Of Thoreau and a smart phone

GLEN LAKE, Mich. – I traveled north again, though this time in a circuitous way, on the hunt for barn quilts in Illinois and Michigan.  More on how many I snagged – and the dangers of yielding your best instincts to technology – in a moment.

First, though, a lakeside report.  I’m here at the cottage with just the dogs; Cindy is flying up mid-week because she had to work. (I’m on furlough … bittersweet but welcome.)

Even the neighbors are gone. It’s an interesting experience, being here alone. In college while reading Thoreau’s “Walden,” I remember envying his solitude.  Certainly the lack of distraction helped him focus. Made him a bestseller!

Hardly my expectation.  But here I have four quiet days alone, and my only obligation is to feed the dogs.  And even that is a selfish task … if I didn’t, they’d remind me through the night.

Folks who know this place always ask about the weather here.  It was gray today, but there was a muscular breeze from the north.  That sent waves against the rocks and the irksome black flies south. Always a nice result.  Tonight, much calmer.

Laurie and her son Tucker, family friends who stayed here ahead of me, report that a powerful thunderstorm tumbled across the lake Friday night.

“We turned all the lights out, sat in the dark in the living room and watched all the action,” she wrote.

The water at shoreline, normally crystal clear, is still churned a slight brown. But the lake’s residents survived nicely … the ducks already have taunted the dogs, there are three humming birds – not just the usual one – that continually buzz by my head, and the other birds are so chatty you’d think they narrowly dodged lightning and are still on a survivors’ high.

My hope is to write a lot this week.  It’s funny how one’s vocation can become an avocation.  I started my career as a newspaper reporter and then editor, marveling to high school friends that “I’m actually writing for a living!”

These days at work, I’m all business.  And so writing is something I do at my leisure.  It’s more fun that way, I think.  But I’ll disappoint myself if I don’t come away from four days of Thoreau-quality solitude with a lot of words under my belt. They may be clumsy words, but words nonetheless.

So on this trip, I suppose my avocation has become a second obligation.

A report on the journey up: We publish quilting books, among others.  And I volunteered to edit an upcoming book on barn quilts. I like to keep my hand in editing, and I love this subject.  There’s no better blend of American culture than quilts and barns. (Somewhere, there must be a quilt doubling as a saddle blanket.)

Now if you don’t know, there are barn-quilt trails all across the country. A barn quilt is a giant, painted reproduction of a quilt block, usually fixed on a barn’s front-facing wall just below the roof’s peak.

It’s quite something to crest a country road and see a multi-colored quilt block against a red barn, all amid green fields of young corn or soybeans.

The book we’re planning will feature 12 such barn quilts with instructions on making an actual quilt based on them.  And we’ll throw in lots of photos as well.

I offered to photograph four barns in Kankakee, Ill., which is on the drive up.  And then more along the Old Mission Peninsula just north of Traverse City, Mich., near the cottage.

Like much of the world, I’ve moved on to a smart phone.  Whether that’s smart remains to be seen.

My phone, an iPhone, includes a map function with GPS – so I can drop in my destination’s address and be assured that the directions are correct.  Right?  The beauty is that it saves all of that pre-planning … poring over maps, plotting turn-by-turn instructions and hoping there’s a gas station along the way.

So it was an easy task to plot the Kankakee barns.  A web site provided the addresses; my route was secure.

I turned west off of I-57 just short of Kankakee and angled over to the first barn.  There it was … “Blackford’s Beauty” at 3500 W. 1000S Road.  A mother and son were parked there.  I thought they were the owners, but they explained that they had escaped the noise of a nearby track meet until the son’s next event was up.

“That’s a nice barn,” she said.

It was. I quickly snapped some pictures.

I wished the track star and his mom luck, then I plotted the next barn, this one in Momence to the east. 

The phone directed me quickly, to a barn owned by a former University of Illinois extension agent based in Kankakee and his wife.  They were just home from the grocery when I pulled up. We had a nice talk about agriculture and the benefits of a University of Illinois education.

I snapped some more photos, this time of “Maple Leaf,” then moved on to No. 3, slowly tapping the address into my phone … “10067 E 7000N Road, Grant Park, Ill.”

I hit “Route” and it flashed the way … so smart!

Off I went, east along Illinois 17.  The instructions said take a right at North Bull Creek Road. I did … it’s a curvy road, with houses dotting either side.  Not the place of barns. I had my doubts.

Soon my little blue, pulsing pin-drop showed where I was on the GPS universe; unfortunately, I had gone past the little red destination pin-drop.  Something was amiss.

I looked around.  I was in the middle of a residential street; no barns in site. Neighbors were staring.

And then I noticed – my smart phone had dumbly sent me to the 6000 block of E 7000N Road. 

I still don’t know why.  And who was dumber … the phone or me?

I won’t share the other, painful details beyond that I searched and searched for the missing barn, but because of road cutoffs, construction and my own impatience, what started as a pleasant search had turned frustrating.

By this time the dogs were antsy, my stomach needed lunch, and we were about two hours behind schedule.  The third barn was a mystery, and I hadn't even tried to find the fourth.  I called Cindy and told her we’d find the barns on the way back.

The point: Be wary of giving up your basic talents to technology.  It can make you lazy, not to mention behind schedule.

Would Thoreau have owned a smart phone? 

“Men have become the tools of their tools,” he warned.

I don’t think so.

Plowing air

BLAIRSBURG, Iowa – For centuries, the winds have howled across this prairie, generally from west to east. Sometimes they're driven by tornadic twisters; more often, they're a predictable current – occasionally gusty, usually steady.

Pioneers cursed the blowing as they headed west. It meant dust in the eyes, stiff resistance for their mules and oxen, and raw, aching windburn at the end of the day. 

Today, though, the descendants of those settlers have embraced the winds. More than that, they’re cashing in.

By plowing air.

Drive north through Iowa to Minneapolis and the evidence is overwhelming.  On either side of Interstate 35 are wind farms smack in the middle of one of the nation’s windiest corridors.

Agrarian purists bristle at the sight.  Views of the horizon are now subdivided by sky-high vertical posts equipped with giant, three-bladed fans. They move clockwise, at wind’s whim.  The blades are not in lock-step … so each fan seems to dance and move independent of the others.  It’s poetry in motion.  Truly.

It’s too easy to contrast these wind farms with the oil gusher bubbling up from the Gulf.  It’s apples and oranges, really.  The former is clean, quiet and renewable.  The latter is dirty, dangerous and finite.

Unfortunately, the latter will be with us for many years as we transition to energy alternatives.  The quicker we can transition the better, is my view.

But next time you’re near a wind farm, stop on by.  It’s all pretty amazing.  And it’s the future.

Like crop rows, the turbines sit side by side, in a straight line.  Generally there are 10 to a row, but that may grow or shrink depending on the circumstance – the land owned by the farmer, for example.

To get a sense of scale, there’s a six-foot-tall manhole built into the bottom of each turbine tower.  Based on a quick look, I’m guessing the turbines are about 150 feet tall … or 15 stories.

The enormity of these towers is breathtaking.   The spinning blades shout a “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” when observed within 50 yards or less. They remind me of the AT-AT Walker in Star Wars … tall, metal-encased, ready to deal with outside forces.

The manhole itself is locked … though with a simple padlock.  Inside, I imagine there’s a ladder stretching up to the top, where the brains of the turbine reside.

Atop the tower is a horizontal pod; there the three blades connect.  And atop the pod is weather instrumentation for measuring wind direction and velocity. Oh, and there’s a red beacon light, I suppose in case airplanes get too close.  

The turbines seem to have a mind of their own.  We’re watching this row, and the closest turbine – No. 158 – seems to be pointed directly south while its nine brothers point more southwest. 

Then, interestingly, No. 159 begins to adjust itself to point more south.  And then, shortly, follows No. 160.

I suspect if we’d hung around, the whole line of 10 would eventually point due south.

You see, the computers inside these pods sniff the wind’s direction and change as the wind changes.  To maximize energy generation.

Meantime, the farmer who’s allowed this wind farm atop his field seems to have quickly adapted to the intrusion.  His rows of corn have been planted within feet of the massive turbine tower.  This summer, tall corn will obscure the base of No. 158.

In short, farming as we know it is existing side by side with cutting-edge energy creation.

The winds that long ago cursed travelers heading west are now being cultivated by those who stayed.

More power to them. 

For more photos, check this out!