Twelve Mile Circle

DISCLAIMER: This is a geography and travel blog, not a political blog. No endorsement or disparagement is intended.

Later today I get to take the John McCain flight. No, I don’t get to fly with John McCain. I’m talking about the regularly-scheduled flight that is a small part of his political legacy.

Washington, DC’s National Airport opened for business in 1941. Runways were fine for the turboprops of the time but they were a bit on the short end when jet aircraft became common in subsequent decades. Lengthening the runways wasn’t much of an option because large parts of the airport had been built on dirt dumped into the Potomac River and there was only so much river one could fill. Residents didn’t really want this either. Jets made lots of noise. They didn’t want to encourage additional flights over their homes.

The solution was to build a gigantic airport in the middle of nowhere, in a spot far enough removed from the city to not disturb anyone, but close enough so that people would actually use it. Thus, Dulles Airport rose from cornfields astride the Fairfax County / Loudoun County border in 1962, twenty six miles outside of the city. Today that’s a heavily populated area so that may seem odd to recent arrivals, but at the time this was remote farm country.

As envisioned the bulk of airline capacity that would serve the metropolitan area and the larger, louder long-haul jets would use Dulles. National Airport would serve fewer flights and more localized traffic. A “perimeter rule” came into being - National Airport flights could only operate within a 650 mile radius (with a few grandfathered exceptions to 1,000 miles), later relaxed to 1,250 miles.

Over the 1980’s and 1990’s, Dulles became successful in its own right. Jets also became quieter. Washington traffic got a lot worse and Dulles became rather inconvenient for eastern portions of the larger metropolitan area. Airlines were trying to expand their bases, and America West had its eyes on the east coast of the United States.

John McCain introduced legislation to remove the perimeter rule in 1999. Some say this was because he was an Arizona Senator trying to help the business interests of an Arizona-based corporation. That’s probably true. All politics is local. I’m sure the ability to take a convenient non-stop flight back from Washington to see his constituents probably helped too. Regardless, Mr. McCain managed to crack the perimeter rule for five destinations in 2000, and one of those five was America West to Phoenix^(*).

America West and US Airways merged in 2005, and continued under the US Airways moniker. The flight to Phoenix became a US Airways flight. I don’t call it pork-barreled politics, I call it a blessedly non-stop flight to Phoenix without hassling through a layover in Atlanta, Dallas or Chicago. Thank you John McCain.

^* By the way, the Wikipedia entry for this is wrong. Refer instead to the GAO’s 2007 report, REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT- Update on Capacity to Handle Additional Flights and Impact on Other Area Airports. Additionally I have personal know that Wikipedia is in error because I’ve taken this flight before, including prior to 2004.

I sometimes wonder about unusually-shaped geopolitical boundaries. Sometimes I find it’s due to specific geographic features as with The Gambia. Other times it arises from territorial clashes as with the Temburong exclave of Brunei Darussalam. Generally speaking, the stranger the shape the better the story. So I got to wondering about the Missouri Bootheel, a little knob of land protruding from the state’s southeastern corner like a hernia.

The Bootheel exists for no other reason than a single person wanted it to exist. It’s an enduring testament to the power and influence of a wealthy Nineteenth Century landowner, one John Hardeman Walker.

The “Czar of the Valley” gathered vast acreage in the wake of severe earthquakes rocking New Madrid in 1811-1812. Mr. Walker remained in the area while others left in fear for their lives. He used this as an opportunity to acquire cheap land from desperate people, and built a profitable cattle-raising business in what was then the Territory of Missouri.

The original State of Missouri petitions submitted to the United States Congress proposed a southern border pegged at latitude 36°30′. This would allow the new state to line up cleanly with the Kentucky / Tennessee border, immediately to the east. However this would also have left Mr. Walker sitting on the sidelines in Arkansas Territory, twenty five miles below the proposed State of Missouri.

He argued that towns along this stretch of the Mississippi River had more in common with settlements in Missouri such as St. Louis rather than with towns in Arkansas. He lobbied heavily in Missouri and in Washington, DC to press his case. He must have been very persuasive because when Missouri became a state it had a southern border at 36°30′ except for the little area between the Mississippi River and the St. Francis River, where the border dropped down to 36°00′. Thus the 980 square mile bootheel was born at Missouri’s inception as a state in 1821.

Technically the bootheel is just that portion of Missouri that extends south of 36°30.’ It includes Pemiscot County and parts of Dunklin and New Madrid Counties. In a more practical sense it extends to a much larger southeastern region of the state, culturally more southern than Midwestern unlike the remainder of Missouri. Geologically it’s part of the Mississippi River Alluvial Basin, the northernmost portion of a broad floodplain extending down to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s much flatter and with more wetlands than is typical of the rest of the state.

It’s an interesting crossroads and transition region, at the confluences of history, culture and geology.

Over the weekend we traveled down the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of an ancient backbone, the Appalachian chain abutting central Virginia.

As the crow flies, it wasn’t too far from Shenandoah National Park’s Swift Run Gap and Skyline Drive. We were guest on private land so I won’t give the exact location like I usually do, but here’s a general map of the area.

The scenery had a timeless quality. No doubt, someone sitting here two hundred and fifty years ago as European settlers carved farms from untamed territory would have seen much the same. The ridge does seem to take on a characteristic blue haze in the distance. The National Park Service credits this to hydrocarbons that trees release into the atmosphere, and that may be the case. I’ve heard similar explanations for the Blue Mountains in Australia which I have also been lucky enough to visit. But on this sweltering humid summer day so common to the area, it may have been more to do with sunlight filtering through moisture-laden air.

Few things could be more relaxing than an Adirondack chair on a shaded porch. Mountain scenery filling the horizon, cooling breezes rolling along hillsides and through the valleys, a bottle of wine from a local vineyard conveniently perched nearby. Birds and cicadas serenaded the pastures while crickets and a bullfrog down the hollow chimed in as the sun set. Fireworks popped in the valley several miles away once it got dark. This last part was rather odd since the Fourth of July happened a week earlier. Somehow it seemed appropriate, though.

It’s a moment that I wish I could have frozen in time.