Eventually
(Top photo by V, others by me)
This post will start out seeming like a boring travelogue, but there is a point to it.
We took a long weekend to visit some National Trust sites that are more distant than our usual range. Our NT memberships were a birthday/Christmas gift from V’s family. We are using them to hilt in the warm season.
We had never been to Northumberland. A friend recommended Cragside there and other interesting places are near it, so away we went.
Angel of the North
The image above is graffiti on the Angel of the North, which we saw on our way home. The entire Angel is huge. The camera in my smartphone doesn’t do it justice, but here it is (with V imitating its pose). It is immense, made of weathered metal, suggestive of an airplane… suggestive of the mining and industrial work in the north of England.
Port Arthur, Texas
I’ve been thinking about how young the town I grew up in was when I was born. If Port Arthur had been a person, it wouldn’t have been collecting a pension yet. I took for granted that it was an established town of about 50,000, plus there were neighboring towns. It was very much a working town, among the busiest of oil and petrochemical refining centers. Two of the world’s largest refineries stood across the street from each other there. Oil and oil products came and went by ship back then. Some of the public schools were among the best in Texas. It wasn’t a classic beauty but it was bustling.
Sixty years before I was born, there was only marsh.
Souter Lighthouse
Earlier in the day we visited Souter Lighthouse, the first lighthouse purpose-built to be powered by electricity.
As you can imagine, an engineer whose father and grandfather were sea captains couldn’t skip this. I’m a little envious that when V got to the top, she was shown the small hatch leading outside, and the equipment used to belay down in the event of an emergency such as a fire that would otherwise trap the tender(s) at the top. When it was my turn to visit the top, some small children were up there and the staff wisely didn’t say anything about any way to go out.
But I probably appreciated the equipment more than V did. In particular, I noticed the bank of chloride batteries to power the lighthouse for up to 36 hours during a power cut.
The lighthouse was built in 1871. The batteries seem to have been added after the initial build, perhaps part of work done in the early 1950s.
Banks of more modern types of batteries are used in the same way to keep telecommunications switching centers running during power outages. That’s part of why you can still make telephone calls when electricity is down. Due to my work, I’ve seen the modern version in a switching center in Colorado. That was in the 1990s, not terribly long after the last major updates to the lighthouse.
Cragside
The first stop on our weekend tour was Cragside. It’s unusual among stately homes managed by the National Trust. Often, NT gets custody of a stately home and its grounds after a well-to-do family gets into too much financial difficulty to maintain it. The family sells off everything they can in their effort to hold on, so by the time NT gets it, the interior has been stripped of original contents. In this case NT stepped in before much more than art was sold. Cragside has most of its original furnishings, wall coverings and equipment as well as extensive grounds and outbuildings.
With tongue in cheek, NT calls it the first-ever smart house. By modern standards, it isn’t, but for its time it was unique. It’s the first home ever lit by hydroelectric power.
Baron William Armstrong loved to invent things and conduct experiments. The power house is still there, an Archimedes screw, hydraulic elevator (lift), dumbwaiter, and early versions of what we now know as a dishwasher, washing machine and vacuum cleaner. Even the dining table is a clever piece of engineering. An expandable rectangular table is easy. A round one that can expand and stay round is another matter.
Cragside was built in the 1860s but underwent a major expansion around 1870 to 1880.
By the mid-twentieth century much of what Armstrong built as unique for Cragside had become part of ordinary daily life in First World countries.
Putting It All Together
This is why the graffiti on the Angel of the North caught my attention.
In my lifetime it feels like technological advancement has gone from a walking pace to a breakneck gallup. It also feels like political and societal upheavals happen faster than I thought they could. Some positive changes have come about that I put my heart into when I was younger and healthier. I believed I wouldn’t live to see them come through. I believed I was pushing for later generations to have them and felt delight at getting to see them occur.
Then negative changes began picking up steam, as though in reaction to the improvements I wanted and celebrated. It has been alarming to see how fast good can turn sour. It has been discouraging.
Between pondering how quickly my hometown was built and surprises over the weekend about how quickly we went from fire to electricity to electronics and computing, I’ve come away from the weekend tour thinking about destruction and rebuilding. Entire civilizations have fallen before ours. New civilizations eventually grew from the ashes of fallen ones. It’s harder to build than to destroy but people have rebuilt before. The climate has fallen apart before and life rejiggered itself to start again.
So I decided the graffiti writer was onto something. The definition of ok may turn out not to be what we would have liked, but one way or another, everything will be ok. With a lot of work. Eventually. Somehow.
Well said, Bonnie.