The Urge to be Someplace Else

Warning:  Objects in your windshield may appear closer than they are. 

Windmill in the hills of southern Pennsylvania. To offer some perspective, the hub of this machine is as big as a bus.

This one evokes some nice feelings.  A pleasant country road running atop a ridge named Apple Pie because there used to live along there in a small cottage a kindly old woman who made great apple pies.

There’s an Apple Pie Ridge Road in Stephensen, Gainsboro, and Winchester VA; in Wellsburg WV, and in Alto and Baldwin, GA.  This one’s in Baldwin.

One of my favorite places to paddle in the Northeast is on the Swift River below the Quabbin Reservoir in Belchertown in central Massachusetts.   

I like it as much for the human-made river art along it as I do for its gentle current and narrow, twisty turns.

It’s not a long paddle.  Put in at Cold Spring Street and go upstream a few miles until you are stopped by the current, shallow water, blowdowns, or groups of fly fisherpersons and then paddle downstream to the dam and back up to the launch.  It’s a pleasant few hours.

Because the river comes out of the bottom of the deep and large Quabbin Reservoir the water is delightfully cold in the heat of the summer and relatively warm enough in the winter that most of it doesn’t freeze over—or so say some of my hardier Northeastern friends.

Three branches of the Swift used to course through the Swift River Valley, passing several small towns and joining up to become one river that emptied into the Ware River just north of Three Rivers, MA.  That all changed pretty drastically in the 1930s, when two dams were built, towns were moved and the valley flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir, Massachusetts’ biggest inland lake and a water source, through an aqueduct, for Boston and 40 of its suburbs 65 miles to the east.   Water in the Quabbin Aqueduct actually flows uphill for part of its route through natural siphoning action.

That changed the landscape!  The process took a long time.  It was first envisioned in 1893.  The work started in 1930, the damming was completed in 1939 and the valley finally filled with water in 1946.  Along the way, the politicians in Boston were happy, the Swift River Valley residents were unhappy, buildings and cemeteries were moved, and four towns–Greenwich, Prescott, Dana, and Enfield–ceased to exist.   

And 75 years later it all looks so natural and permanent, like nothing ever happened!  Except for some old roads that dead end at the water’s edge and the occasional basement cavity that wasn’t filled in.

But back to the point of this.  One or two of the households along the river enjoy yard art as much as I do and have the advantage of a river bank to use as a setting.  Here’s a collection of the pieces I have seen in my half-dozen times on the river.

This dragon was new to me this year…

…and so were these guys…

…and this collection.

The couple below has been around for a while. One year in the early spring when I floated by they were still covered with a tarp protecting them from the snow. That care has paid off. On the left as they appeared several years ago and on the right what they look like now. The paint job has held up well.

This dragonfly, however, has lost some of its wing fabric over the years.

Sadly, the folks below weren’t around in any form this year…

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.