Today, I am thankful for those shortcuts that save time and still get the job done.
In life, we are all desperately searching for the quintessential easy road. Who does not want a faster, more more-efficient path to get to work or a friend’s house? Our Global Positional Systems (GPS) on our phones or in our high-tech automobiles are often up to the task of using the satellites in the sky to reduce the time spent in our vehicles. Who does not prefer a time-saving mechanism to feed ourselves? Hence, cookbooks highlighting quick, easy-to-make recipes and drive throughs at fast food restaurants have come to fruition. Who would not desire a way to lose 10 pounds in less than a month? So, programs like Weight Watchers and NutriFit have materialized to facilitate the task. Who would rather have 3G service on their phone as compared to 5G? No one is going to prefer slower Internet service. Our brains are wired in such a way so that we identify and readily choose the fastest path of least resistance.
So, it should not come as any big surprise that, throughout the course of history, humans have been looking for shortcuts – those accelerated ways to get something done. I know Aesop, the renowned Greek author of fables, shares the story of how a diligent tortoise defeated the overconfident hare in a race. So, we all herald the mantra that ‘slow and steady wins the race.’ But, the truth be told, don’t always listen to a Greek.
All this reminds me of the history of transportation in the United States. Long before a rallying cry for Manifest Destiny was issued in 1839, Americans were already moving westward. Although travel was commonly done on foot, horseback, or via horse-drawn carriage, settlers already realized that a faster means of transportation was often over water than on land. For this reason, a usual trip from Boston to Philadelphia or from New York City to Virginia used the open sea or intercontinental waterways. But, the westward march over land-locked regions required some ingenuity. To this end, the early 19th Century heralded the creation of canals that connected separated bodies of water. Probably the most famous of them all in our nation’s 250-year history was the Eric Canal. Built over a period of 8 years between 1817 and 1825, this ‘ditch’ was essentially a small river that connected the Hudson River in upstate New York with the Great Lakes, a distance of some 370 miles. In doing so, a gateway to places like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois was now readily opened to anyone living in New York City, provided you had access to a boat. The Eric Canal was an instant and lucrative success for nearly five decades. In fact, by the end of the 1830s, a person could travel from New York City to New Orleans via a wide array of interconnected canals. These waterways remained a major means of transportation until the invention of the steam engine and the railroad significantly reduced its value in the latter half of the 19th Century.
However, in the United States, the concept of canals did not die in the 19th Century. Canals were built well into the 20th Century. For many years, the only way to get from New York City to Boston over water was to travel around the tip of Cape Cod. This journey was a veritable graveyard for ships, especially as they made their way around the precarious tip of what is now Provincetown. So, in 1909, August Belmont Jr., with the help of an astute engineer William Barclay Parsons, designed a cut-through across the Cape near the town of Bourne, Massachusetts, thereby connecting Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay. Ten prior attempts to dig a ditch had failed. Nevertheless, these 2 men, with the help of 26 dredges, a make-shift railroad track, and some sticks of dynamite, eventually dug their way across the 7-mile stretch. In the process, they built 3 bridges to cross the man-made waterway. Finally, on this day (July 29) in 1914, the Cape Cod Canal was officially opened to boats (for a small fee, of course). Incidentally, 17 days later, the Panama Canal would also open, ultimately connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the first time.
As I plan my upcoming trip to Martha’s Vineyard for some well-deserved summer vacation, I pay gratitude to those enterprising, resourceful individuals who created a path to get me to the island I so greatly love. Now, if I can only figure out a way to convince the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to build a bridge that would obviate my need to take a ferry across the Vineyard Sound.
Any and all ideas are welcomed.
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