POWER

Tales of southern brusque, part V:

My first brush with power was with electricity. It was with the crackle of lightning on a hot, humid Missouri afternoon. I had taken a nap in the afternoon, recouping from a night spent in a field outside Boonville. I woke up with the room shaking. I wasn't close enough to New Madrid but I didn't discount an earthquake, used to not discount anything. It was the low steadily increasing rumble of the thunder. Unless you've experienced a midwest thunderstorm firsthand, you don't know what "lighning" and "thunder" are about. You maybe have seen them, but they're the Midwest's second cousin twice removed, kind of a sissy, not much drama behind the quick flash. Lightning in the midwest has arms that reach across the horizon. Not some zap that goes straight down. There are two sounds of a good crack. One like a whip poised to shoot as the air burns making way for that light on the way down. The longer the crackle, the more the buildup holding it in with potential energy for as long it can stand until some farmer sez "She's gonna blow" and it releases itself bound home, smacks dead on where it was supposed to go and starts the ground convulsing. Though lighning always knows where it's going, it never tells the ground, because lighning has the power. The ground having nothing to fear but it don't know that. Then that slow rumble, always fools you if it's a good'un, keeps rising like a pre-concert warm up, bass-heavy, clinking the glasses. I guess that's why midwesterners are so scared of earthquakes. They think if the thunder roll causes that little clinking, then something that can knock that glass off the table must be a Mother.

I woke up and watched the hail come down, wondered if it'd tornado. Hail always weirded me out as a kid cause it only came on damn hot days. Someone was really fucked up, up there can't keep their temperatures straight. Then it just came down -- thunder only happens when it's raining. Being in California so long, I'm used to the cold shower (real and metaphorical) but on a hot upper 80s lower 90s day, the rain just stays warm. It feels good on the face. Its like wading in the warm ocean since our closest one is 1000 miles away. I drove out to the outskirts of town and watched it roll in, go out.

My second major encounter with power was in Kentucky. I drove out of Paducah, a town I will not return to anytime soon, unless there's some salvation dependent on it, don't think so. I stopped at the AAA, mostly to pick up a sticker, needed excuse. They "took my name down." Everybody "takes your name down" in Kentucky, even if they don't hear it in the air. I headed east not really on any path. Campaign slogans hawked a Senator Null; apt name in these anti-government times.

Fields of grass took over in the rolling Kentucky hills. Above me wires began to shoot over the freeway in ever-increasing arrangements. Finally culminating in those walking drones of high-tension power lines, bustling with the silent hum, electromagnetic tension in the air. I was entering the realm of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) formed in the depression to development Tennessee and Kentucky, dam the rivers, control the floods, and provide cheap power to one of the poorer regions of the country. Really to give people jobs, to throw bones, to give some meaning to a region that had lost its. They stood like lumbering invaders, cut through the trees, carrying their cargo. Even their simple presense could change a region. This was modernity amid the backwoods. Infrastructure that still looked eerily futuristic, must've blown the whisky-drinkin socks offa some folks back then.

Power is a weird thing. It just isn't there. It comes from somewhere. It only has meaning if there's either less or more power somewhere else. Equal power is no power. No tension is no life no movement. So If you see power, you know there's something else behind that door, over that horizon, maybe way down below or above. You see power and there's some other presense even if you can't see it feel it shove it (and it may make you crazy finding it). But so much electricity in the air can't be wrong.

In this case, a more simple detective one, the wires were tethered to the Kentucky Dam, a hydroelectric beast, largest dam in the east, plugging up that Tennessee river (and in so doing taming it) creating a huge reservoir that stretches from mid-Kentucky to north east Tennessee. When they built it, an entire region o' poor folk lost their homes and villages in the valley below, ghost towns amid the depths, but this being the depression, they were all too willing to get that check cut from the government for their space.

The dam stands like a causeway on one side, wall on the other. It doesn't look that much like Hoover or any western dam, plugged snug between rocks. Just kind of resting on the grass. The reservoir was unnaturally blue you can always tell fake water. The concrete and cables of the dam were silent, but there was so much infrastructure around you thought there must be some action.

Kentucky Dam doesn't create that much power compared to the nuclear (pronounced NUK-U-LER below Mason-Dixon) plants littered around the south, but it did have five constantly humming turbines below. It was mostly created to prevent flow to the Ohio (and Mississippi) so that they could better deal with floods. At least that was the reasoning back in the good old 30s-50s, when the whole brawny nation was dam happy. Mostly, Kentucky dam was built like most large public projects were built in America, to prove a point. That we were the best, most shining goddam nation on earth. Kentucky was trying to latch on to that modern North, never wanting ties to a Confederate (read loser) South. A major public works project was their tie to the future.

A few miles down, another dam, the Barkley, bars the Cumberland river. Both of these rivers used to bring misty eyes to southerners because of their inability to be tamed, but everything gets tamed, or dies. Can't really tell if the Cumberland's dead, but it don't move much. They run parallel, and when filled up almost bursting from behind, they create a state park, the Land Between the Lakes (LBL). Power in this case affording a byproduct recreational park for the South. The parkway was barred to commercial traffic and there were no buildings for 40 or so miles. The road winded on purpose. My second brush with power ended with a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, refrigeration provided by power from the Kentucky dam.

Entering N'Orleans warned not to go by Margo the fever within me starting to awaken fascinated by the lay of the land (there being none) I was hit by the sudden onslaught of a "tropical depression." Depression in the south taking on a more violent aspect than in most northern towns, it lashing out on that world won't go quietly. The rain just didn't start dripping, even with some warning like it would in the Midwest. It just came, it just came down hitting washing swaying blinding. The summer storms in N'Orleans are intense and short-lived, fits its demeanor. Unable to see half a car length in front of me, stopped in the middle of the road, I waited for 10 minutes for it to let up a bit. It let up a bit, but not much. But having taken a book out to look at, look down, look up, suddenly sun. If it weren't for the humidity holding onto that moisture, no sign of storm would remain in an hour's time. I thought that something was trying its futile best to prevent me from entering the French Quarter. A sound and fury signifying nothing.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a town that never was now is. It is a town that will forever be tied to Hiroshima wishes it wasn't can't escape its past, only humans can do that. In 1942, Enrico Fermi produced the first chain reaction of a uranium isotope at the U of Chicago. He wired DC, told them the bomb was possible, and the sleepy area a little west of Knoxville overnight turned into Manhattan project central. Something like 4,000 workers began building X-10, the codename for the Manhattan project's reactor site on what would later become the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Experimental work done here would be relayed to Hanford, in Washington state, where the larger reactors would churn out deadly powder by the billions of atoms.

The now defunct reactor is open for tours. Stepping into it was exactly the same feeling of stepping into the Junior Physics laboratory at MIT. The same equipment, same desks, same steel gray, twice as heavy as need be desks, same green badly designed chairs. Same instrumentation, steel-encased wires dials gadgets. On one wall stood an array of concrete with little holes, 20 feet square. Something like 600 holes. This was the "face" of the experimental reactor. Within each hole, a pellet of uranium 238 was inserted shoved down to join its cousins in the graphite further down, 7 foot of concrete in between. When enough uranium got together, the chain reaction would begin, leaving behind plutonium. They'd scrape the shit out later and collect it for the bomb.

I went to the back where they inserted the control rods and scraped out the plutonium. They didn't even know what they were doing back then, handling that dangerous isotope like it were sugar, clad only in lab coats. Most people don't know what the hell they're doing when they hit the big power, hit it on the nail. Well, we won the war. (This is said a lot out there.) Someone told me a story that the first time they collected enough measurable plutonium for the bomb (like 9 months later; they needed to get it right) the guy dropped it on the floor because he was so tired. If you handle something dangerous and important, make sure you have a good day's rest.

Driving through Tennessee later on the trip, I encountered the seventh or so thunderstorm. When I saw it I raced into it, taking side roads hoping to hit it square. The lightning came down with such sheer consistency you could've almost read by it. Finally on some side road it started coming down, the lightning that is, beckoning me on either side. So much fury was coming down on either side of the road it felt like I was driving into hell, except hell would've been lined with warm sunshine and pretty flowers else no one would go. I saw trees being hit, which unless you've seen it heard it is nothing like anything. You could smell the electricity through the damp air circulating through the car. It was a rush, but like most rushes, ended with the comfort that temporary shelter provides, this being a less-than-fleabag hotel in nothern Tennessee.