Monthly Archives: July 2015

True Colors*

Posted on by

Saturday night Leah and I went down into town to get hamburgers, a very rare occurrence for us. We had forgotten that it was the Fourth of July until we drove past Ridge Ferry Park on the Oostanaula River and saw crowds and police gathering. The hamburger joint was nearby. When we pulled into the parking lot, we saw this parade heading towards the park to celebrate American independence.

rednecks

Leah and I both had the same strong emotional reaction to this sight: it was scary.

I have tried to be fair and honest about this, but I can’t think of one even slightly charitable interpretation of this behavior. For me, it’s one of two things, either a display that says, “I’m a racist and proud of it”, or a display of gross ignorance; possibly both.

All of the flags in this image seem to be the Confederate battle flag. Some trucks had the old Georgia state flag that included the battle flag, and some had an American flag alongside the racist flag.

The old Georgia state flag with the Confederate battle flag is an even stronger statement of racism than the original battle flag itself, since the Georgia legislature created that particular flag in 1956 specifically as a symbol of defiance towards the American policy of desegregation. The racist symbol flag was eliminated in 2003 through the efforts of Roy Barnes, the last Democratic governor of Georgia, who lost his next gubernatorial election largely because of that.

I interpret this parade of bigotry as a reaction to the widespread backlash against display of the Confederate symbol after the racially-motivated murder of nine black people in Charleston. Apparently other like-minded (I’m being generous in attributing a quality of “mind” to this behavior) people have been having such parades around Georgia and perhaps other backward places.

I talked about the kinds of people who do this in a previous post about the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the racist auto tag they had the state of Georgia produce. There is sometimes an attempt to characterize the symbol and the behavior as honoring some kind of mythical Southern heritage that doesn’t include starting the bloodiest American war to try to preserve and extend slavery in the United States. In that previous post I concluded that the SCV are being disingenuous and that their other words show their true colors.

Maybe some of these people are trying to say that they simply want to honor their Southern heritage. In that case, it’s kind of ironic that they are heading towards Ridge Ferry Park, named for the Cherokee leader Major Ridge, who had a ferry not far away. Ridge was a Cherokee leader during the time that the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their traditional lands in Georgia by covetous white settlers. That’s certainly part of Southern white heritage, but not one I would consider worth honoring.

Another part of Southern heritage is a tendency to cry about how badly Southerners were treated after the Civil War (or, as I prefer to call it, the War to Save Slavery). Roger Aycock, a local author, wrote a history of the Rome, Ga, area called “All Roads to Rome.” He relied largely on contemporaneous newspaper articles for his material. The history of Reconstruction was notable for the whining of Romans about how badly they were treated after losing the war, but there was nothing about how badly slaves might have been treated before, or ex-slaves after. That kind of blind, self-absorbed unhappiness about conditions created by their own behavior seems to continue to this day to be typical of a certain population down here.

In any event, everyone knows that the Southern heritage they want to celebrate and honor never existed, and “everyone” includes the flag bearers of that heritage.

The other possibility is that these people really are simply racists and they know exactly what they’re doing, and they want people to have the reaction that Leah and I had. They want black people to fear them and what they might do. If it scares a few white “liberals”, so much the better.

I suppose one possible good thing about the display of the Confederate battle flag is that these people are identifying themselves so the rest of us know who they are.

* This opinionated post is one of the very few I have allowed myself on this blog. We now return to the normal bland posts.

Friday Felines

Posted on by

In the beginning Mark and the cats didn’t care for each other at all! This includes Zoe, Dusty, Rusty and Chloe. Then one day, Sylvester appeared coming out of the woods in the back yard. Smokey appeared some time later at the front of the house. And now for some reason, Smokey and Sylvester gets up on the couch with Mark. Mark pets them, and they love it.

mark and the cats

It doesn’t make much sense to me, since I’m the caregiver and provider. Ha ha.

An old B-E at work

Posted on by

The well driller showed up on Monday, June 29. I heard the rig so I went up to the lot and looked. Here it is at work.

This is a Bucyrus-Erie cable drilling rig. It’s nearly as old as I am, and it’s in operation in this video by the fourth generation in a well-drilling family. According to the young fellow working the rig, it belonged to the grandfather of the current owner, who passed it to his son, who passed it to his son. Now the young fellow, who married the owner’s step-daughter, is using it. He said it dates to 1955, although the truck it’s mounted on probably dates to around 1970.

Cable drilling rigs are obsolescent, if not obsolete. They have been largely replaced by rotary drilling rigs, which, according to what I have read, drill holes significantly faster than the brute-strength method of a cable rig. The cable rig raises a heavy steel pipe with a bit on the end and drops it repeatedly. There is no rotation of the bit, so the bit drives through the earth and rock simply by pulverizing it.

In the last part of the video, you can see another steel pipe resting at an angle in a larger metal pipe. The operator periodically pulls the drilling bit out and drops the other pipe in. There is a trip mechanism at the end of the other pipe which opens the end when it reaches the bottom of the hole, so it lets the slurry into the hollow pipe. Then, as it’s raised, the trip mechanism closes the valve and the operator brings it up to dump the slurry. It runs out through the open end of the larger section of pipe and then down the hill. Then the operator drops the drilling pipe back in, puts some fresh water in, and begins drilling again.

This is some of the slurry from early in the drilling process. It’s lighter and not as red as the overlying soil. That means it came from the upper layer of sandstone, which varies in color from white to brown to reddish. This slurry was gritty from the pulverized sandstone.

slurry

Later on the slurry was darker. The operator said that came from a layer of dirt beneath the upper rock layer. And then after that, there was some lighter slurry with a mixture of larger rock pieces, which came from a lower, harder rock layer that didn’t turn into sand when the bit pulverized it.

This type of rig is based on a drilling rig patented back in the mid-1860’s. Bucyrus-Erie bought the rights to it some decades later. The rigs were used not only to drill water wells, but also to drill oil wells, back when oil well depths were measured in just a couple of thousand feet.

Bucyrus-Erie apparently sold its cable rig manufacturing to another company which continues to offer parts for old rigs like this one.

Petroleumhistory.org has an informative description of cable drilling rigs as well as information about Bucyrus-Erie. I would say it’s interesting, but that’s probably a matter of opinion.

This old rig is slowly drilling its way into the earth. As of Wednesday, I can still open the door and hear the rig working down the street at our new house site. The same rig was used to extend our neighbor’s well to 450 feet after they had some well problems. Our current well is less than 300 feet deep, but we have never had any hint of supply problems, even back a few summers ago when we had a fairly severe drought. I don’t know how deep the new well will go, but we will probably be conservative about it, which means deep.