Geek Highways: "Yellowjack" Walter Reed's Birthplace

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Down a quiet road in a remote part of Gloucester County, Virginia, is the tiny house that was the birthplace of Walter Reed. Reed was the Army doctor who led the team that established that "Yellowjack" -- Yellow Fever -- was spread not by contact but by mosquito bites. This and other discoveries make him one of the fathers of epidemiology.

There I am, yesterday, in front of the house. Really, it should have been Marianne since so much of her work involved epidemiology. But life isn't always fair. Dr. Reed always credited Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay for discovering the disease vector and how to control it. Alas, we have only room in our memories for one name when crediting such things.

But, as either doctor would have told you, credit is a minor thing. What most matters is the number of lives saved, the sheer mass of human misery prevented.

For which we can thank those two men and all those who worked with them.


And, remarkably enough....

Remember Ardudwy, Will Jenkins'/Murray Leinster's house, which I blogged about yesterday? It's maybe two miles, certainly no more, from the Walter Reed birthplace. There are hidden patterns everywhere.

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Geek Highways: Ardudwy

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On the bank of the York River, in a still-remote part of Gloucester County, Virginia, that was a heaven for his small daughters, sits Murray Leinster's house, Ardudwy. that's it up above.

Will F. Jenkins was a very successful fiction writer whose love of science led him to write science fiction, against his agent's horrified objections, under the Murray Leinster pseudonym. He was the single most important SF writer between H. G. Wells and Robert Heinlein. At a time when the stuff was mostly written by untalented hacks and paid accordingly, he wrote the kind of exciting idea-fiction that lit a fire in the young brains of Isaac Asimov and many, many other writers-to-be. He wrote the first "first contact" story. In "The Runaway Skyscraper," he invented alternate history. In "A Logic Named Joe," he describe the Internet in detail -- in 1946! He was the first Dean of Science Fiction.

And I met him.

I did! When I was 29, Dr. David Clay Jenkins (no relation), the single most valuable teacher I ever had at William & Mary (and there were many to whom I owe enormous gratitude) took me and my friend Paul Fuchs to meet the great man. I wrote a sketchy account of it here. Short version: He dazzled. He was everything a writer should be: Lordly, gracious, interested in everything, full of lore, bubbling with ideas, enthusiastic about great writing, in love with language, an amateur inventor. And kind to at least one young fool.

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Geek Highways: The Roanoke Colony

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Yesterday, Marianne and I went to Roanoke Island, site of the lost Roanoke Colony, the earliest and most enduring mystery of post-Columbian America.

In slapdash short: Sir Walter Raleigh (not in person; Queen Elizabeth wouldn't let him go adventuring in the New World) planted a small colony in what would later be North Carolina. If it succeeded, it would make a swell port which British privateers could raid the Spanish treasure ships. He also had dreams of peacefully colonizing North America by making the American chieftains British lords and their people citizens. The colony, however, was underprovisioned and sent their governor back for more supplies.

Enter the Spanish Armada. It was three years before John White (Virginia Dare's grandfather) was able to acquire a boat (all had been essentially nationalized to fight off the threat) and funding to return. Only to find that the colonists had taken up their weapons and essentials and left. In their absence, the buildings had been torn down and chests they had buried containing possessions they could not take with them had been dug up and their contents scattered about. The word CROATOAN carved into a tree suggested that they had gone to live with friendly Indians at Croatoan. White wanted to go look for them, but a storm came up so they went back to England instead.

Yeah, that last bit makes no sense to me either. In fiction, it would a clue. But maybe things will be clearer to me after I read a book or three.

We visited the site. A great deal has been added and nothing remains. There's an open-air amphitheater with the ocean behind the stage and the wind singing through the light scaffolding. There's a large fantasy of what an Elizabethan garden might have been like with proper funding and Twentieth-Century sensibilities created by the local garden club. There's a slope-shouldered recreation of the small dirt fort that had been built there, based on archaeological measurements.

Of the original colony, there is not a trace. Nothing remains behind but silence. And mystery.


Next up: Monster Trucks!

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Geek Highways: Kitty Hawk

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Okay, yes,  Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first flights from Kill Devil Hills, not Kitty Hawk and Kitty Hawk only got the credit because that's where the telegraph station was from which they sent the news.

That's just the fine print. It doesn't really matter.

What matters is that in what was then was a lonely, isolated corner of North Carolina, the Wright Brothers made their first four flights on December 17, 1903.  Since then, the sand dune looming over the site has been stabilized and turned into a grassy hill, atop which is a huge memorial. A small airstrip has been added. A life sized  installation of statues representing the brothers, their flyers, and everyone present at the first flight has been thrown into the mix. And the usual tourist center has been erected as well.

All very nice. But what's moving is to go to the boulder marking the place where the flyer took to the air and pace out the distance to stones marking where it came down for the first three flights -- hops, really, up in the air for a few seconds -- and then far beyond them to the end of the first sustained powered manned heavier-than-air flight of 852 feet in 59 seconds.

The moment that flight had been achieved, Boeing 747s became inevitable.

It's quiet at the memorial site and there's a steady wind from the sea. It's a good place to reflect how little time separates those two uncommon men from us.


Above: Marianne at the fourth touchdown stone.

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Geek Highways: Wallops Island

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Officially, it's called the Wallops Flight Facility but I've never heard anyone call it anything but Wallops Island. It's not like there's a lot of anything else there.

Wallops Island is one of five main flight facilities operated by NASA and, let's be honest, isn't a patch on Canaveral. It's responsible for twenty to thirty sounding rockets a year, only four or five of which are launched locally. The rest are launched from sites around the world as needed. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, which it operates, is probably best known today for the private-industry Antares rockets launched there by Orbital ATK.

Marianne and I stopped here on our way to Kitty Hawk, tracing in reverse a voyage that went from a 59-second flight to the Moon over the space of a single human lifetime. It didn't matter that Wallops Island has only two launch pads. Standing by the road, looking at the parabolic antennas aimed at the heavens, I felt like I was standing on the shores of space.

As of course I was.

As of course, so are we all.


Above: "Little Joe," used to test the Mercury capsule, its emergency escape systems in particular.

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Geek Highways: Bottle Trees.

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I spent the day wandering about marshlands, doing research for The Iron Dragon's Mother. Lots of nifty stuff: wild ponies seen from a distance, a gannet seen from three feet away and so on. But, necessary though all this was, none of it was geeky.

So today's blog is about a chance sighting of a cluster of bottle trees as Marianne and I passed through Stockton, Maryland yesterday.

A bottle tree is simply a dead tree whose branches have been cut short and then adorned with a glass bottle. Scholars have traced the practice back to Africa, where the practice had a religious significance. It survived American slavery and, although for a time looked to be on its way to extinction. Instead, it spread through the South to such a degree that a certain number of whites make them too.

So why do they exist today? For the same reason that Morris dancing and  Krampus exist today -- not because we necessarily agree with or even know their original purpose, but because they're fun. Because they're real. Because they satisfy something deep within the human spirit.

I look for stuff like this everywhere I go. I like to think of it as Evidence of Intelligent Life on Earth.

You can read a Smithsonian article about bottle trees here.

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Geek Highways: Wallops Island

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As always, I'm on the road again -- this time, making a pilgrimage to Kitty Hawk, where human heavier-than-air flight had its humble beginning.

A long drive through grey and brown countryside brought Marianne and me to Wallops Island, site of one of  NASA's five main launch facilities. It's humbling to stand here, on the shores of space at the slender instant in time during which life leaves the planet.

When I was born, most people would have told you flat-out that human beings would ever walk on the Moon. Yet it happened only sixty-six years after that first fifty-nine second flight that it happened. That's roughly one human lifespan!

Long after Apollo 11, people commonly said that a computer would never beat a human grand master at chess. Then, in 1997, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in a six-game match 3 1/2 to 2 1/2. So, as people will, the doubters redrew the goal lines and said that a computer would never beat a human go master.

On March 15, last year, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in the last game of a five-game match. Final score: AlphaGo 4, Lee Sedol 1.

Something to keep in mind next time somebody tells you we'll never have a true AI or a colony on an extrasolar planet.


Above: One of the rockets outside the Wallops Flight Facility. I probably had the plastic model back when I was a teen.

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