The Urge to be Someplace Else

I had a handful of productive days meandering around Florida this past week.  It included some nice recycled gas stations, a wildlife-filled paddle on the Hillsborough River, a couple days with relatives, and an afternoon visiting with former high school classmates.

It was all accompanied by some very nice tunes from the playlist I’ve uploaded to my new music toy.  Yes, I am moving from CDs to an electronic music library.

First the florists.  There were two of them, Sara’s Flowers in Bartow and the Bonita Flower Shop in Dade City, both in well-kept classic designs.  A third recycled station rounded out the trip.  It was the Fashion Shop in Webster.  From the looks of the add-on drive through bank window on the right side, this is at least the second reuse for this nice former gas station.  You can see all my photos of recycled gas stations here.

My paddle on the Hillsborough was a bit spur of the moment and well worth it.  A friend down here from Connecticut went along.  We put in at the Morris Road Bridge in Thonotosassa and paddled upstream 4.5 miles to Sargeant Park.  It took us three hours for the upstream paddle and two for the return. It was a nice, leisurely paddle. We saw tons of alligators and so many birds that I was at the end of my bird-recognition knowledge.  The scenery was great; huge cypress trees with their magnificent knees and live oaks with their Spanish moss and air plants.

A note for the future:  It’s nine miles from Sargeant Park to the Trout Creek launch and doing a shuttle for the whole run would make a nice morning or afternoon paddle.

I also intended to paddle a small section of the Withlacoochie River up in Dade City on this trip, but the conditions at the launch I picked, on Route 575, were pretty lousy so I passed on it.  I need to research that one a bit more.

Photos are below.  Click on one for the slide show.  I’ve included some of John’s as well.

This trip also included a stop in North Fort Myers.  My cousin Peggy and husband winter there and they were being visited by son Brad and his family from Boston.  My brother Roger and wife filled out the crowd.  It was a nice, relaxed visit with folks I don’t get to see very often.

On the last day I stopped for an afternoon in The Villages for a mini high school reunion.  My high school class (1962) has been holding reunions back in Illinois regularly since graduation, thanks to the fine work of a core group of classmates.  I made it to the fifth and the fiftieth.  In recent years there have also been smaller gatherings in Florida amongst those of us who live/visit here.  I’ve enjoyed renewing those contacts.  We all grew up to be pretty decent folks!

And finally, my new music toy.  I’ve had to change my music formats because a lot of new cars these days don’t have CD players.  I’m getting to the point of wanting/needing a new one, having put my normal ten years and 250,000 miles on the present one.

My daughter recently bought a new car and it didn’t come with a CD player.  Oops.  I wouldn’t have road trip music without a CD player.  What to do for the future?

My decades-old and largely unused ipod couldn’t be resuscitated and I don’t want to use my phone for music.  So I started poking around and found that ipod-like devices are cheap and plentiful, so for $35 I got a nice one that’s Bluetooth capable.

Then came the fun part:  Poking around for all the music I wanted on my playlist.  I have about 24 hours’ worth  loaded up.  It includes the best from all the CDs of course and way more.  I made the list public on Spotify if you’re interested.  It’s called Road Music.   There are several with that name so look for the one By Ron.

Happy listening!

…Gone, I’m afraid.  It’ll be very hard for the venerable place to recover from this blow.

A trucker, apparently thinking it was a drive-in, did just that a few days before Christmas last year and embedded his rig in the building.  The truck went so deep into the first floor that when they pulled it out most of the building collapsed.

Here’s what it looked like before the truck hit it:

And here it is a week ago:

On shaky ground for a long while—the restaurant has been closed for about a year—the building had recently been donated to the local historical society, which was in the process of figuring out what to do with it.

I suspect that truck driver has now made their decision for them.  It doesn’t make me happy.  I am sure it’ll be replaced by a far less interesting eatery, probably a huge truck stop.

As a funky and mellow stopping place at the nicely rural crossroads of well-traveled routes in east-central Florida, it has always figured into most of my travels around the state.  For some previous blog posts about the place, go here and here.

Built in the 1920s, it ended up on the National Register of Historic Places not because of anything particularly unique about the building as a structure but because its presence spanned two key historical periods in Florida history.

Its location, now called Yeehaw Junction, was the juncture of two dirt tracks far back in the 1880s and the area became a hub of sorts for the wild cattle industry later in the century.  Moving into the 1900s, it became the site of a cattle depot, trading post, and, later, gas station/motel/restaurant called the Desert Inn.

This is from the paperwork that lead to the historical designation in 1994:  “The evolution of the Desert Inn coincides with the transition of the Florida cattle industry from a traditionally transient open range occupation to modern ranching operations, and with the early development of the state’s modern, transient tourist industry based on automotive transportation.  It reflects, in other words, the final stage of Florida’s long frontier history and the short twentieth century prelude to the space age.”

It’s a bit sad for me because it is another of those nice country places that are disappearing all over the place.  If you’re looking for someplace to stop up that way, however, there is still Griffis Café, a few miles up 441 in Kenansville.

Some more photos:

That’s true.  It was a couple years ago and I was meandering east through Arizona, sticking as closely as I could to the cracked pavement of the original path of classic Route 66.  Much of it has been paved over by Interstate 40 through that state, but there are still bits and pieces remaining.

This drive meant going through several small downtowns with a handful of businesses still eking out a living by catering to tourist traffic.  One looks much like the other and all are worth stopping in, but stop in them all and you’re not going to get anywhere.

I ended up in Winslow by following the Old Historic Route 66 signs that took me off I-40 west of town.  The downtown was small but looked healthy. I wasn’t in a stopping mode though, and I was nearly through it and back to I-40 when the phrase hit my brain: “Standin’ on a corner in Winslow Arizona.”

Well, Damn!  Here I am!  I circled back and started looking for the corner.  It wasn’t hard to spot, as you can see from the photos.

Winslow, a town of some 10,000 folks (0.09 per cent Pacific Islander, in case you want to know) was a pretty important shipping and trade hub in the steam locomotive era, but began declining  when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad moved its maintenance base to Barstow, CA, when diesels came along.  Today the BNSF Railway uses it as a crew change point and there is twice-daily Amtrack service.

Route 66 kept it going OK for a while, but the final blow to a bustling downtown came in the 1970s, when it became the second to the last town in the state to be bypassed by I-40.

It rose to national fame of course in 1972, with “Take It Easy,” written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Fry.  It was The Eagles’ first single and became the band’s signature song.

As Browne later recalled it:  “I knew Glenn Frey from playing these clubs – we kept showing up at the same clubs and singing on the open-mic nights. Glenn happened to come by to say ‘hi,’ and to hang around when I was in the studio, and I showed him the beginnings of that song, and he asked if I was going to put it on my record and I said it wouldn’t be ready in time.

“He said ‘well, we’ll put it on, we’ll do it,’ ’cause he liked it.  But it wasn’t finished, and he kept after me to finish it, and finally offered to finish it himself. And after a couple of times when I declined to have him finish my song, I said, ‘all right.’ I finally thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Go ahead and finish it. Do it.’ And he finished it in spectacular fashion. And, what’s more, arranged it in a way that was far superior to what I had written.”

According to Frey, the second verse of “Take It Easy” refers to a time when Jackson Browne’s automobile malfunctioned in Winslow on the way to Sedona, requiring him to spend a long day there. The city erected a life-size bronze statue and mural commemorating the song at the Standin’ on the Corner Park in 1999.

There is one Winslow favorite son worth mentioning:  Richard Kleindienst, US Attorney General under Richard Nixon.  He grew up fluent in Navajo.

He was largely untainted by Watergate, and in fact helped get the investigation started, but pled guilty to a misdemeanor relating to Senate testimony in which he attempted to hide White House efforts to get him to drop a Justice Department antitrust action against the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.

The judge who handed him a suspended sentence called him a man of ”highest integrity” but one who had ”a heart that is too loyal.”

Walden Pond is nicely nestled in Concord, Massachusetts, about 20 miles west of Boston.  It’s a kettle pond, left behind by retreating glaciers ten or twelve thousand years ago.  (Don’t ask me how we know that please)

It’s not a normal pond, of course.  This post is intended to give you a Thoreau explanation why.

THAT’S A LOUSY PUN, you’re screaming.  Let me point out that 19th century New Englanders put the accent on the first syllable, not the second one, as we now do.

So just calm down.

It’s not an ideal paddling pond for me, a bit small at 64 acres, very few nooks and crannies, and no fowl-filled wetland areas.

Also, getting to the launch area is a bit of a chore because you have to pay the park entrance fee at the main parking lot on the east side of Route 126 and then turn around and drive to the launch area on the west side of Route 126.  The place is very busy on summer weekends so all that maneuvering with a canoe on a trailer through congested auto and foot traffic takes a while.

But how can one NOT go to a place so embedded in the culture?

I’ve been there twice.  The first time was on a summer Saturday while driving home to Connecticut from New Hampshire.  When I realized that the sign I saw that said “Walden Pond” was THE Walden Pond I had to stop.

It was a busy day.  Lots of folks come to swim at the small beach, but the main attraction is the pleasant path along the shoreline to the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin.  The building’s location is marked by granite posts and there is a replica of it on the park grounds.

The pond is visible from the Thoreau cabin through the sparse leaves of early spring.

I returned early the following spring because I wanted to see the place without so many leaves on the trees and because I didn’t have my canoe with me on that first visit.

The trees mattered because I wanted to see if Thoreau had had a water view from his cabin.  He certainly did not have one when the trees were fully leafed out, assuming the trees were there during the two years he lived in the cabin in the mid-1840s.

And I wanted to paddle the pond.  Paddling is allowed, but no motors and no sails. I think Thoreau would have agreed with banning the former, but the latter would seem to be right up his alley. Among his dying words, it is reported, is the phrase: “Now comes good sailing.”    And here’s another quote: “The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.” But those are the rules.

I hit the gift shop too, of course.  Found the perfect T-shirt for myself.

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in 1817.  He decided after college to go by Henry David.   His maternal grandfather led the first recorded student rebellion in the colonies, at Harvard, which the younger Thoreau attended from 1833 to 1837.

His life appears to have been shaped by the steadiness of work at the family’s pencil factory and the influences that came his way through a friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who he met after college graduation.  Emerson became a mentor of sorts, inviting the younger man to live at his home and tutor his children and introducing him to folks like poet Ellery Channing, journalist Margaret Fuller, educator and philosopher Bronson Alcott, and novelist Nathanial Hawthorne.

It was Channing, in 1845, who told him “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”

Just two months later Thoreau moved to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson at Walden Pond and began his two-year experiment with minimalist living.  More precisely, it was two years, two months and two days.

His cabin was a whopping 1.5 miles from the Emerson home, to which he returned to live at Emerson’s request to help his wife manage the household while he was traveling in Europe.

The book, Walden, or Life in the Woods, was published in 1854 and Thoreau continued to write until his death in 1862 at age 44 from tuberculosis, a disease he had first contracted in 1835.

He was asked by his aunt Louisa on his deathbed if he had made peace with God.

“I did not know we had ever quarreled,” he replied.

And now let’s get to the Ice King:

Thoreau’s years at Walden Pond overlapped with another figure of the time, Frederic Tudor, dubbed Boston’s “Ice King.”  Older than Walden by some 40 years, Tudor was hitting his entrepreneurial stride at about the time Walden moved into his cabin.

Walden was one of several ponds from which Tudor cut huge blocks of ice in the winter and shipped and sold all over the world and became a very wealthy man.

The ice was free, sawdust for packing and insulation was free and shipping was cheap because many vessels leaving Boston were empty.  Sure, there is loss on the way: 180 tons of ice at the start would become 100 tons by the time it arrived in India four months later.  But it was profitable.

Thoreau philosophized upon it all in his journal while watching Tudor’s ice harvesters one winter:  “The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well … The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

There, consider yourself Thoreaully informed.

This shot is from the boat ramp, in the southeast corner, to the cabin site in the northwest corner, about dead center in this photo.  (All Photos by Ron Haines)

I hadn’t heard the song in months.  It’s on one of those CD’s I keep in the car and play only when I am on a serious road trip.  It’s been a good while since I’ve enjoyed one of those.

But that didn’t keep this sign on a building in Lake Park, FL, from hitting me right between the eyes this afternoon as I meandered my way back home from a short paddle on the Loxahatchee River up in Jupiter.

The song?  “A Better Place to Be,” of course.  One of those great poems set to music by a songwriter I have long enjoyed.  My music tastes were set in stone decades ago, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Seeing the sign today pushed any other thoughts out of my brain and I was left with this:  “I am the midnight watchman down at Miller’s Tool and Die. And I watch the metal rusting, and I watch the time go by.”

Harry Chapin was born in 1942 and died in a car accident in 1981.  If you’re of a certain age, just say out loud, “It was rainin’ hard in Frisco……”  and it will all come screaming back.

And for a look at some of what Harry Forster Chapin left behind go here.

I almost forgot to post a note about the end-of-season paddle this year with my friends at Paddle Killingly, an eastern Connecticut paddling group I belong to.

To mark the final paddle of the season we always have a pizza party.

This year was a special one because Granddaughter Margeaux came along in her kayak.

It was a chilly day, and I was glad I’d thrown a jacket in for her to wear and that I had my

Margeaux in the hat she gave me.  She sewed the moose design on it.

backup stocking cap along.  The hat actually was a gift from her that she had hand sewed the outline of a moose into.  One of my paddling friends had an extra pair of gloves that came in handy too.

She did quite well.  The use of a tow rope to augment her paddling works nicely when we’re against the wind but otherwise she can keep up by herself.  We headed back to the launch a bit before everyone else and had such a nice time just moseying along by ourselves that the rest of the group caught up to us about when we were ready to come ashore at the boat ramp.

Here are some photos.

A week ago I was privileged to add my name to the wall of signatures of Mississippi River paddlers that Dale Sanders, the Grey Beard Adventurer, maintains at his home in Memphis for just that purpose.

For years Dale has been a ‘River Angel,’ one of those many kind folks up and down the Mississippi who aid thru-paddlers. Since 2012 he’s been collecting signatures on his wall.

A life-long adventurer, he himself paddled the river in 2015, becoming the oldest person, at age 80, to do so. He went on to hike the Appalachian Trail in 2017, becoming, at 82, the oldest person to do that in one calendar year.

I’ve known of Dale for several years and had wanted to meet him and add my 2003 thru-paddle to his wall. Fortunately, our path from Connecticut to Arkansas for a Sue family meetup took us right through Memphis, so I messaged him that I was coming.

Unfortunately, Dale had a scheduled hiking trip on the day I would pass through, but his wife, Meriam, was a most gracious host. The two of them, by the way, hitchhiked around the world together back in 1983, passing through 26 countries.

Thanks Dale and Meriam.