this P.I.E. truck driver telling us that he had driven his tractor trailer rig over the structure many times, for years, and that he had felt that wavy motion himself, and always felt the structure was unsafe, unstable in some way, that he didn't catch on other such structures over which he had driven many, many miles of rugged road in the region. Thump-boom, thump-boom.

We remember this truck driver telling us that he had a friend who was a fellow trucker who was driving his truck over the structure at precisely 5:06 p.m. when the Force came and spent itself in 17 or 18 or 19 rumbling seconds, feeling like a freight train or a big truck rolling by the house, only without the noise, instead silent, ominous, just Force and motion all at once without warning from the distance. He made it, his friend, said the truck driver; the car in his rearview mirror, however, disappeared amid the crumbling sections, denouncing their interconnections in space and time, breaking asunder their connecting malleable steel bars, shifting their gravity-held sections in submission to the force impelling them downward, downward, shaken to their foundations, taking all riding this apparent strength for four and a half decades of years with it, down, down to the ground below, slapping each top slab violently to the one below, down yet further then to the ground.

We remember that.

And, six months after it happened, on March 12, 2002, we happened to have occasion to be in Gettysburg touring the battlefield for a day, a sunny, warm spring day, after spending the night just a hundred feet or so from Lee's Headquarters there, along the Cashtown Pike. And we looked and listened to the silence of the battlefield there.

And we drove over to Brooklyn that evening for a play, Cymbeline it was. In Cymbeline, an ironic play, primarily a comedy, a satire of some of Shakespeare's histories and love-tragedies, there are some lines, which occur in a comedic scene of feigned death by a star-crossed lover in the play, a character who doesn't actually die, in the play, that is.

These lines go: Well, you find them, the ones about the dust.

As the lines were spoken, we felt a palpable sense in the audience, a sense of unspoken grief, mounting, as mounting the very stage itself, a feeling creeping its way into every soul in the rich, old, cavernous, theater there in Brooklyn, unadorned by modernity passed the early part of the last century, an unearthly feeling of spirit and mortality and awareness. Everyone suddenly brought vividly to recognition of our immediate commonality with one another, our mortality.

We were, after all, just a couple of miles the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, leading over to the Battery, and the place where tragedy had produced that same sort of horrible sound, that deathly silence, that crumble of smoke and dust and smells intermixing, to haunt all who percipiently sensed it, at the scene or even from afar, and for the rest of their lives probably. That sound and smell which reminds each of us left to live after it of our mortality, and the responsibility exerted from it then to remind each, the other, of that remaining last shred always of commonality, just as the men from those fateful three days at Gettysburg had in this year on which these editorials normally rest here, 1938, had congregated to celebrate its 75th anniversary.

President Roosevelt had been present there to open a memorial on the grounds, just a few hundred yards from where we had stayed that night of March 11, 2002.

And we toured those grounds after nightfall, late, late, at Gettysburg on March 11--and in lower Manhattan, March 12--when the ghosts come out and speak to you, if you listen--that is, if you listen and see the silence amid the dust.

For, in life, though not in the play, not in Cymbeline, anyway, we all pass away. But, as the slave aboard the Amistad said, we don't know where they go.

We climbed the tower there at Gettysburg that afternoon, there not being one any longer to climb in Manhattan, way up the long winding staircase, positioned on the Southern side of the lines, overlooking the line of the Charge, the harsh, fateful charge toward the little clump of trees on the knoll, toward the stone wall, toward the Angle.

Today, the California Memorial stands there in prominence, has for many years, since the 1930's, anyway.

Atop that tower, we looked to the northwest and could see the Eisenhower Farm, where the former leader of the Allied Invasion Forces had gone to retire, to be called from retirement to lead his country through the changing times of the 1950's, had gone to final retirement on the snowy, frosty night of January 20, 1961, a night we also remember well, a night warm to us, warm to our heart and our mind, though surely not so for everyone, perhaps, those who were sad at the loss of their man.

We thought about those times again, as we peered over toward the farm from that high tower, turning just around a brush to the side of ourselves to look over to where Pickett and his men had gone marching to their collective end that afternoon of July 3, 1863.

We thought some about that. We thought about Gouverneur Warren, the surveyor and engineer, who spotted the men the day before down in the Devil's Den, making their way toward the little hill where he stood at the left flank of the Union lines, and with his thoughts and mind properly trained on the moment, his listening and looking through his magnifying spectacles--as we had the foresight to think to bring with us, too, that day of March 11--properly to the silence amid the trees and among the rocks below, sent warning to transfer men to that part of the lines, saving the day for the Union in the process, holding the lines ultimately through the heroics of Joshua Chamberlain and his swinging door movement toward the Confederates at the last of any real chance the South ever had to win that battle, that battle to sever the Union in two over a contest of wills, over a contest between local control of affairs and Federal control, a contest over whether an economic institution could be maintained at the expense of human lives and human souls in bondage, sold and auctioned and maintained as so many field animals--over that ultimately, it was.

And that field where we then walked across--just as a few hours later in the wee hours of the morning we would course around and around the hollow ditch in lower Manhattan, ringing still with the souls of the perished, ringing in our ears--full of the blood which ran, full of the dust of the corpses which fell, full of the ghosts which remain--if you stop and listen and look to the silence.

Then you see them and then you hear them. And they tell you. They tell you that they understand. They understand that they should not have won that battle, that they should not have fought that battle, that they should have remained at home on their farms and in their villages, and never come to this haunted ground in the Pennsylvania countryside.

They tell you things, if you choose to listen and look.

So our hearts and minds go out to the souls there in Pakistan and India, that haunted intermediate region in turmoil for so long in Kashmir. We cannot say that we know what you among you feel today because we don't know that. But we can sense you and imagine from our own experience what it may be like, that which you feel and see before you.

That immanence. That ghost. That inexpressible thing which has happened to you. You who live will recover and be stronger for your experience. Those who lost their lives, those thousands, will teach you, if you look and listen to them.

And so we wondered this day, October 13, 2005, some about all of this stuff going on in the world.

In one year, just since last Christmas, we have had in that region of the world, the East, a typhoon, a giant wave produced by a violent earthquake out in the Indian Ocean, then this earthquake on dry land in Pakistan, and in the West, Katrina and Rita, back to back category 5 hurricanes when at seas.

And here it is, October again.

Are these events interconnected? Our teaching in geology, that which we have, though by no means are we experts on the topic, tells us at first that they could be. The earth as we learned is one giant ecosystem which, when it coughs in one place, it may have chills and fever in another, just as a person does when we have the flu. We have already mentioned the satellite photographs which demonstrate that 20% of the polar cap has melted away since 1979, that this phenomenon is indicative most forcefully of the global warming trend produced by the capture of hydro-fluorocarbons in our atmosphere producing the greenhouse effect, causing a heating of the atmosphere, the retention of more heat, the heating of the water below, the sweating of the earth, the chills, the fevers, the flu.

And the graph which says that, based on core samples of the trees, the ice, the sedimentary rock in various parts of the world that the existence of carbon in the atmosphere as settling in these timeclock stops has exponentially increased in the time since 1850 when plotted over a period of some 10,000 years of time back, back, back before New Orleans, before Gettysburg, before New York City and Peter Stuyvesant, before the Dutch came to settle New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, back before Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline, before Edward de Vere, before Kit Marlowe, before Bacon, and the others who contributed to the Renaissance in England and France, before India and Pakistan and Thailand were settled as civilizations, long before, way back there.

This graph shows the steep incline since 1850 to the present of all of that carbon generated by those fossil fuels, by those rumbling old steam engines which shook the countryside furiously as they passed, unsettling the earth in their fury, from the horseless carriage producing carbon monoxide emissions without remission from 1900 on up through the 1970's, and since with some abatement in play in parts of the world, but nevertheless increasing and starting to abound without so much control in other parts where cars begin now to replace the bicycle as the favored mode, as prosperity comes to these outposts which had heretofore escaped some of the trappings of modernity.

That curve, those two satellite photographs, Katrina, Rita, typhoon, earthquakes, they tell us things--if we stop and listen and look to the silence in their aftermath.

So, that's The News for October 13, 1938 and for October 13, 2005. Time moves on in its petty pace, as someone once said. We move on in our petty pace, too.

And the stage and the play move along as well, all in our pace, petty and small, yet large in sum for mankind, we do. And for all of Nature ultimately.

Rumbling trains, earthquakes, a collective footstomp on the crust, a marching army, a rumbling corps of tanks, rattling along that freeway, cur-plunk, cur-plunk, cur plunk--thump-boom, thump-boom.

Are they all interconnected? Is there relativity here, too? Is something happening here? We suspect that the answer could be yes. And we suspect we can and must do better or ride the tiger to the collective end, off the rails, the Cannonball crashing, crashing headlong, for too much speed, to much emphasis on time, into the old Long Island Express, into the old freight train, down the line, where somewhere a baby is born, down the line, maybe at Cash Corners, or somewhere else at those Crossroads, other forces being impelled and crashes occuring on the highway, and somewhere, elsewhere, else a hurricano finds fury, and somewhere else a typhoon, and yet again a quick little shake of the old mare's head.

The aboriginal teaches us to live better with our world, to learn that we are only passengers in Nature, passing, forever passing through, mere guests amid its tumultuous display of hostery.

A ghost story, a war of worlds, world wars--all packed into tight time, in 1938.

A ghost story, a war of worlds, world wars--all here, now, too, more subtle than in 1938, probably, but yet still whispering its foreboding to us to stop, and look and listen at the Crossroads, to the silence.

And we are here, again, in October.