The Urge to be Someplace Else

I encountered this fancy bicycle repair station on a drive through Kentucky.  It’s one of four on or near the campus of tiny Berea College in the small town of the same name about 50 miles south of Lexington on I-75.

The device includes a bike hanger, tools, an air pump and a savvy smart phone link to repair instructions.  It’s manufactured by Dero, a Minneapolis-based producer of all sorts of bicycle racks, shelters, lockers, bikeway materials and other cycling-related items.

A pretty pricy avant-garde piece of equipment to find in a southern, middle-of-nowhere town I thought to myself.  I’d pulled off the highway to take a look at the town’s renowned Kentucky Artisan Center and I certainly hadn’t seen enough bicycle traffic to warrant such an installation.

A little research opened my eyes though.

Berea College, with enrollment just under 1,700, is a private, non-denominational Christian college. Its history is closely entwined with that of the town of Berea, population about 14,000, and its student transportation policies explain the presence of the high-tech bike repair stations.

A little history first.  In 1853,  Cassius Marcellus Clay, a wealthy Kentucky anti-slavery landowner (not the boxer, who came along later) offered John Gregg Fee, a noted abolitionist minister, 10 acres on the edge of the mountains if Fee would take up permanent residence there. Fee accepted and with the help of local supporters and other abolitionist ministers he established two churches and a one-room school  in a  settlement they named “Berea,” after the biblical town whose populace was open-minded and receptive to the gospel.

Berea’s first teachers were recruited from Oberlin College, an anti-slavery stronghold in Ohio.

Fee’s goal was to found a college “which would be to Kentucky what Oberlin is to Ohio, anti-slavery, anti-caste, anti-rum, anti-sin.”  The first articles of incorporation for Berea College were adopted in 1859. But that also was the year Fee and the Berea teachers were driven from Madison County by pro-slavery activists.

Fee spent the Civil War years raising funds for the school. In 1865, he and his followers returned to Kentucky and by 1869 Berea College was a reality.

It was the first college in the southern United Sates to be coeducational and racially integrated.  It charged no tuition; every admitted student got a four-year education in exchange for working at least 10 hours per week in campus jobs.

All was not smooth however.  A new state law in 1904 meant the end of desegregated education in Kentucky.  Berea College challenged the law all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, but lost.  It was forced to segregate, and in reaction helped fund  the Lincoln Institute in Louisville for black students.  When the state law was amended in 1950 to allow integration, Berea promptly returned to its original policies.

Today it enjoys a good national and international reputation and is one of only nine “work colleges” in the nation.  They are defined by the U.S. Department of Education as distinctive liberal arts colleges that promote the purposeful integration of work, learning, and service.

And where do the bicycle repair stations come in?  Here’s how:  Students are not allowed to have cars on campus without a special permit, and permits are rarely granted to first- or second-year students.

As noted in the student handbook: “College policy is to discourage unnecessary ownership and use of personal vehicles by students. It is also College policy to provide an educational and social situation in which the ownership and use of personal motor vehicles by students is not normally needed. Ecological and environmental effects, loss of open space, costs of parking, and increased traffic hazards associated with a large number of motor vehicles are also factors influencing the College’s policy of restricting student vehicles.”

The college offers sustainable transportation resources such as campus bike racks and carpool parking, a campus shuttle system to surrounding communities, and a student-led community bike program.  In addition, the college and Enterprise Car Rentals provide an on-campus car for student use and in partnership with Zimride, it offers a free ride sharing and carpooling service.

No, I have not forgotten the Ralston-Purina checkerboard logo.  Today that company is part of the Nestle conglomerate and the logo is used far less prominently than it was at its peak of popularity.  But it was once ubiquitous.  And remember the ‘Checkerboard Square’ address of the company back in the day?  I do.

The pattern became the logo in the late 1800s because of company founder William Danforth’s childhood memory of a family dressed in clothing made from a bolt of checkerboard cloth.

And why do I think that is relevant here?  William Danforth is an alum of Berea College.

More photos of the Dero Fixit below.  All photos by Ron Haines.

It’s a catchy name for a museum/art gallery/workshop, but, on the surface anyway, there’s a pretty mundane explanation.

Allen Christian’s early artistic efforts centered on bowling balls as a medium, carving them, painting them, and otherwise having a bit of fun with them.

That, he says, gave rise to the name of what is today, a quarter century later, an eclectic collection of human and other figures made out of just about anything, and called the House of Balls.

But, fortunately for us bottom-feeders, there is also a scatological bent to the label.  It signifies, he says, “the idea that we all possess the creative impulse and owe ourselves the balls to express it.”

Yes, it takes some balls to do what he does.

Located in the West Bank area, just a short light rail or bike/walk trip across the massive spaghetti pile of I-35W’s on and off ramps from downtown Minneapolis, the place is instantly likeable, at least for me.  It’s in a former gas station, after all.  What’s not to like?

The outside, with its large displays and open-air gallery and work areas just across the chain link fence from the Cedar Riverside train station, is itself well worth a visit.

And that’s almost all I got to see of the place!

I had not paid any attention to its hours of operation (Saturday afternoons) and I happened by on a Monday morning.  I called the phone number posted on the door and left a message.

I didn’t want to spend the day in Minneapolis waiting for a call back, so I headed north to Lake Itasca.  I wanted to revisit some of the places I had stopped at in 2003 when I paddled the Mississippi River.  Allen Christian called me back in the afternoon.  Turns out he has a real job on weekdays and wouldn’t be able to meet me at the museum for a tour until the weekend.

Bummer.  Even my loose traveling schedule wouldn’t allow me to spend the rest of the week near Minneapolis.

So we chatted a bit, trying to figure out a way to rendezvous and Allen came up with an incredibly generous solution.  He gave me the code to the keybox at the museum and told me to go there in the morning, let myself in and then call him so he could walk me through turning on the dozen or so light switches, some of them hidden in the artworks themselves, that would light up the rooms and operate the figures that were animated.

So I hustled back south to Minneapolis that evening and on Tuesday morning spent a couple hours poking about the place and taking photos.  Just getting all the lights turned on was a great adventure.

When I  finished my tour I retraced my steps and turned off all the lights, locked the place up again and called Allen to confirm I was leaving and to thank him for the hospitality.

My visit there included a pleasant phone encounter with a complete stranger who was kind enough to let me roam around his creations untethered for as long as I wished.  That and the fact that the photo below, which appears on the House of Balls facebook page, shows he is a fellow Carhenge visitor make him in my book a fast, albeit unmet, friend.

More photos are below.  I took a lot of them.  Hope you don’t get bored.  I didn’t.

I’ll cover a couple varieties of oldies but goodies in this post.

First the recycled gas station kind.  There were two recent finds, both of them the old sturdy stone structures that one can still find occasionally.

This first one, in rural Williston, Florida, seems to be a private residence, and the second, right in town, is a pizza restaurant. (Go here to see my complete collection of recycled stations)

And now to the human variety of oldies but goodies: high school classmates.

Yes, I have renewed contact with a bunch of them.  It began when I attended the 50th reunion back in 2012, continued with the 55th in 2017.

The occasion this year was a ‘mini-reunion’ up in The Villages of some of us who live in Florida.

I’m one of those who floated through the high school years totally oblivious of most socio-cultural clues and I saw no need to continue a relationship with someone just because we attended the same high school.

I knew that there was a core of classmates who stuck together and had been holding reunions every five years since graduation.  I had attended only one, the first, back in 1967, but I had always been on the mailing list and had occasionally made a small donation to further the cause.

So when the 50th came along I decided to go.  Call it curiosity or whatever.  It would at least make a nice road trip back to the Midwest.  The 50th was also sort of a big deal, tour of the high school, Friday night dinner prepared and served by some students, announcement of us at the Homecoming football game, Saturday dinner at a hotel, Sunday lunch at the sportsmans’ club, etc.  All the hoopla.

I was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere.  Informal, friendly, welcoming.  I’ve seen the stereotypical reunions as portrayed in the movies—the gathering of the in-crowd, the posturing, the posing and the exclusion—but there was none of that in real life.  (Perhaps I remain socially oblivious?)

Just a bunch of mostly Midwest oldies but goodies getting together to renew acquaintanceships with folks they hardly recognized.

I had borrowed a classmate’s yearbook for the 50th and scanned all the senior head shots to put together a small booklet to pass out at the reunion.  It was a big help to me in putting the now into some context with the then.

I remember standing in front of a mirror and holding up my senior photo next to my face and thinking, “nope.  I won’t recognize anyone.”  And with one exception I didn’t.

Below is the recent mini-reunion  in Florida.  That’s my tanned bald forehead sticking up at about one o’clock.

I found another pink elephant last week in a rambling road trip up to west central Florida.

It’s the mascot for an auto sales and repair shop in Inverness, but it could sure use an optometrist.

Or maybe just a front end alignment?

Go here for more about pink elephants.

Actually they have two, but until the other day I wasn’t sure they had any at all.

The only times I have seen hummingbirds is in flight, hovering or flitting about, legs tucked up tight and quite invisible.

But I saw one recently actually standing on a branch, dipping into the flowers that were within reach.  Lazy bastard, I thought at the time.

It turns out those legs aren’t of much use for anything BUT standing around, and occasionally moving sideways along a perch.  The feet aren’t built right and the legs are too far back on the body to make walking possible.

But the wings of these tiny beings…wow… with from 12 to 80 beats per second those things can propel the bird up to about 34 mph, with a cruising speed of about 25.  And distance?  Some of these things migrate yearly from North America to Central America, often straight across the Gulf of Mexico, twice a year!

With a rate of metabolism higher than any other temperature-regulating animal, the hummingbird is a sugar-utilizing machine. Sugars consumed power 100 per cent of their metabolic needs (in comparison, human athletes max out at around 30 per cent).

When resting at night, they go into what’s called torpor, a sort of hibernation, during which its metabolic rate falls to a fifteenth of normal.  But even at that reduced rate of metabolism a hummingbird will lose 10 per cent of its body weight overnight.  Now that’s a hell of a weight loss program.

With all the nectar-drinking activity you see, one would think hummingbirds eat nothing else.  Au contraire, they actually depend on insects.  They are carnivores.  The nectar is simply the fuel to power their insect-catching activity.  And they still find the time and energy to build a nest and mate, to say nothing of all that migrating.  Pretty damn busy creatures.

And speaking of drinking nectar, that long beak is not a straw.  Inside the bill is a long forked tongue, with flits out and back in, lapping up the liquid.  No, I do not have a photo illustrating that, just take my word for it.

Finally, thinking of taking someone’s word for it, I came across this sentence in my research:

“The hummingbird evolutionary tree shows ancestral hummingbirds splitting from insectivorous swifts and tree swifts about 42 million years ago, probably in Eurasia.”

Yeah, right.  I’m as much a believer in the various sciences as the next guy, but wow, how can someone actually say that with a straight face, as if we knew for sure?

I leave you with a couple of jokes.  If I don’t write them down I will forget them when I want to tell them to the grandkids next time I see them.

So why does a hummingbird hum?

Because he doesn’t know the words.

What do you get when you cross a hummingbird and a doorbell?

A humdinger.

Below are some of the photos that got me to thinking about all this.  They were feeding on the flowers of a nice aloe patch I have in the front yard, so I could shoot them from my chair WITHOUT USING MY LEGS!      (All Photos by Ron Haines)

Punxsutawney Phil and I met, sort of,  nearly a year ago. We didn’t actually speak to each other.

It was a chilly and drizzly June day and well after hours when I rolled into Punxsutawney, PA, so we just had to be content with eyeing each other through the glass of his off-season home,  Phil’s Burrow.  I can’t guarantee he opened his eye, but I did.

His burrow is inside the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club Headquarters in the library building.  His prognostication platform, Gobbler’s Knob, is on the outskirts of town.

As you all know, he appeared there just a few days ago for the 132nd time and saw his shadow.    Six more weeks of winter.  Sorry folks.

And for you Doubting Thomases out there, Phil is 100 per cent accurate.  It says so right there on the sign.

The tradition was brought to town by German settlers.    In the old country a hedgehog did the honors, but here they used a groundhog.   The first official Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney was celebrated in 1886 and the event has grown, with worldwide media coverage and tens of thousands descending on the some 6,000 permanent residents for several days of festivities.  In most other parts of the world, Feb. 2 is still Candelmas, the traditional Christian holy day.

On the second Groundhog Day, 1887, the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club declared the town to be the Weather Capital of the World, and announced that Phil’s full name is actually “Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinary.”

About those predictions…Wikipedia sums it up best I think: “The practices and lore of Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are predicated on a light-hearted suspension of disbelief by those involved.”

Taking a quick look at the official website confirms his acolytes have their tongues firmly in cheeks:

Here are some answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the holiday:

–Yes! Punxsutawney Phil is the only true weather forecasting groundhog. The others are just impostors.
–How often is Phil’s prediction correct? 100% of the time, of course!
–How many “Phils” have there been over the years? There has only been one Punxsutawney Phil. He has been making predictions for over 131 years! A groundhog’s life span is normally 6 to 8 years. Phil receives a drink of a magical punch every summer during the Annual Groundhog Picnic, which gives him 7 more years of life.

Leave it to the government to poke holes in our fantasies.  Here’s the assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, referring to a chart of Phil’s predictions:  “The table below gives a snapshot, by year since 1988, of whether Phil saw his shadow or not along with the corresponding monthly national average temperature departures for both February and March. The table shows no predictive skill for the groundhog.”

For those keeping track, Phil’s accuracy rate is 39 per cent, about the same as The Farmers’ Almanac and its rival, The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Phil has his imitators of course; a few of them get some regional or national press on Groundhog day and others are just local celebrities.  Other animals have also been pressed into duty.

The Phil folks aren’t worried though.  As groundhog.org webmaster Alan Freed puts it: “We’ll take ’em seriously just as soon as a major motion picture is created in their honor.”

(For the curious, Groundhog Day was mostly filmed in Woodstock, IL, not Punxutawney.)

Below are some views of Phil’s in-town home and his Groundhog Day stage, and an assortment of Punxutawney Phil statuary around town.  (Photos by Ron Haines)