danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I don’t know what to say about the misery wrought by this terrible earthquake in Haiti.  But why must the worst things happen to the poorest people?

Filed under: Current Events, Geography on January 14th, 2010 | No Comments »

SAN JUAN – Where ever it is that you live, you can probably depend upon a certain minimum level of traffic control.  Street signs, traffic lights, medians, dividers, lanes, and so on.  In Puerto Rico, those things are rare luxuries.  Put simply, this place is Thunderdome.

Each morning, we walk across the street in front of our hotel to the lot where our rented Nissan waits for us.  Parking isn’t a problem.  It’s expensive, but spaces are ample.  Depending on where we’re going, we turn either right or left.  Left takes us into Old San Juan, or the highways that lead to the western and southern portions of the island.  Cities like Arecibo and Aguadilla are reached via PR-2, which roughly follows the contours of the Atlantic coast.  Ponce, near the Caribbean coast, requires a journey south, via PR-52.  To reach the eastern portion of the island, we turn right out of the parking lot, travel down some two-lane roads past public beaches and vendors selling all manner of Puerto Rican cuisine, and connect to PR-3, which leads to Fajardo.

Some of these highways are limited-access freeways like the Interstate system.  Elsewhere, they are more like standard American highways, with at least two lanes in each direction, but intersections and direct access from shopping centers and local streets.  Some have tolls, though they are spread far apart, and are inexpensive.  The highest I encountered was $1.50, and most were half that.

Depending on where you’re going, however, these highways may get you only half way there.  The center of the island is rural, rugged and mountainous.  Though the peaks don’t generally exceed a few thousand feet, they do so from sea level and are quite steep.  The two-lane roads that connect the small towns in the interior are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the USA.  First and foremost, almost none have lane markers.  (That goes for many of the main highways, too, where the first few hundred yards on either side of an intersection have no lines of any kind.)  This means that drivers move freely across the surface of the road.  On a four-lane highway, it’s bad enough to constantly fear that the driver in the lane next to you will try to move over.  On narrow roads high in the mountains, a car in your lane as you round a corner may mean certain death.  Meanwhile, these rural two-lane roads in the mountains are narrower than an average American driveway.  Imagine the door of your two-car garage.  Now, imagine coming around a blind corner fifteen hundred feet above the forest floor, finding a car in what should be your lane–if there was one–and having to pass in the space of that open garage door.  Imagine doing that at speed, where a false move will send you down into a ravine.  That happens a dozen times every kilometer in Puerto Rico.  (Curiously, distances are measured in kilometers, but speed limits in miles per hour.)

Meanwhile, the narrow, lane-less roads are invariably in terrible condition.  Huge potholes dot every street, rural or urban.  In cities, drivers must avoid these, while simultaneously dodging deep-set manhole covers placed in a seemingly random fashion, and wide metal grates which aid in drainage.  One such grate awaits those who exit PR-26 at Isla Verde.  If you know it’s there you can try and slow down, because hitting it at forty-five miles per hour would be devastating to tires.

Making things worse, Puerto Rican drivers do not use turn signals.  Ever.  You never know what anyone is going to do until they do it.  And they practice something Miriam refers to as “nudging”, in which, when leaving a shopping center or trying to change lanes at an intersection, they just push the noses of their cars into traffic, forcing others to either let them in, or crash into them.  Nudging may be so necessary and frequent because the names of streets are seldom indicated with visible signage.  If you’re lucky, you’ll see some faded tiles on the side of a corner building.  But you will frequently go for blocks in a city without seeing anything indicating where in the world you are.  It’s indescribably aggravating.

Add to all of this an innate Puerto Rican recklessness, and you have the recipe for disaster.  And yet, after seven days and almost nine hundred miles of driving, I saw only one accident – on my very last day.  I’ve never made the hour and a half drive from Gainesville to Orlando without passing at least one accident.  This afternoon, after watching a bicyclist charge blindly into traffic on a busy Ponce street, I came to a conclusion: God loves Puerto Ricans and protects them from automotive disaster.  The combination of bad roads and bad driving here made me expect to see corpses piled high beside shredded wreckage, but, no.  Some divine hand is keeping them safe.  May it be ever thus.

Filed under: Geography, Transportation, Travel on August 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Walt Disney Pictures released a series of films featuring a child actor named Bobby Driscoll.  He was the voice of Peter Pan, and also starred in the live-action Treasure Island and Song of the South.  The latter has never been released on home video in the United States, but Disney used to periodically re-release its films in theaters, which is how I originally saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Pinocchio, Robin Hood, and Sword in the Stone.  That must be how I saw Song of the South.

At the far west end of Long Island Sound, just to the east of the Bronx, there is a tiny dot of land called Hart Island (view this excellent map).  Over the centuries it has been the site of a mental asylum, a prison, a POW camp, and a U.S. Army missile installation.   It is also the site of the largest cemetery in the United States.  It isn’t a normal cemetery, however.  Hart Island is a huge potter’s field.  The 800,000 bodies buried there belonged to the homeless, the penniless, and the unidentifiable.  Their corpses, along with stillborn babies and amputated limbs fill mass graves, where plain wooden coffins are piled atop one another, over a hundred at a time.  Somewhere in one of those mass graves lies the body of Bobby Driscoll.

By the mid-1960s, Driscoll had seen his fame and fortune vanish.  He’d been to prison and he was addicted to drugs.  When he died alone in an abandoned Manhattan building, his body went unidentified.  More than a year passed before efforts were made to locate the missing Driscoll.  Eventually, police matched Driscoll’s fingerprints to ones taken off the unidentified corpse, but his body was never exhumed for reburial in a family plot.  Instead, Driscoll is still an anonymous person buried among hundreds of thousands of other anonymous people at Hart Island.

Hart Island is strictly off-limits to the public, but Richard Nickel managed to sneak ashore, and his photo essay is marvelous, disturbing, and touching.

Filed under: Film, Geography, Musings on August 10th, 2009 | No Comments »

I don’t generally harbor notions of myself as any sort of adventurer. I don’t suppose I’ll ever sail solo around Cape Horn, or kayak on the Futaleufú. I have no interest in BASE jumping from the CN Tower, nor do I desire to climb K2 or Everest, or even Stone Mountain, Georgia.

I am, however, fascinated by Kilimanjaro. This is a mountain that rises over 15,000 feet from the Maasai steppe, practically on the Equator, to a summit of 19,340 feet. An astonishing diversity of flora and fauna is found in the vicinity and along the route to the peak, from open plain to rainforest to a virtual desert to a glacier.

One day I’d love to climb Kilimanjaro. In spite of the fact that it is Africa’s highest mountain, it is also relatively feasible for a mere mortal to make the trek. I’m mortal; that could be me!

In the New York Times Magazine today, Tom Bissell has a fascinating description of his Tanzanian adventure, and in an accompanying multimedia presentation, his route is charted, as are his vital signs. His associated commentary is dissuading, but I will not be deterred. Such is my desire to climb Kilimanjaro–while the Furtwängler Glacier remains, I hope–that I even find myself enjoying Toto’s “Africa” – a weak song by all practical standards.

Filed under: Geography, Popular Music, Travel on October 28th, 2007 | No Comments »

My love of trains is well known. But did you also know that I am fascinated by African geography? For instance, the only mountain in the world I am interested in climbing before I die is Kilimanjaro. I was amazed by the NPR story of the runners who crossed the Sahara. I love The African Queen. And I am fascinated by the geography of the Congo.

So, finding this New York Times story about the railroad in Congo with an accompanying photographic slideshow was especially poignant to me. It’s a sad story about a kind of poverty most of us in the United States could not possibly imagine, and yet it is a way of life for millions of people. I’ll try and think about that next time I am upset by traffic, as I sit in my air conditioned car.

Filed under: Current Events, Geography, Musings, Transportation on September 4th, 2007 | No Comments »