The Urge to be Someplace Else

I saw this sign the other day on one of those nice lanes lined with multi-million-dollar homes on the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River in rural Newburgh, New York.

Unnoticed when I shot the photo, the word “ruffed” caught my eye immediately when I opened the image on the computer. 

“A clever sign marred by a misspelling,” I thought.  “Surely someone should have caught that error.”

I decided to check anyway.  Oops!  The sign’s right.  I’m wrong. And have been wrong for seven plus decades. I don’t think I’ve ever actually written it, but in my speech and thoughts it’s always been “ruffled.”

And I haven’t been the only one.  There is plenty of confusion out there.  A few examples below:

And online definitions don’t help much.  One says simply, “The difference between ruffed and ruffled is that ruffed is having a ruff while ruffled is having ruffles.”  As if that clears it up.

Ruffle as a noun generally implies a bunched-up fabric added to a piece of clothing.  As an adjective it can include messed-with hair or feathers, or even one’s feelings.

Ruff as a noun can mean anything from one of those Elizabethan collars to a ring of feathers or hair around the neck of a bird or mammal.

So if the ruff of a grouse is slightly askew, as may happen in a wind, for example, I suppose it could be called a ruffled ruffed grouse.

I’m done.  The bird, technically Bonasa umbellus, is called a ruffed grouse, but I’ll forever picture it ruffled.

This is about the finest example of a recycled gas station I have seen in all my years of searching them out in my travels.

Kitchen Cabinets and Design, Abingdon, VA.

It’s on a nice corner on Main Street in Abingdon, VA.  I stayed there two nights on my way back from Connecticut last week because I had a couple of on-line meetings to attend and needed a good wifi signal.

The motel I stayed at offered a second picture-perfect moment on my first evening there.  I was sitting outside with a couple newly-made acquaintances.  Amid bursts of sunshine it was raining off and on, but we were sheltered by the roof overhang.

All of a sudden there was a huge, brilliant rainbow above the valley below us, stretching across the horizon.  It was so big that I couldn’t get the whole the thing in the frame.  I even tried with the Iphone held horizontally (no, I don’t know how to do panoramic photos).  There were two of them, but the second was invisible to the naked eye and I saw it only when I enlarged the photo on my computer.

The rainbow faded and a half-hour later another one formed in the same spot, accompanied again by a second one, more visible this time.

So, while the rainbow viewing was perfect, the photos are not.  Sorry.   Hope you enjoyed the gas station.

This is the first rainbow we saw.  The faint one above it was not visible to the naked eye.

This is the second one.  It’s cousin was more visible to us this time.

The unpretentious Alpine Motel in Abingdon was a good choice.  The location atop a hill overlooking a valley and distant mountains was a perfect place to chill out. 

About every ten years I buy myself a new car, whether I need it or not.  And truthfully I don’t ABSOLUTELY need it. The old one usually has only 250,000 miles or so on it and runs just fine.

But it’s a darn nice, every-ten-year Christmas present to myself!

And where’s the awkwardness come in?   It’s that in-between time when I have two cars, the very adequate old paid-off one and the new one, loaded with nice new features, but also with years of debt.

It’s all mental:  That 2010 Honda is comfortable, runs well, could last another five years probably.  Why blow all that money and get into car payments again?

This will go on for a week or so.  One day I’ll be fine, the next day the doubts will be back.   Happens every ten years.  I’m getting used to it.  And then finally the old one is gone, the new one gets comfortable and I’m settled into it for a decade.

One thing that helps me get over this is to remember the bad times.

Like that day in deep southern Ohio a year or so ago when I managed to nurse my limping Honda off Route 32 into the small settlement of Wellston, founded of course by a man named Henry Wells.  The alternator had quit.

I would have to be towed, I knew, but I had the trailer and canoe with me. I don’t have towing coverage for it and I did not want to leave it sitting along the road, especially overnight.

Fortunately just across the road was the Homestead Country Market (Website and Facebook).  It’s a friendly-looking, Amish-oriented deli, bakery, fresh produce and general food store.

So I went in looking for help.  The Amish salegirls, reticent around this tall male stranger, quickly got me to the owner, Chris Hershberger.  Yes, he’d be happy to keep an eye on the trailer for me.  And he even offered to move it from the roadside to behind the store if needed for the night.

A tow truck was dispatched from the appropriately named Ron’s Garage and Wrecker Service in nearby, and larger, Jackson, Ohio.

Ron’s is a scruffy place,  a repair shop that doesn’t cater much to people who hang around for their cars.  No waiting area to speak of, just a largish interior office/dispatch space with some worn desks and chairs, lots of greasy overalls and random visitors, and not much in the way of smiles.

The situation reminded me a lot of Ethiopia, oddly enough.  I was the stranger, didn’t speak the language very well, and was mostly to be ignored.  The natives would carry on in their own way at their own speed regardless of what I said or did.  In the face of some early pessimism about even being able to get an alternator that day I made it clear I expected it to happen and for me to be on my way that afternoon.

And then, as I often did in Ethiopia I decided not to keep bugging them about it, but to just let them sort it out.  The hours rolled by, nothing much was said to me and not much seemed to be happening with my car beyond the initial diagnosis and dismantling.  Then, in the mid-afternoon, a delivery guy showed up with a cardboard box.  An hour later I was happily heading back to the Homestead Country Market to pick up the trailer and be on my way.

The second lousy time with an old car could have been far worse than it was.  The transmission on my 1999 Dodge Caravan failed at about 265,000 miles.  It happened in Manchester, CT, a few miles from my daughter’s house, and it delayed our departure to Florida by a couple days.

Just that afternoon, Sue and I and Jennifer and her family had returned from New Hampshire in that car.  Visions of all of us stranded on the Mass Pike somewhere were not very pleasant.

So, the occasional pang of guilt about replacing the old with the new is eased by the reality of getting stranded by an older car’s problems.

And I do like to travel…

The shade tobacco industry in central Connecticut continues to get smaller and smaller.

I’ve long known that the growing fields and the big red drying barns were disappearing, slowly being replaced by the housing complexes and industrial parks that are the urban sprawl of the Hartford area.

But the pace seems to be picking up.  Usually it’s a barn here or a field there, but last fall I noticed this large field of barns being reduced to orderly piles of old lumber.  And the for sale sign.

The planting and harvesting continues in the midst of the barn destruction but one day it’ll all be just a memory.

Go here for more about Connecticut shade tobacco.

This business on Walnut Street in Abiline, Texas, wasn’t open when I happened by a few years ago, so I just snapped a photo and filed it away so I could check it out later.

From the front and the windows it certainly looked like a regular hardware store, and I didn’t see any stock of bibles or biblical hardware on display, so I figured it was owned by someone who had decided to fuse their religious life with their business.

Not so at all. This 76-year-old business, now on only its third owner, was founded way back in 1944 by one Rufus Bible. 

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.