Seventy-five years ago today, American soldiers dropped the world's first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
I will not try to debate whether the bombing, or the one in Nagaski three days later, was necessary or ethical. The effect of those blasts was, I believe, best summed up two millenia earlier in a Calgacus speech, as recalled by Tacitus: Ubi solitudenum facient, pacem appelant (They make a wasteland and call it peace.)
I have seen the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and of various natural disaster. I cannot, however, pretend to have ever seen devastation resembling anything wrought by those weapons.
Even what I saw yesterday pales in comparison.
On the day after a not-quite-hurricane struck this area, I went for a ride in the direction of Connecticut. Along the Pelham Bay Park trail, I had to detour around downed limbs and other parts of trees. Still, my ride was going relatively smoothly until I crossed into Westchester County:
Less than a mile north of the city/county line, this tree toppled onto Mount Tom Road in Pelham. So I backed up a bit and took a right, figuring that the road would take me, if in a more roundabout way, the direction of my ride.
Didn't get very far.
On that road, a couple of guys were sitting in their car. "Be careful out there," the driver yelled. He explained that his friend had just been out cycling and encountered broken power lines as well as downed trees.
At his suggestion, I cut through the golf course into a residential area of Pelham Manor. I knew that I would end up at or near Boston Post Road, a.k.a. US 1, where I could re-orient myself. At worst, I figured, I could ride US 1 for a bit, as it has a decent shoulder--and, I thought, was less likely to contain obstacles and hazards like the ones I'd encountered and been warned about:
So much for that idea, right? I turned down another road blocked by a tree. For a moment, I thought perhaps the storm was some cosmic conspiracy that threw down those trees as a "wall" to keep riff-raff like me out of the upper reaches of Westchester County and Connecticut.
Of course, that thought was no more rational than any comparison between what I was seeing and what the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki carried with them.
