Hell on Wheels (and Hurdy-Gurdy Dancing)

AMC premieres a new television series tonight, “Hell on Wheels.” Before I began work on my current project, Locomotive, I knew the phrase “hell on wheels,” but I didn’t know its origin. I think I associated it with motorcycle gangs. Incorrect! It comes, instead, from the 1860s, from the rowdy, ramshackle, dangerous towns — hell — that would spring up alongside construction of the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad and then, as construction moved on, pack up, pick up, and move down the tracks — wheels — to keep up with the workers who kept the town’s bars and brothels running at a profit. 

(This was a phenomenon only of the eastern half of the line, where the workers were largely Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The western half of the line, built largely by Chinese immigrant laborers, progressed without benefit of the same quantities of liquor, murder, and prostitution.) 

Here are two good bits on hell on wheels towns, both of which I first read in Dee Brown’s Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West. The first is a contemporary description of Benton, Wyoming, by publisher Samuel Bowles. The town was, he wrote, “a congregation of scum and wickedness…almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of the lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce, the chief business and pastimes of the hours,—this was Benton. Like its predecessors, if fairly festered in corruption, disorder and death, and would have rotted, even in this dry air, had it outlasted a brief sixty-day life. But in a few weeks its tents were struck, its shanties razed, and with their dwellers moved on fifty or a hundred miles farther to repeat their life for another brief day. Where these people came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished, and their occupation over, were both puzzles too intricate for me. Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them….”

(An aside: It’s hard, for me, at least, to think of George Lucas ever writing the lines “wretched hive of scum and villainy” without Benton and Bowles having paved the way.)

The second story is set in the new city of Cheyenne when the line has just reached it, one hundred forty miles after leaving the town of Julesburg behind. Dee Brown writes, “The next day, the first passenger train arrived, and from it poured a considerable portion of the gamblers and dance-hall girls of Julesburg. A few hours later, a long train of flatcars rumbled into the station. Every car was loaded high with knocked-down buildings, storefronts, dance-hall floors, tents, wooden sidings, and entire roofs. According to legend, as a brakeman dropped down onto the station platform, he shouted to the waiting crowd: “Gentleman, here’s Julesburg!””

Sadly, none of this material will quite make it into Locomotive, which will be (someday, I promise) a picture book for the 6+ crowd. “Heck on wheels” just doesn’t have the same ring. It makes a fellow want to get into YA.

West Virginia Book Festival

I’m heading to Charleston, West Virginia this weekend to give a presentation Saturday at the West Virginia Book Festival. I look forward to flying into Yeager Airport, and am remembering the bit from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in which he theorizes that airline pilots across the country speak in a sort of emulation of West Virginia’s own Chuck Yeager:

“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot . . . coming over the intercom . . . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it's reassuring) . . . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'it might get a little choppy' . . . .

Well!—who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it,—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”

I’ll be listening for it. Meanwhile you can, should you choose, listen to me, sounding as if I’m calling from the far side of the moon, in conversation with Mona Seghatoleslami of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. We discuss Ballet for Martha and the themes of the presentation I’ll be giving. The interview is online here. 

And if you’re in range of Charleston, I hope I’ll see you this weekend. I’m looking forward to the trip! Festival details are here and details for my presentation are here.

Above: Aaron Copland at work on Appalachian Spring. Not that Copland knew that was going to be the title; Martha Graham surprised him with that.

Return to the Library of Congress!

Exciting news here is that Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring will be featured on Tuesday, October 4 at an event at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the dance was first performed. Here are the details, via the Library’s press release:

“The ballet classic Appalachian Spring, created by Martha Graham with music by Aaron Copland, is the subject of a new book for young people, called Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (Roaring Brook Press: 2010). The Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress commissioned the work, which premiered in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on Oct. 30, 1944.

A program featuring the creators of Ballet for Martha, as well as a performance by members of the Martha Graham Dance Company of excerpts of Appalachian Spring, will be part of an event on Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 11 a.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. A small display of important items from the Library’s Martha Graham Collection will also be on view. Students from local schools will attend this event but all are welcome.

The book Ballet for Martha was written by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, with illustrations by Brian Floca. These three will present an illustrated discussion of their book, which will be available for sale and signing. The dancers from the Graham Company are Miki Orihara and Tadej Brdnik. Speaking on behalf of the Library are John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book, which oversees the Library’s Young Readers Center, and Susan Vita, chief of the Music Division.”

The full press release is here. It will be an honor to present the book in this setting and in this company. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll be able to make it to the event.

Above, an alternate sketch of the audience arriving at the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building on the eve of the ballet’s debut.

A Dinosaur Draw-Off

As a boy I loved to draw dinosaurs. 

I knew that Tyrannosaurus rex was the king of the dinosaurs, and so I always gave him a crown. Later the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat stole this idea from me and used it for an image that you can now see on a collection of Maya Angelou poems, a box of chocolates, and who knows where else. 

But the point is: dinosaurs and drawing, and that I’m pleased to announce that I will be moderating the DINOSAUR DRAW-OFF at the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend. Bob Shea, Matt Myers and Roxie Munro are the artists who will draw for your entertainment, edification, and astonishment. 

(And my qualifications as moderator? I’ve been around the block myself. I would say that book was a long time ago, but what’s a long time ago when we’re talking dinosaurs?)

I’m looking forward to the drawing and drawings that we can expect from this very talented group. I hope you’ll join us. We’ll be at the Target Children’s Area, Joralemon and Adams Streets, Sunday September 18, from 10:30 to 11:00 AM. All Brooklyn Book Festival events are free. More details here. I hope to see you there!

No swimming

I moved my studio last month. I’m excited now to be sharing a space with four great authors and illustrators. The crew here includes — or will include, once everyone (else) gets back from summer vacations and time away and so on — Sophie Blackall, John Bemelmans Marciano, John Rocco, and Sergio Ruzzier. We’re in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, near the Gowanus Canal, a fabled strip of water, infamous for the sludge and worse that industry has poured into it over the years. Thomas Wolfe wrote:

“And what is that you smell?

Oh, that!...It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate putrefactions. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smoldering rags, the odors of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incense of putrefying offal, the fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs.”

Oh, that!

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel...

...is, well, you know what. The good news, for me, at least, is that I do now finally see light at the end of the tunnel, the tunnel that is my next book as author/illustrator. (Like Moonshot, the new book centers on long-distance travel in the year of ’69.) There’s a lot of tunnel left still, no doubt — someday I’ll blog about what an unexpectedly complicated book this has been to make — but the steam is up!

Countdown: Apollo 15

Today, July 26, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 15, flown by Commander David Ross, Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden, and Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin.

Earlier this year I had the chance to hear Dave Scott speak about his trip, the fourth manned landing on the moon. Scott was modest and accessible, but listening to him was nevertheless a reminder of the intelligence, education, nerve, and skill that went into these missions. Scott led the first of the J missions — missions that gave the astronauts improved lunar modules, improved backpacks, Boeing-built lunar rovers, more challenging landing sites, more time for exploration, and more ambitious science to perform. (It’s an irony of Apollo is that even as funding cuts had the end of the program in sight, the missions and their ambitions were expanding.)

Once they landed their Lunar Module Falcon, Scott and Irwin settled in for almost three full days on the moon. They would spend over eighteen and a half hours of that time outside their LM, walking (and driving) the lunar surface. (Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon for less than a day, and able to spend only two and half hours on the surface.) Scott and Irwin worked in a dramatic landscape: along the edges of both the Apennine Mountains and Hadley Rille, a deep channel in the moon's surface. The men deployed and performed scientific experiments, took photographs, and collected lunar samples. The most famous of the samples came to be known as the “Genesis Rock” because of its incredible age — 4.5 billion years.

Here is one of the more modest but also more accessible experiments that Dave Ross performed on the moon:

Meanwhile, in lunar orbit the Command Module, Al Worden had his own work to do. His duties included the first “deep space” spacewalk — a trip out the hatch to retrieve film and check equipment on the command and service module. Imagine being alone in lunar orbit while your crew mates are down on the moon, and now imagine being alone in lunar orbit, outside. You can see video of Worden’s EVA on his website, here.

You can also find on that same page of Worden’s website this account of how the Apollo 15 mission patch was designed:

“The mission patch for Apollo 15 was basically designed by the Italian dress designer, Emilio Pucci. We had as a crew evaluated some 540 different designs for our crew patch. They appeared either too mechanical or to have nothing to do with the flight, so finally, through a mutual friend, we asked Pucci if he would help us with the design. Now, Pucci, as I best recall, was an aeronautical engineer and had a good feeling for flight. With his artistic nature, we felt that he would be very helpful in the patch design. He did send us a design which was basically the same as the patch we eventually used, however the colors were in the normal Pucci blues, purples, and greens. We took his design, changed it from a square to a circular patch, made it red, white and blue, and put a lunar background behind the three stylized birds that were the major Pucci contribution.”

First, this makes me wonder who was the go-between between the NASA astronauts and the Italian dress designer. Second, this makes me, and I type this respectfully, just a little glad that Worden became a test pilot and then an astronaut, and not an art director.

Next: Apollo 16

Sources: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin; http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo15.html; http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/AS15/a15landsite.htm; http://www.emiliopucci.com/Index.aspx