A glory at Kwaj

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Mark P

In about 1987 I had a chance to travel to Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Kwajalein Atoll is part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. It’s about 10 degrees north of the equator and about 13 degrees on the other side of the International Dateline (the US government stretches the dateline west to include Kwajalein in the same date as the mainland US). It’s 2500 air miles from Hawaii, which is about 2400 air miles from Los Angeles, which is just under 2000 air miles from Atlanta. It is, in other words, remote.

The US has operated a base on Kwajalein Island since the end of World War II US Army Kwajalein Atoll, or USAKA). They also operate bases on other islands in the chain, including one called Roi-Namur.

I took this picture when I flew from Kwajalein to Roi-Namur (Roi and Namur were originally two separate islands, but they were joined by an artificial causeway by the Japanese during World War II.)

Here is another I took on the same flight.

This is a glory. This is not an especially good example, but any example of a glory is a wonder. A glory is a bright ring that forms around the shadow of an observer when the sun is behind the observer and the observer looks towards his own shadow. Glories can often be seen from airliners flying over clouds, or in fog with bright lights behind the observer. I showed a glory in fog in a previous post, although I didn’t actually identify it as a glory. You might also see a glory in smoke.

The Wikipedia article on glories indicates that there is some scientific uncertainty about the source of the phenomenon, but other sources indicate a fairly simple explanation that I think is accurate. It is basically caused by scattering of light by cloud drops or other particles in the air. In the case of most particles or droplets, most of the light that interacts with them is scattered in the same general direction as it was originally traveling. That’s why, when clouds cover the sun or moon, you can see a bright area around where the sun or moon is, as long as the clouds aren’t thick enough to completely block the light. However, a large portion of the incident light is scattered back towards the source. That’s what causes the bright ring around the observer’s shadow. Back scattering, as it’s known, is what makes it hard to see in thick fog if you use your car’s high beams.

The (relatively) simple explanation is also consistent with the fact that you can see a similar phenomenon on a sunny day if you look at your shadow on the ground. There should be a brighter area on the ground surrounding your shadow. That bright area is light that is preferentially scatted back towards the light source.

The Wikipedia article about Kwajalein Atoll has at least one mistake. It says that the total area of the atoll islands is about 16 square miles, when it is, in fact, about six square miles. They may have been referring to the total area of the Marshal Islands, which includes other atolls.

The Marshall Islands are probably most famous as the site of a lot of the US atmospheric nuclear weapon testing.

Kwajalein Atoll is now used by the US Army as a missile and missile defense test site. The current name of the site is the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site (usually called simply the Reagan Test Site, or RTS), named in honor of President Ronald Reagan because of his pursuit of the fantasy of a defense against a large-scale missile attack on the United States.

More than 70 years ago, in 1944, US forces invaded Kwajalein and Roi-Namur as part of the strategy of island-hopping across Pacific on the way to the Japanese homeland. Kwajalein was invaded a few months after Tarawa, which was the first really bloody lesson the US learned about what fighting the Japanese would be like. The planners for the Tarawa invasion thought they had bombed and shelled the island so much that there would be little resistance; that turned out not to be the case. So when they planned the amphibious invasion of Kwajalein, by one estimate, they poured about 6000 tons of bombs and shells onto the island. That’s equivalent to about 40 percent of the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Another estimate was that it amounted to about 100 pounds of explosives per square foot of the island.

The battle for Kwajalein Island lasted four days. It’s pretty amazing to think about, especially if you have actually visited that island. At almost any point it’s possible to see the ocean on both sides at the same time. Back then I was still running; it was an easy run around the entire perimeter of the island.

The invasion of Roi-Namur occurred next. That island is tiny, even in comparison to Kwajalein Island. That battle took a day. As a result of that 24 hours of fighting, four Medals of Honor were awarded.

There are quite a few relics from the Japanese occupation and the US invasion. Here is a Japanese headquarters building.

This is what’s left of one of the Japanese defense positions.

This is a wall of a building with graffiti left from that time.

This is some of the debris left from US equipment lost on the beach. I found some old rifle cartridges in the water near Roi, but have long since lost them.

Today, the islands are pretty.

Base personnel cut the coconuts down from the trees to keep them from falling onto the heads of residents.

It’s not what you think of as a tropical paradise, but that image probably comes from volcanic island rather than coral atolls. Coral atolls have no mountains. The highest natural elevation on Kwajalein is probably less than six feet above mean sea level. Fortunately for Kwajalein, it is close enough to the equator that hurricanes almost never hit the island. However, when I was there, a strong storm had only recently hit the islands, resulting in a lot of losses for the Marshallese. Kwajalein’s and Roi’s facilities weren’t harmed, but those facilities are American and more sturdily built.

Kwajalein Island and Roi-Namur Island are reserved for US personnel. Any Marshallese working on the islands must return back to their home islands after each work day.

The reason US personnel are at USAKA is to take part in US missile testing. US intercontinental missiles are sometimes launched from the coast of California to reenter at Kwajalein as part of routine testing of US offensive weapons. Personnel at Kwaj also take part in missile defense testing. This is used for both purposes.

This is ALTAIR (ARPA Long-Range Tracking and Instrumentation Radar), operated by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. ARPA is the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is currently called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. There are other radars located around the islands.

My visit was part of a small sounding rocket test associated with the old Ballistic Missile Defense program, the one that was going to protect the US from a massive Soviet missile attack. I flew into Kwaj one day and then flew with a few of my fellow contractors and some government workers to the island of Roi-Namur. I stayed at Roi for a few days before the missile test I was involved with. It was a nice vacation. I spent it walking around the island, reef walking and taking photographs (the slides from which the images here are scanned). The weather was warm and humid but reasonably pleasant. The facilities on the island are pretty primitive in some respects. It was at Roi that I learned that if you don’t keep Diet Coke cool, the Aspartame in it breaks down into something that doesn’t taste very good. At all.

Our test, which was a small one, failed. It involved what’s called a sounding rocket, which is a smallish missile that barely reaches outer space and then returns. Our missile had three stages. When the first stage separated, it “chuffed” (residual propellant ignited and puffed out). When it chuffed, the first stage bumped into the second stage and damaged it. The missile then went out of control and had to be destroyed.

So we packed up and went back home, and I never went back again.

Summer in Savannah

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Mark P

Leah and I took a trip down to Savannah last week. We stayed in our travel trailer in Richmond Hill, south of town. We arrived just in time for a heat wave. It was in the 90s every day, with humidity to match.

Savannah, which was founded in 1733, is the oldest city in Georgia. It has some very beautiful historic neighborhoods in a fairly compact area. It’s probably best known for the book and movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. We didn’t go looking for the famous Bird Girl statue because it has been relocated since the movie was made.

We didn’t have any particular itinerary for our visit, so every day we just picked something to do or see.

The first day we went to the riverfront and walked around a little. The highlight of that day was stopping for a midafternoon beer. The bar claimed that they had the coldest, cheapest beer in Savannah but the claim was not true. The beer in our refrigerator was colder and cheaper, although I suppose technically the refrigerator was not actually in Savannah.

One of the nice features of downtown is all the squares and parks. Here’s a well-known fountain in one of the better known parks, Forsyth Park.

A nice couple took our picture next to the fountain. If you look carefully you might be able to tell that I have lost weight lately. I have to cinch up my pants with my belt to keep them on. Leah is her usual lovely self.

What does the fountain in Forsyth Park have in common with a toilet? They use similar floats to maintain the water level.

This church, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, is near Lafayette Square. It reminds me of the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, but really doesn’t have much in common other than being large, ornate churches near downtown in an old Southern city.

Wormsloe Historic Site has ruins of one of the oldest structures in Savannah, but the most dramatic sight there is the mile-long drive lined with 125-year-old live oaks.

Savannah’s beach is actually on Tybee Island. We drove out there one day, but I think both of us have outgrown the desire to walk on a beach in the kind of heat we had for this visit. We did climb the Tybee Island lighthouse. When we got to the top I found that my camera battery was dead, so I took some pictures with my phone. Here’s a panorama from four of them. Click to get a little bigger image.

Leah is not in the picture because she stayed inside at the top of the lighthouse. She is not fond of heights, so she decided to experience the view vicariously.

We both like seafood, but Leah really loves it. Savannah is on the ocean, so naturally we expected to get good seafood there. I feel that the most noteworthy aspect of the seafood we ate was its price, but maybe that’s just me. But instead of seafood, let’s talk about weather.

One evening we ate at a restaurant situated along a nice, wide, calm river. We were seated at a big window looking out over the river. This is what we saw.

I have an app on my phone that lets me see the last hour of weather radar images. This is what it looked like then. We’re at the blue dot at right center of the image.

There was a severe thunderstorm warning with a notice to prepare for 60-mph winds, but the storm basically split as it reached us. We got a little wind and rain, and there were a few whitecaps on the river, but we missed the worst of the storm.

The worst part of the trip was the heat. June is definitely not the right season to visit coastal Georgia, but we had to schedule our trip around our petsitter’s availability. I think it would have been much more pleasant in April, or maybe October.

On the bright side, it was only 84 when we got back home, and that felt cool after Savannah.

A Thanksgiving story

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Mark P

When my brother was moving back to Atlanta from San Diego, he needed someone to drive his old car back east. My friend Tom and I thought it would be a nice trip, so we agreed to do it over Thanksgiving week. The details are fuzzy now, because it was about 20 years ago, but here’s what I remember.

First, of course, we had to arrive in San Diego without a car. Tom’s idea was that he would drive to Georgia from New Mexico in his little pickup, and we would drive back and catch the Amtrak train from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. It sounded good to me, so that’s what we did.

The first part of the trip was uneventful. We had both driven back and forth between Georgia and New Mexico many times, so the trip through Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee was pretty boring. About the time we reached Arkansas on I-40, it started raining. Hard. We heard a weather forecast on the radio for snow, and we both thought it was ridiculous with all the heavy rain. But as we kept going into the night, it got colder, and the rain turned to snow.

It snowed hard. The interstate started getting slippery. Tom’s truck was four-wheel-drive, so we didn’t have much trouble, but we did have to slow down quite a bit. The highway was covered with snow that was packed by the traffic. We watched a big truck driving up a long grade curved to the left. The tractor was in the right lane, and his trailer was sliding along in the left lane.

It was pretty tiring, so we stopped for a while at a motel in Amarillo. The next morning had turned bright and sunny with only a few icy spots between Amarillo and New Mexico. We headed up towards Lamy, which is where the Santa Fe train station is located. We intended to buy a ticket for the next day’s train, but found that that day’s train was late. It had been behind a freight train that had come apart on a grade, so we were able to get tickets for a compartment on that day’s train.

We had a while to wait so we went over to the Legal Tender Saloon for a little nip, and then came back to the station. Tom was a fan of detective novels, so we joked about Murder on the Orient Express and whether there might be a death on the train.

It was so late after the delay that they started serving dinner almost immediately after we left the station. We went up to the dining car and sat down to eat. After a while, we looked outside and then asked each other whether the train was slowing. It was. Out in the middle of nowhere between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, a drunk had decided to take a nap on the tracks, and the train had run over him. The almost imperceptibly slow stop was called an emergency stop.

It was a long time before the ambulance and police cars came, and a lot longer before the train started again. And then it went almost immediately into a siding where every wheel was inspected for damage. Apparently that’s required after every emergency stop.

Eventually the train went through Albuquerque and then headed west across Arizona and into southern California.

I think traveling by train may be the best way in the world to travel. The western Amtrak cars are two stories tall, so you sit up high. In the compartment we had, the seats faced each other on either side of the window. There was almost no sensation of motion, just the western landscape passing silently by. At night the seats fold down to make one bed, and the upper berth lowers immediately over it. It was a comfortable ride, but I had a cold so it was hard to sleep. Even so, when I got off the train in LA, I felt like I had just walked out my front door. There was none of the drone and low oxygen levels of airline travel, which usually leaves me exhausted after a four or five-hour flight.

We rented a car to drive down to San Diego. My brother, who was back in Georgia, had told me that his car, a 1967 Porsche 912, would probably need a tune-up. We got some tune-up parts and I started working. The car kept running worse and worse as I worked, but finally, at the end of the day, I had it running about as well as it had been before I started. At that point it seemed best to consider the job done.

We left the next morning. It was ice-cream weather in San Diego, but the cold weather we had passed through in the middle of the country was still there. In case you’re not familiar with old Porsches, I’ll explain. The 912 looked exactly like its bigger, more expensive brother, the 911, but it had a four-cylinder, air-cooled engine more powerful but otherwise not much different from an old Volkswagen’s. Since an air-cooled engine doesn’t have cooling water that can be used to heat the passenger compartment, Porsche and Volkswagen got heated air into the cabin by putting an envelope of sheet metal around the exhaust manifold and a blower to push hot air from the engine at the back up ducts to the front of the car. It’s a perfectly logical solution, as long as there are no exhaust leaks, but it sounds much better in theory than it works in practice. We never could feel any heat from the little vents. Riding inside the 912 didn’t seem much warmer than some of the cold days I have spent on a motorcycle.

When we decided it was too cold to take it any more, we found a K-Mart and bought a Sterno stove. A Sterno stove uses a little can of jellied alcohol placed in a small, squarish metal stove. You light it with a match and it burns with a weak flame. We put it down in the floorboard between the passenger’s legs. The main problem with it was that it produced a lot of water vapor that kept fogging the windows.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was probably a worse idea even than the original Porsche heating system. It did, however, provide enough heat that we were almost comfortable.

Around that time the Porsche’s starter stopped working. Our first idea was to make sure we parked on a slope so we could push it off. That idea also turned out not to be so good, but at least it gave us some exercise. After one stop, we couldn’t get the car started again until someone stopped and helped push it off. After that we decided to simply drive straight through the rest of the way without turning the engine off. That might not have been a good idea, but it worked.

On Thanksgiving day, we pulled into a truck stop, filled up the tank and parked in front of the truck stop restaurant. We left the engine idling and went in for our Thanksgiving Day dinner.

We managed to make it back to Georgia without any further adventures. We parked the car in my parents’ driveway in Rome and turned the engine off. My brother had to come up from Atlanta to get it. I think he had a hard time getting it started again. I don’t remember how Tom got back to Lamy to pick up his truck from the train station.

We went to Colorado

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Mark P

We have been out of town on vacation for the last two weeks. We went to see some old friends in Denver, and had hoped to drive over into Utah to see Arches and Canyondlands National Parks. We saw our friends, but not the national parks. (Thanks, Tea Party. I hope your shutdown didn’t inconvenience any of you.)

We drove and towed a travel trailer. I know a lot of people look down on RVs. It’s not really camping. Some even consider it irresponsible. RVs use too much fuel. But I have some very fond memories of traveling with my parents in their RVs. I would love for Leah and me to have the same kind of experiences that they had.

I start out with a natural inclination to like this mode of travel. Leah, on the other hand, never did it until we got married. OK, twice before we got married. But still.

We had a small motorhome that had all the necessary conveniences. I stayed in it while working in Huntsville. It was a little small for me, and way too small for Leah. So we decided to sell it, and my one-year-old Nissan pickup, and get a decent-sized trailer and a used truck big enough to tow it.

I’ve done the drive from Georgia to Denver a bunch of times, including on my motorcycle, back when I rode. I always did the 1300 miles in two days. But towing a trailer is different, especially with two dogs along for the ride. We took four days.

On the third day, my outside temperature monitor showed 90 F early in the afternoon. By that evening it was 55 F. With that kind of temperature gradient, you can expect a strong wind, and that’s what we got. The last day before we reached Denver the wind blew strong and steady pretty close to directly into us. My fuel mileage dropped by about a third for that day, and when we stopped, it was hard to open the truck or trailer door.

The wind had moderated by the time we reached the Denver area. We stayed at Chatfield State Park, which is just a short drive from where our friends live in Littleton. It’s a convenient but not particularly pretty park. The sky compensated. This is what we woke up to one morning.

Sunrise at Chatfield

Here’s the view in the other direction, with the Rockies illuminated by the red morning sun. These are the best shots we got of the sunrises and sunsets.

Sunrise on the Rockies

There were some pretty skies in Colorado but most of the time it was impossible to get decent pictures because of utility poles, ugly buildings or lack of a good place to pull over while driving.

We arrived on Friday and had planned to leave the next Tuesday morning for Utah. We had hoped that the government shutdown would be over by then, but, of course, it wasn’t. So we stayed a couple of more days and then drove down to Colorado Springs.

We drove up Pikes Peak, but it was so cold and windy at the top that Leah didn’t get out of the truck, and I didn’t get out for long. That afternoon we drove around the Garden of the Gods, which is a park located in Colorado Springs. I have pictures of my mother and father going horseback riding in the Garden of the Gods during the war, when my father was stationed at what was known then as Camp Carson. He learned to ride because when he first went into the Army, he was assigned to the horse-drawn artillery. It’s hard to believe the Army still trained soldiers with horse-drawn artillery in the 1940s. He never went into combat on a horse, but, according to him, he managed to stop biting his fingernails when he worked with horses. Unfortunately for us, it was foggy and drizzling when we were there.

We left for home on Friday morning, a week after we arrived. The forecast was for more strong winds in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, mainly from the northwest. We didn’t feel much of it, and it didn’t compensate for the headwind we had coming out.

If you have never driven across eastern Colorado and Kansas, you can consider yourself lucky. I don’t know who coined the expression “miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles” but it applies really well to Kansas. It’s flat. The highest relief is usually a highway overpass, and I don’t think I have ever seen as many overpasses that crossed dirt roads in any other place. The most common man-made features are grain silos, with churches a close second. I cannot imagine living in the small communities out there, where the closest grocery store might be an hour away.

This was the most dramatic sky we saw in Kansas.

At least something’s going on in the sky

This was taken through the windshield so there are some reflections, including the light streak near the top.

The wind in Kansas doesn’t go entirely to waste. It’s hard to see here, but there is a line of windmills that spans the horizon.

Windmills marching across the horizon

They are right at the horizon, which makes them so far away that they’re hard to see. The fact that you can see them at that distance means they are really big. These windmills are huge. They seemed alien and unreasonably outsized in this landscape, which made it hard for me to grasp their size accurately. I estimated a radius of around 80 feet. Based on Wikipedia, I might have underestimated by a significant amount. One article says that one of the wind farms along I-70 uses windmills with a rotor diameter of 80 meters, which would make a radius of around 130 feet. I’m not sure the ones we saw were that big, but they might have been.

I counted a rotation period of about five seconds. They looked like they were rotating lazily, but If the rotors were 130 feet in radius, the tips would have been traveling at over 110 miles per hour.

We enjoyed visiting our friends and hope to go back before too long, but the trip out and back made me kind of discouraged about this country. The interstate highway system is an engineering marvel. It’s a great accomplishment that took a tremendous national effort at great cost. We had the resources and wherewithal, but, more importantly, the national will to build this transportation system. Now we have the resources and wherewithal, but apparently not the will to maintain the roads. Oh, there is a lot of road construction everywhere, but it never seems to make much difference in the smoothness of the roads. It seems to me that it’s what you get when no one really cares about the quality of the work. I have to assume that the construction companies build to the accepted specification, but why are the roads so rough?

I suppose you could argue that interstate highways are a thing of the past, and gigantic windmills are the future. But don’t tell that to the truckers; according to the Department of Commerce, trucks carry about two thirds of all freight shipped in the US. My guess is that the national highway system is declining because the important people don’t drive cross country; they fly, so rough roads mean nothing to them.

That leaves the unimportant people like me to experience this particular sign of our national decline first hand.

CaniConfidimus

Loyal. Trustworthy. Sometimes with fleas.

Category Archives: Travel

A glory at Kwaj

Summer in Savannah

A Thanksgiving story

We went to Colorado