From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay

October 21 to October, 26, 2016—west coast of Florida

From the Keys we made a long haul to Sanibel island on the Gulf of Mexico. The island is famed for shell collecting because unlike other Gulf islands it has a long beach exposure running east to west and so, owing to the current, intercepts more artifacts from the sea. But there were more shell collectors than shells the two days we were there and the beach was pretty much picked over by the time we made the rounds. A pleasant, reasonably-priced RV camp called Periwinkle. (Diane and Preston had stayed here once before; people still talk about them.) There were lots of exotic birds in cages, and also a handful of captive lemurs. We found a place to hike in the nearby wildlife reserve, but it wasn’t a particularly appealing trail through the mangrove forest in the blazing sun. I eavesdropped on a guided tour to learn that the mangrove seed is the only seed that fertilizes while still hanging on the tree. From the fertilized seed it grows a six inch tube called a propagule, resembling the cigars from cigar trees of our region. Theses propagules fall off and can drift for as long as a year before being washed onto their ideal grounds for sprouting, a shaded sandbar in shallow water.

We headed up the coast after a couple days at Sanibel to a private campground on the Chassahowitzka river. Took a little bike ride around the area and ate onion rings at a dive bar. A couple guys came in accompanied by a trail of marijuana vapor and started getting rowdy after a couple beers. We can get that at home so we rode back to camp at dark. Brenda turned in early, I wound up getting in conversation with a guy playing guitar across camp, a pleasant, philosophical chap. We had a couple beers and a couple laughs. While we were talking a herd of something commenced to stirring up the underbrush. On the way back to the Scamp I discovered they were armadillos as they made their way blindly across the campground nosing around for ants and grubs.

 

Moved a little ways up the coast to Homosassa to a pleasant-enough camp by the Gulf shore. Unfortunately a guy was running a small loader to smooth some ground in the camp making a horrendous noise, especially the alarm that beeped when he went into reverse. He said he was going to be at it until sundown and start again in the morning so we left without checking in and drove to another campground which proved to be located in a median strip next to a truck stop so we passed that one by too. A little further up the road we chose Newport State Park which was much to our liking. We wound up staying two nights instead of the one we originally planned. There was a little fishing camp town down the road, St. Mark’s, where we had dinner and watched the workboats bringing in the catch. One boat had two square baskets, bushel-size, filled with stone crab claws. Took two men to lift each one. I am guessing that each basket held about $1,500 to $1,800 worth, retail. (The restaurant was selling a pound of claws for $35.) Workers immediately began sorting them by size and packing them on ice.

Next day we visited, a few miles away, Wakulla Springs, billing itself as the largest freshwater spring in the world, 600,000 gallons per minute flowing out of an underwater limestone cave system that is the largest in the US, 30+ miles. For less than ten bucks you get an hour’s ride around the springs on a little pontoon boat. The water is  crystal clear to ten or more feet and you see untold numbers and types of fish and many manatees. At least a dozen alligators nearby and many species of birds. Wakulla Springs is a state property now but was founded by Edward Ball as a, here we go again, resort for the rich. The splendid hotel he built is well-maintained by the state. He dynamited the river to deepen it so his buddies’ yachts could reach the springs from the Gulf and put a fence across the river so the undesirables would be kept at a distance. I asked the boat guide how Ball made his pile. He said that Ball’s sister had married a DuPont and her husband hired Ball to manage the Dupont investments. Something sounded familiar and after a few minutes I realized that the woman who married into the DuPont fortune was Jessie Ball who we learned about from all the memorials bearing her name around Reedville when we stayed there in late August. What a coincidence. Both Edward Ball and Jessie Ball DuPont were significant investors and philanthropists in the building of Miami and St. Augustine and are lionized in Florida history, along with Henry Flagler who built the railroad to Key West and is known as the father of Miami and Palm Beach. You can’t throw a stone anywhere in southeastern Florida without hitting something named after Henry Flagler. (Edward Ball is know as the father of one of the most violent labor disputes in American history, a years-long showdown with the railroad union that went on into the 1960s.)

In years past the guides of the various Florida spring boat tours, local African-American boat captains, developed unique, stylized recitations that they would deliver during the tour. If you do a little searching you will be charmed by the recordings. Google “Welcome to Rainbow Springs” and there is an example on youtube. Another is on the florida state archives and features a guide from Wakulla springs named Luke Smith. His son works as a guide at Wakulla currently, tho he was not our guide. Our guide, named Pat,  arrived at Wakulla by accident in the early 1950s, hitchhiking around the south as a teenager. He was captivated by the place, hung around till they gave him paying work, and never left. He was an entertaining guide altho, sadly, he repeated two entire stories during the trip. Finally, I should not fail to mention that some of the Weismuller Tarzan movies were filmed at Wakulla as were the water scenes in “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Nature and Culture, together in one place.

(This is the “black lagoon” from which the Creature emerged in the movie.)

Tom and Renee Ewart, old friends from Bushwood Mill past, live in Tallahassee and we met them for dinner at a midpoint between Tallahassee and Newport. It was a nice, old restaurant reminiscent of now-gone crabhouses of old St. Mary’s county. In a remarkable achievement Tom had managed to find the only dining place in Florida that didn’t serve alcohol. Way to go, Tom! Once again I was sorry that we had not planned our trip a little better so that we could have spent more time with our old friends. We certainly wouldn’t have minded another day’s stay at Newport–there were lots of inviting bike trails in the Big Bend nature reserve surrounding the camp—but we are coming up on a deadline to arrive in Albuquerque in a few weeks and have to maintain westward progress.

October 14 to October 21, 2016—Key Largo and Bahia Honda.

I had planned on staying in Flamingo, FL in the Everglades National Park. After some review we ditched that plan. The mosquitoes are still very much in season there (next month would have been better) and thanks to the hurricane some spots opened up in the state parks in the Keys.

We booked three nights in John Pennekamp Park in Key Largo. The camp is a very small part of what is a vast marine preserve of one the US’s largest coral reefs. A few miles north of the park you start to see those patches of emerald and blue water that you don’t  see elsewhere in the US. The keys, the thin islands that stretch from the end of mainland Florida to Key West, are unique environments not just in the US but in the world. Subtropical plants and animals mix with temperate climate species in a variety of habitats that are constructed on fossilized coral reefs, some of which are old enough to have developed something like soil. So you have two foot long emerald green iguanas not far from the only endangered pine forests in North America. (The iguanas were a frequent sighting but not so frequent that we could look away from them.)

We  bicycled mostly, as the water was uninviting—very turbulent with wind and filled with icky vegetation. We spent a few hours at Dabney Johnson Nature Preserve which had very well-thought-out signage with information about the peculiar flora of the area. The preserve is home to many national champion trees because this is the only place in the US where these Caribbean species will grow.) Looked forward to snorkeling, which I had only done once before (with Lucy in Puerto Rico) and found otherwordly, but the tours were canceled because of high winds. Ate Stone Crab claws, the crab from which the fishermen only harvest one claw and return the crab to the sea to grow another. Talk about a sustainable harvest. An excellent crab, make no mistake, but for the price, myeh.

Perhaps you heard of the Screwworm outbreak here? Our visit coincided with the beginning and hopefully the height of the disease outbreak. It is an aggressive fly-born disease thought to have been eradicated forty years ago. I’ll spare you the details of the screwworm biology but its main effect here is to threaten the 1,000 remaining individuals of the Key Deer population—a diminutive deer that roam some of the keys, strolling comfortably among humans without looking for a handout. We had to pull over at an agriculture department barricade, exiting the keys, because we had pets with us.

Took a day trip to the Everglades National Park, an amazing place. I guess I’ve been told my whole life that the Everglades is a vast, slow-moving river but it never registered. I thought it was a swamp. Really it is a Serengeti of water, fifty miles wide, flowing perceptibly slowly through a sea of grass and cypress islands. At one overlook the other visitor was an African, a Nigerian by my guess, and he was excited about the resemblance to the plains of his country,  saying he wouldn’t be surprised to see an elephant walking in the distance. In fact an elephant could walk on it as it flows only a few inches deep over a solid limestone base. This is also the only home of the American crocodile, living with the more common alligator. All kinds of cool environmental stuff going on here. Makes you want to blow up the Tamiami Canal, the Everglades Highway and the dike around Okeechobee. Of course then you could only get to the Everglades by boat.

 

 

 

We decided to push further down into the keys, as there were now openings at Bahia Honda state park. This is another ninety miles, maybe, south, and the now the water is really turning gem-like colors. Good swimming in crystal blue water, but not deep. Another place that made us glad we bought bikes (although we barely have room for them, having to store them in the trailer itself when we move) which made some remote beaches accessible to us. Saw a guy reel in a three foot shark on hook and line. Swam in waters only a few feet from pelicans. Snorkeling dives canceled here, too, because of winds. Drat.

Back in Pennekamp park in Key Largo we had gotten friendly with a couple who’s traveling situation was like ours. From Michigan, in their forties, they decided to take some time traveling the country in a small fiberglass egg-shaped trailer. In their case it was a Trillium, a product of a defunct Canadian company, very much like a Scamp. They had started in December, planning on doing a year’s travel, but were thinking of carrying on past December because things were going so well—he was able to continue contributing to the business he half-owns and he and his wife hadn’t murdered one another. There were very much like us. They differed in their younger age and their habit of doing strenuous exercise routines in the morning, but I try not to hold the conditions of people’s birth or their religious practices against them. We might  see them again in Albuquerque in December.

If I have one reservation about Florida it is that I am uncomfortable doing nothing here. Elsewhere I have no trouble sitting in a chair staring at what’s in front of me or reclining to look at the night sky. Here it seems somehow wrong. The environment here foments lassitude; when I am busy doing nothing I want to feel like I’ve earned the time or stolen it, not that it seems like the natural thing to do. Perhaps a bigger part of it is this: at home, a day of perfect temperature with a crystal blue sky and a warm gentle breeze is a day to savor; you take your time to enjoy doing whatever it is you are doing and feel like you have received a gift. In Florida almost every day is like this and feeling that you have received a special gift every day can tire you out after a week. There is an angst latitude somewhere north of Savannah, Georgia where I belong.

October 8 to October 14, 2016—South St. Lucie Lock, Stuart, Florida

We finished out our stay at the ACE lock facility here, after the hurricane hegira. A nice camp—small (nine sites), friendly and helpful staff, top notch infrastructure, interesting to watch the lock operations with pleasure yachts of all description flowing back to the Atlantic from their west coast hurricane refuges, and friendly neighbors.

 

Wildlife

Manatees enter the locks with boats. Several of them in front of our canalside residence one day, for hours . Big, fat, docile creatures, hippo-like. They loll around underwater slurping up food, not showing much ambition.  Brenda says the manatee is my spirit animal. You see their nostrils sticking up out of the water, or their broad backsides, or sometimes their rounded tailfin.

(the swirl of water is a manitee, you’ll have to trust me, and the boat is George’s.)

 

Exotic birds of every description are all about–ibises, spoonbills, egrets, herons of all varieties. They come streaming out of the mangrove forest in the early morning.

A dead alligator washed up. An eight-foot long, white, belly-up carcass, stinking to the heavens. The stench drove some boaters away from their boats until Park ranger Art came to tow it out into a cul de sac of the mangrove forest across the canal.

A number of small and large parks with trails within a few minutes drive. Atlantic Ridge Nature Preserve was a vast network that we sampled a few miles of. Their claim to fame is the periodic prescribed burning they do to mimic what would have happened in the area through the pre-human millennia. I think they might be overdoing it a bit. We did see some bobcat tracks but the preserve seemed rather devoid of life. We actually got locked in this park—the exit gate was padlocked when we tried to leave and had to make some phone calls to find someone to let us out. Still not sure why that happened. (Now that I think about it I am not sure they want people in this preserve. Besides being locked out, there were no signs, and the only available map was an indecipherable tangle of lines worse than the map of the Hudson River island I complained of in a previous post. Now that I think on it more,  I like the idea of a piece of land kept in its most natural state that would even go so far as to discourage humans from visiting it. If someone wants to bring a compass and supplies and climb a gate, they could come in.)

 

Bikes

We bought a couple  of single gear bikes off Craigslist, $30 each. We used them a lot exploring the area in two directions along the canal and surrounding farms. We’ll keep them at least until New Orleans next month, altho Brenda’s is a cute paisley-decorated orange Huffy that she is growing fond of. Huffy is a Chinese word meaning “sloppy welds,” I believe.

 

One place we biked to was on a shell trail east along the canal that ended after a few miles under the Florida turnpike. We found ourselves standing under massive concrete arches supporting a highway maybe seventy feet above. It started to rain and we were protected under the highway. Water running off from the highway bridge high above started pouring out of spouts located about every ten feet along each side of the bridge. It was an engineering and architectural marvel, water pouring down in even intervals amidst these soaring concrete columns, some falling onto the ground, most falling into the canal or the surrounding swampy area. It was an operatic setting, a Seven Wonders of the World setting.  One of my favorite places of the trip.

Neighbors

There are four boat slips for rent at the lock. George was at one in the catamaran he has called home for eleven years. He entered the canal the day before the hurricane was due to hit here, planning on getting further west, but a fuel pump went out before he got to the lock. He poled the boat into a mangrove swamp, put out four anchors, took the dinghy into a marina and sought shelter on land. He had slim hopes of seeing his boat again, unless it was to find it tossed up into the mengrove forest, but the storm took a favorable turn and his boat was intact. Took him five hours, he said, to get the anchors untangled from the mangrove roots and up and he broke a toe in the process.

Extremely nice guy, George. In his mid sixties, squeaking by on social security, leading a peripatetic life. He and his then-wife had built a trimaran in San Francisco when he worked there in the early 1970s. He sailed it east through the Panama Canal after the marriage. Just a few months ago he found the boat still afloat and being used by a family on the west coast of Florida. He was in Stuart picking up his traveling companion, Happy, for a repeat of their years-ago trip to the Bahamas. Brenda and Happy had a nice walk together and Brenda looked forward to spending time with her but she had to decamp to attend to some family matters. Happy was a real 1960s San Francisco free spirit, raising two kids in a van for many years until one of the kids said, “Mom, when people ask where we’re from what do we say?”  When I told George we were planning on going to Baja Mexico he made me a gift of a nice hardbound book of the Baja peninsula, with detailed coastal maps and histories of all the little towns along the way. A generous gift to an appreciative recipient.

We had drinks several evenings with Janice and Steve. They had a portable icemaker, the device which I most covet. A cold drink is a treat for us. They live on a twenty two foot motorboat and a 40 foot motor home. They don’t own a home on land, haven’t for six years. Somehow they have coordinated the movements of these two vessels to cover the country several times, mooring one or storing the other for extended periods, or taking them both somewhere. They coming project is “the Great Loop” by boat—up the intracoastal from Florida, up the Hudson, across the Erie Canal, across the Great Lakes to the Mississippi (via the Ohio?), around the Gulf back to the beginning. Their boat is a sharp-looking affair, fiberglass made to look like lapped wood, lots of teak.

 

(the rare two-headed Florida Sandhill Crane.)

 

 

 

 

 

October 3 to October 8, 2016—Gimme Shelter

 

So we made a fairly long drive down highway A1A to Stuart, Florida, which is just outside of Port St. Lucie on the maps. I had reserved two weeks at this campsite back in April because it was cheap, $15/night. It was cheap because it is a federal facility and comes under the national parks senior pass. South St. Lucie Lock is a flood control lock system run by the Army Corps of Engineers, built to control the height of water at Lake Okechobee about thirty miles west. It has nine really nice campsites, with concrete pads, covered picnic tables, fire rings, grill boxes, and water and electric connections at each site; nice bath house, everything super clean. We got one of the canalside spots and watch the yachts queuing up to enter the lock which lowers them to ocean level, five to twelve feet, depending on the lake depth. (Lake Okechobee itself is surrounded on three sides by a 143 mile long earthen dam which is rated as the second-most vulnerable water control structure in the US.)

We arrived on Monday, early afternoon. That night the National Hurricane Center revised its predictions to put us in the path of Hurricane Matthew. The Scamp could probably handle 40+ mph winds with some prudent lashing but we were facing the possibility of 150 mph winds arriving Thursday afternoon. As park ranger Art said, “Your trailer would be like a bowling ball.” The forecasters were holding out hope of a westerly turn of the storm, taking us out of the most dangerous zone but Matthew was being billed as a real monster with a wide reach. The other issue was traffic—the longer we waited for a more definite prediction the greater the risk that we would be caught up in a mass migration and be exposed to high winds stuck on a highway. We decided to bail on Tuesday, fewer than 24 hours after arriving. I talked to Art Robertson the park ranger and he made arrangements for us to transfer our stay to their Franklin lock facility on the other side of Lake Okechobee for three nights, no extra charge to us. On Tuesday we drove 150 miles around the Lake to Franklin Lock, about fifteen miles from the Gulf Coast near Ft. Myers.

On Wednesday the Hurricane Center predicted possible tropical storm force winds (50 mph) for the Franklin Lock area. I went to Tractor Supply and bought some cargo straps. Unfortunately the nearest sturdy object to lash to was about 18 feet away. I attached to a steel-in-concrete structure and tied the other end to the west side of the trailer frame which is where the strongest winds were expected to come from.  I hooked the trailer to the truck and moved the truck forward to pull the straps taught. The long distance of the strap made it less than ideal but I figured it might keep the Scamp from rising more than a foot off the ground on that side, or at least keep it from rolling into the canal  a few feet away (and where we had seen a humongous gator earlier in the day).

In the end the storm was late arriving Thursday night and where we were it packed a weak punch—maybe 30 mph gusts that made the cargo strap vibrate like a tuning fork but did not cause us concern.

The next day, Friday, dawned calm and beautiful and we talked with all the other refugees that had come in on Wednesday and Thursday, congratulating ourselves on weathering the typhoon. The storm had arrived later than expected and was moving slower than expected, so our return to st. Lucie lock had to be delayed another day. We drove the few miles to Pine island in the gulf and rented a space at an rv park there. We spent the afternoon a few miles away at the Randall Research Center. It is an archeological park encompassing what was once an Indian city the likes of which I never imagined existed in North America. The aboriginal inhabitants, the Calusa, built mounds of shell and sand thirty feet high and residences on top to escape the mosquitoes and catch the breeze. They built a similar mound on the outskirts of the city in which they buried their dead, and that mound had a terraced spiral around it–the Calusa would walk that trail to commune with their dead ancestors and seek advice. The Calusa built impressive canals throughout their city here, four feet deep and sixteen feet across. The artist rendering based on the accounts of early Spanish explorers suggests a large urban area looking like a cross between an Aztec city and Venice. The chief’s house was two stories tall and could house 2,000 people! The Calusa dominated a large part of Florida for a thousand years, and the site at Randall is thought to be their capital. The Calusa believed a person had three souls—the pupil of the eye was one, the person’s shadow and their reflection the other two. They made masks and carved decorative wooden objects that look to me like the work of northwestern tribes or inuit. Can you guess what happened to the Calusa? Weakened by European diseases their native American rivals, armed with rifles furnished by the British, finished them off in the 1700s. A group was said to have escaped to Cuba.

The Calusa were the first natives encountered by Ponce de Leon when he “discovered” “le florida.” The Calusa met them in the Gulf firing arrows from their canoes and drove de Leon’s ships away. Another conquistador named Hernando something came back a year later and they drove him off too. Then de Leon returned for a rematch. He lost again, with the Calusa not only driving his army away but fatally wounding de Leon himself—a poisoned arrow in the thigh. They took the Ponce to Puerto Rico where he succumbed to his wounds.

I mentioned the Ribault Club in Talbot Island. Just outside the Randall Center was a similar establishment dating to the 1920s, another playground for the rich of the era, the Tarpon Club. This one was still in business and serving gin and tonics, god bless them. We sat at a tiny bar with another couple in the late afternoon while the bartender told us the history of the place. The fellow next to us had just returned from Leonardtown MD of all places, doing some kind of hospital management work for Medstar. Worse than that when we returned to Pine Island KOA rv park, the employee I struck up a conversation with said he had lived in Country Lakes in Chaptico for ten years. AND he said that there was a couple in the park who winter there every year from LEONARDTOWN! Saints preserve us.

We went into St. James City for a restaurant meal, a rarity for us. I had what was described as a “crab cake” with sweet potato fries and Brenda had a fish taco. The place needs to change the grease in their fryers is all I can say. We sat outside and watched a manatee play with her pup.

September 28 to October 3, 2016—Tomoka

I hadn’t made a reservation anywhere for these few days because I was hoping to take Brenda to a hotel for her birthday. But the place I had in mind, an old hotel on the water in Jacksonville Beach, didn’t accept pets. Originally we thought that staying in hotels periodically would be a treat but it doesn’t really appeal to us now—would probably discombobulate the cats and a  hotel stay doesn’t really offer anything we don’t already have, at least not enough to justify the expense. Can’t remember what I did actually get for her birthday but whatever it was, or wasn’t, I’m sure she remembers.

Instead of the Casa Marina in Jax Beach we stayed a few days in Tomoka state park outside of Daytona Beach. Pretty much the same as the previously described camps—tropical jungle sea islands. We met some folks who had a troupe of dancing tropical birds (not with them) that had earned them an appearance on the TV show America’s Got Talent.

Below is a local artist’s homage to the Tomoka people, hidden deep in the park.

 

We drove to a couple of nearby attractions. One was what was said to be the largest live oak (“live oak” is the species name; it is the one you see Spanish moss hanging from) in Florida, 500 years old.

 

The other was the ruins of Bulow Plantation, a vast sugarcane plantation and sugar-making operation in the early 1800s. The operation was the largest and richest in northeast Florida—hundreds of acres of sugarcane, now grown over in native plants, and a major factory operation for crushing, reducing and solidifying the sugar. The young Jon Bulow that inherited the plantation while in his early twenties was lucky that he had a lot of African slaves nearby to help him keep it going. They chipped in with the cutting of the cane (and also the cultivation of his rice fields) and the decidedly arduous work of boiling it down to make sugar and molasses. Fortunately for young Bulow there were 200 such slaves living right nearby to help him establish and maintain one of the most celebrated plantation houses in the region. We’ve seen scores of magnificent plantation houses on our travels. My first impression used to be, “wow, what cool buildings with those massive columns and vast porches.” Now all I can see is plantation owners sitting on those verandas sipping cold drinks watching bandanna’d heads going up and down in the cotton or cane or tobacco fields, and all I can hear is the snap of a whip. Has someone written a book about all the impressive structures that never would have been built without slave labor?

In this region, southern coastal Georgia and very northeast coastal Florida, a favored building material, and road material, of early settlers was “tabby,” made by burning oyster shells to make lime and mixing it with sand, water, crushed oyster shell and ash. It is a basic concrete and some buildings constructed from it in the 18^th century still stand as historical sites. The name Tybee Island is thought to derive from a corruption of the word tabby. Bulow’s sugar factory was built from a similar material called cochina. It is basically a type of tabby that forms naturally in the ground over centuries. It can be cut from the ground in blocks which harden as they cure above ground.

Bulow, like his father, had decent relations with the local Seminole Indians. When the federal government waged war on the Seminoles in the 1830s, for failing to act submissive like the other Indians, the army arrived at Bulow plantation to make it a base for pursuing the Seminole. Bulow resisted the attempt, even firing a cannon at the approaching army, for which he was imprisoned for a short time in his own home. His reasoning was that if his plantation was militarized the Seminoles would destroy it. Sure enough, when the army left the Seminoles did just that, burning the wooden plantation house and surrounding slave quarters, and the sugar works. The cochina stone walls of the factory remain intact, as do some of the cochina foundation of some slave cabins.

(remains of Bulow sugar factory.)

I think I am correct in saying that the Seminoles were the only native people who were not beaten into submission by the US government, fighting a guerilla war from the everglades. The army lost thousands of soldiers trying to roust them out, failing. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition of New Orleans, where social clubs construct and parade in elaborate indian costumes, is said to derive from slaves who escaped Louisiana into the everglades and joined the Seminoles. There defiant anthems, with refrains like “we won’t bow down/not on the ground,” celebrate that association. If you have seen the tv series “Treme” that tradition is depicted. Years ago the Paribellos and I toured the museum of Mardi Gras indian costumes, in a modest  house in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Go out now and buy the Wild Tchoupitalous album of 1976, one of the greatest records of all time.

September 23 to September 28, 2016—Northeast Florida coast, Jekyll Island to Little Talbot

 

Another postscript regarding Jekyll Island. Before we left we made acquaintance with Jan and Mac, a really nice couple who invited us into their luxurious motor coach. (It had a refrigerator better than the one in my house.) We enjoyed talking with them, comparing notes about our lives and travels. They were one of many folks who winter over in Jekyll, October to spring. I’ll talk later about our adventures with hurricane Matthew but Jekyll Island came under mandatory evacuation orders during the storm, temporarily scattering the whole camp.

After Jekyll (which, in yet another postscript, is where the design of the Federal Reserve System was hashed out between government reps and the nation’s gazillionaires in a secret meeting) we made a series of short hops down the coast. Each place was interesting or strikingly beautiful in its own way.

First stop was just south of Cumberland Island National Seashore, on Amelia Island, Fort Frederick State Park. Amelia Island is a popular destination for people, with beaches, shopping, and the little town of Fernandina Beach. Fernandina Beach has Florida’s oldest bar which we couldn’t not visit. Had gin and tonics and a banana which we bought from a little guy who hangs around the bar playing harmonica and selling bananas. He played “Oh Susanna” and “Camptown Races.”

A freight train crept through the little town and had some kind of problem which caused it to have to back up and inch forward many times over the course of half an hour blocking traffic right in the center of town. It was kind of comical, people displaying different degrees of agitation or resignation.

One of Amelia Island’s claims is the only place to have flown under eight different flags. Even tho at least two of the flags were not actual countries (a pirate navy allied with the Mexican Government; an American militia) each flag had to be forcibly removed by the next guy with a different flag which I think makes each one valid as a legitimate occupation.

We toured Fort Frederick, a star-shaped affair; a massive brick castle, with thick walls and interesting architectural features found only in forts—crenellations and ramparts, giant gates, etc.

 

There was a uniformed Union army interpreter. He refused to get out of character so you had to pose your questions as if you were in the 1860s. He called General Sherman “Uncle Billy.” He was mildly informative but every time you asked a question he had a canned recitation that started somewhere far away from the point of inquiry and took a long time to get around to it. (“Where do you go the bathroom?” “My day starts at 6am as I rise from my canvas and rope bed, put on my workday uniform made of wool from….”) Press ‘start’ to hear narration again.

The waters from Cumberland inlet meet the ocean here and the currents are strong and treacherous. I went into the water a little ways to cool off and, floating, started drifting at a fast clip. I found a coprolite on the shore. That’s fossilized poop to you.

When we were in Acadia NP in Maine, I called Brenda to look at a weird phenomenon—just after sunset bright little points of light were scattered in the nearby trees. I thought it was some kind of lightning bug that didn’t blink. Turned out to be some asshole with a laser light contraption attached to his monster RV that scattered pinpoints of bright green light all over the freaking place. He was very pleased that he had tricked us and laughed with this high “tee-hee” at every opportunity. He said he saw this contraption somewhere and “just had to have one.” Nature isn’t good enough by itself for some people. Anyway, the guy next to our campsite in Fort Frederick had the same bloody light gizmo and I swear he had the same pervert laugh. People kept stopping by his site expressing wonder and admiration at the obnoxious display. Get me out of here.

A little southern Gothic scene occurred at Florida’s oldest bar. A guy in his late thirties wearing the white linens of a restaurant cook comes into the bar and orders a double shot of tequila, downs it looking over his shoulder. Suddenly asks the bartender, sotto voce, for a non-alcoholic drink to go, “a soda or something.” Bartender serves it up as an older woman (his mother?) comes over to the guy in white and says, “what are you doing here?” “Just getting a cold drink to go.” They leave, the woman returns thirty seconds later and asks the bartender “what did he have?” Bartender answers truthfully, “a tequila and a coke.” Woman nods, looks around the bar thoughtfully and leaves. Several possible interpretations.

After a few days here we moved an hour down the coast to Talbot Island State Park. I had reserved a site on the edge of the camp that looked out over the grassy estuary that flooded twice daily with the tide. When I booked the site the description warned that this particular site was vulnerable to flooding if the tide was particularly high but it never rose that much and made for a beautiful place to camp.

 

 

We did all the trails, walked miles on the beach, rented bikes for a day and visited nearby inlets and rode on the beach. At one point a storm threatened and even tho it didn’t hit us a single bolt of lightning struck close and unexpectedly, so close that we could smell burning in the air for minutes. Brenda was outside and I was inside at the time. I came out half-expecting to find her on the ground. She was shaken but okay and thought I took too long to come out to investigate. The debate over exactly how much time transpired will go on forever, I fear. I might have taken a moment to gather my thoughts on what emergency actions might be called for, seconds at most. It isn’t like I continued making sandwiches.

Exotic birds of all kinds, always one within sight. Palms of various kinds and heights dominate the woods interspersed with towering pines.

We spent part of a day at the Ribault Club, a few miles down the road. It was a club, an exclusive Jekyll Island type resort in the 1920s that didn’t survive the Great Crash. After several changes of hands it became state property and a historical park with miles of trails, which is why we went. The original clubowner, some northern industrialist, had built and maintained a large golf course. The sand traps were already there, all he had to do was clear a bunch of palms and pipe water all over the damn place to keep up the greens. Money was no object. You can still detect the outlines of the course and the waterworks. The park hosts a large colony of gopher tortoises, the Florida state reptile.

Interesting fellows, the size and shape of a GI helmet, they excavate and live in deep burrows with many side passages. Something like 300 other species (insects, rabbits, snakes, squirrels, other reptiles) make use of these burrows for their own purposes–storing food, I imagine, getting out of the weather, trysts.

 

The original occupants of northeast Florida, the Timucua, had a principle village where the Ribault Club stands. By accounts they were statuesque, peaceable, into decoration and dancing. The only thing missing was Christianity, apparently. The Spanish bought them diseases which reduced their numbers over the course of the 16^th century from 200,000 to 50,000. By 1700 there were a thousand Timucua and then there were none. Everywhere we have traveled there is a similar demoralizing tale to be told. The decimation of the first peoples seems to be the common thread running through our trip, I’m sorry to say.

August 23 to September 22, Bushwood, Buena Vista, Blue Ridge

 

We had decided to stay in the east to attend an old-time music festival in Virginia. After some deliberation we decided to make a dash home to Bushwood to air the house. The hot humid summer was taking its toll on the shuttered house, we feared, and we weren’t far wrong. Some of the woodwork had a coating of mildew that would hot have improved with time, and a couple of bushes were asserting themselves into the crevices of the abode. We wiped down the tabletops and bookshelves, hacked the greenery into submission, slept in spacious accommodations, watched TV, ate at Quades, went to Bill Longley’s funeral, touched base with the neighborhood, did some truck maintenance. I was reluctant to return home and add an asterisk to our future claims of having travelled for a year in the Scamp but home ownership has its responsibilities. Now there’ll be a footnote in the record book.

 

Bill Longley passed the day we arrived back in Bushwood. He was a well-respected guitarist and a member of the Piney Point Playboys, the cajun band with Annie Jean, Brenda and Bernice. Bill came to our house most Sunday mornings for rehearsal. He was a steady and lively guitar player and the most authentic-sounding interpreter of old country songs. RIP brother Bill.

After a few days we headed out again, stopping outside Crozet VA for the night after tiring of driving. After setting up camp I realized that we were only a few miles from the home of some old friends. It was too late to get together and we had a nice talk on the phone but I regret not having figured out earlier that we would be in the vicinity. Sorry Chip & Angie. These are folks Brenda and I each knew through a separate set of contacts years before we met one another, when we were teenagers. It’s a small world and for some of us it was even smaller circa 1970 in the greater DC area.

We arrived in Buena Vista VA on Wednesday to stake out a good spot for the music festival that was to begin on Friday. Half the attendees had the same idea so for all intents and purposes the festival began two days early. Ultimately there were probably over 200 campsites at the festival—tents, RVs, trailers—with more than twice that in attendance, I am guessing. Starting in the evening they played into the small hours. Start walking around and a group is playing “Soldier’s Joy,” walk fifteen steps and a different ensemble is playing “Flop-eared Mule,” and a little further on a tune you never heard. I said “starting in the evening” because during the day the temperature hit a hundred degrees and few felt like holding a fiddle under the chin or an instrument next to the body. I had been here once before, Brenda had attended 4 or 5 times, and the days then were as music-filled as the evenings, but this heat wave stifled the desire to play. We had our group of friends in a little tent-trailer compound with overhead cover and the weekend went by pleasantly, getting up every few minutes to chase the shade around or refill a cup.

 

When others were away at workshops or otherwise occupied Lucy and I drained the meltwater out of the ice chests into buckets and soaked our feet in the cold, cooling our heels. We learned you can get something like brain-freeze in your feet.

Things broke up Sunday but Brenda and I decided to stay in place for another night. Of course the weather broke the next day and the park became pleasant. It really is a pretty setting in Glen Maury Park in Buena Vista, alongside the Maury River a few miles before it joins the James, just below the Blue Ridge Parkway.

 

A few other folks stayed into Monday also, enough to get up a decent jam Monday night. One of them was Mississippi fiddler Harry Bolick who recently discovered a raft of documents from WPA researchers about fiddlers in his region. He was traveling around with a supply of the book he wrote as a result, Mississippi Fiddle Tunes of the 1930s, published by University of Mississippi Press. Speaking of that era, I had conversation with the fellow camped next to us in his RV, Skip Ashby. He leads an old-time band that his father started in the late 1930s called the Free State Ramblers. The band is one of the oldest non-institutional bands of any kind to be in continuous operation for over 80 years. Nice guy—we talked about the declining state of the natural world and other uplifting subjects. He lives in Virginia and we discovered a mutual connection, Steve Hickman.

Another guy I met at the festival had detoured off the Appalachian Trail, nine miles away, to take a break from his trek to Georgia. I saw him on Sunday hiking out and gave him a lift to the trailhead while he told me stories from the trail. At the trailhead another kid approached me and offered me five dollars to give him a lift to some town whose name I forget; he and his buddies had taken a kayak trip down the James and somebody had to go back and get the truck. I gave him a lift, declining the fiver. He grew up in the area and though we were only fifteen miles from Buena Vista he said he had never been there. “Never had a reason to go there I guess,” he said when I expressed surprise. Fair enough.

Our next destination was a campsite on the grounds of the Mt. Airy, NC fairgrounds. We hadn’t counted on there being a fair that night. The campsite was right at the entrance to the fairgrounds and promised a long night of traffic noise and dust. We chose to go to a private campground which was a sterile, barren drag of a place, ‘nuff said. We went into Mt Airy which has taken advantage of being Andy Griffith’s birthplace and has fashioned itself into a makeshift Mayberry—recreations of Floyd’s barber shop, a museum of Andy Griffith Show memorabilia, an old police car, a general devotion to some kind of imaginary time and place. I give them some credit for trying, but you can’t escape the idea that you are in a town that has recreated itself in the image of a fictional TV show for no other reason except that its main actor was born there ad the setting of the show was piedmont NC.

Stayed a few days in a pleasant state park in the sandhills region of South Carolina, just outside Columbia, SC. South Carolina gave up the confederate flag relatively early (put it up in 1962 and took it off government grounds in the 1990s) and has avoided the ugly confrontations and conservative backlashes that other southern states still succumb to. The state museum in Columbia even managed to portray Sherman’s destruction of that city and the civil war generally in a matter-of-fact way, without innuendo or code talk. My museum would have been harder on Sherman than their state museum. Good hiking around the lake at Sesquicentennial State Park,

 

and you can fall asleep to the sound of machine gun fire from the neighboring Fort Jackson.

A long drive along the backroads to Savannah GA and one of our favorite campgrounds to date, Skidaway Island State Park. Spacious campsite on a sea island; palmetto trees and massive live oaks heavily draped with Spanish moss with epiphyte ferns sprouting from the branches and cavities. (“the trees were festuned with Spanish guitars and epiphones.”). We stayed here five nights, enjoying the variety of hiking trails and environments. The sea islands are sandy prominences in a vast plain of low grasses that flood twice daily to a depth of a few inches–the savannas of Savannah. We took trips into Savannah and Tybee island, old haunts of ours, from the time when Zach went to college here, which we loved revisiting.

 

One crosses Moon River en route to Skidaway Island, and I was excited to see a bit of Americana—obviously this would be the Moon River that Savannah native Johnny Mercer wrote of when he lent the words to Henry Mancini for the tune by that name. But no, it is another Mayberry. The city of Savannah renamed the inlet Moon River in honor of Mercer, post mortem. Another simulacra.

We were sorry to leave Skidaway for Jekyll Island, 90 minutes further down the coast. The natural environment here in Jekyll is similar to Skidaway, but the campsites are very close together and the feel is less wilderness and more geezer camp. Jekyll island, famous as the playground of the robber barons of America’s gilded age, is now a state-owned property but the state leases out everything to predatory vendors. Even as campers we had to pay $6 to get on the island and have to pay that again if we decide to go off-island to get some fairly-priced food or other commodities. It does have a nice bike trail that goes around and through the island, and we rented bikes yesterday to take advantage of it. And there is ocean access, altho it is the least inviting iteration of the Atlantic I’ve ever seen—too warm, kind of muddy looking, shallow waves. We did have a nice long walk on a deserted beach at the south end, and saw unusual, to us, shore birds including a large flock of black skimmers. Huge shrimp trawlers ply the waters just offshore here, a half dozen at a time. In all, I would have preferred staying in Skidaway for another week. Trodding where the Rockefellers and Goulds have trod doesn’t do it for me.P

 

 

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Postscript 9/22

I didn’t do Jekyll Island justice. We took a couple of walks along two beaches that were broad and beautiful and deserted. We were the sole posessors of miles of beach. One is the at the south end called Glory Beach (another instance in which a place was renamed to commemorate a fiction; this beach was named after the movie “Glory” some of which was shot on this beach) and the other is Driftwood Beach which we hiked to via the fishing pier at the north end of the island. No people, no houses, no signs of civilization except the sight of St. Simon Island to the north and the shrimp boats.

 

 

 

August 13 to August 28, Outer Banks and Tidewater Virginia

We had a classic beach experience. Fourteen people in the oceanfront house, family and friends, doing the time-honored rotation—house to ocean to umbrella shade to ocean to house; the occasional trips out to shell shops, beer stores, and local attractions; trying to wrangle a consensus for dinner. A week of sun and surf,  playing with the grandkids Clementine and Tavish.

Got some work done on the trailer and truck. While getting the trailer’s wheel-bearings repacked the mechanic called my attention to one of the tires which was dangerously worn on the inside, near to coming apart. Brenda had read me some horror stories from the Scamp-owners forum of tires delaminating on the highway. Frequently the tire comes apart and rips through the wheel well and tears apart the electrical, plumbing, and gas connections that come together there. We were lucky to have caught the problem, and I was lucky to find a guy who had the right size tires in stock and made time to mount them. He also had to be the looniest mechanic in the Outer Banks, jabbering nonstop about everything and nothing; absolutely starkers.

I have to remark on how unbelievably clear the water was in Nags Head. In water that came up to my chin I could see the ocean floor in perfect detail. I have been coming to these beaches since I was a kid and have never seen the ocean so transparent. Also, it was teeming with fish, seemingly-endless flows of minnows and foot-long fish (herring? mackerel?) the whole week we were there. I have never seen any aquatic resource get better over time before this. A fluke of the sea.

Everyone else headed north to Maryland or airports at the end of the week; we went west a little ways to a campground in Rocky Hock, NC on the Albemarle Peninsula. A quiet spot near a little lake with a white and a black goose. One of our cats had an eye infection or irritation from a piece of sand so we took a trip to a nearby vet who was very accommodating. The campground was near Edenton, NC which is quite an attractive place, a sort of small-scale Charleston. Edenton was founded in the 1600s by adventurers from the Jamestown settlement, and was, for several decades, the colonial capital of the Carolinas. Its heyday was in the mid-19^th century when the rail line allowed the town to capitalize on its seafood and its cotton mills. Fabulous mansions were built by the town’s many notable citizens, and scores of them still stand downtown, some for sale in the two million-plus range. Near the old cotton mill are a couple blocks of identical one-story mill-worker dwellings, some looking unchanged since they were abandoned in the 1950s, some gussied-up and selling for $200,000+. We knew nothing about Edenton before visiting so it was a pleasant surprise to find it such an inviting town to walk around. (If you go, don’t be tempted by the drugstore that advertises freshly-made lemonade and orangeade—they both taste like sugar.) Driving out after a three day stay, in nearby Southhampton, VA we saw historical markers noting the rise and fall of Nat Turner whose turn on the stage played out here in the 1830s. Since then, in just the last week, I have heard a lot about Turner—press about a new movie, and a bit in the New Yorker in connection with the African-American Museum on the mall. This must be Nat’s year. I remember reading Styron’s book The Confessions of Nat Turner when I was a kid and it might be time  for a second look at that.

We drove north, and west a little, to Mount Medoc State Park which sits on the edge of the piedmont where it falls off to the coastal plain. Mount Medoc is not much of a mountain, barely even a hill at 325 feet. The park thinks they sidestep the issue by claiming that it was once a mountain in the distant geological past. By that reasoning you could call it anything—Vast Inland Sea of Medoc; Medoc, Center of the Supercontinent Pangea.

A well-kept camp facility, really nice trails through the woods, up the “mountain,” along the river. The wooded trails were draped everywhere with spider webs; it’s that time of year. Brenda made me walk point to intercept all the webs. I walked along swinging a stick up and down in front of me, and Brenda did the same just in case I missed one. We must have looked like a couple of medieval penitents on a pilgrimage through the forest.

Shortly after we arrived in camp the local state police officer assigned to the park came by. He assured us he would be on the job, coming by every hour or so to cruise the park. He gave me a piece of paper with his emergency number in 3 inch high letters. I thought, “Geez, quite a security presence here.” Next evening Brenda and I got to wondering why, for the second day,  we were the only ones in the large campground. Connecting this with the police presence I wondered if there hadn’t been a recent spate of murders in the park, or maybe it bordered a prison or something. Brenda checked online and found a possible explanation—BIGFOOT HAD BEEN SIGHTED HERE WITHIN THE PAST FEW WEEKS! It was a statewide news story, complete with accounts from frightened townspeople who saw “something cross the road” or who had lost a cat recently. A local man took casts of large footprints found on the very trail we had just hiked. I couldn’t help but look around every few minutes for large lumbering hairy beasts. Here is my haiku “Mount Medoc Yeti”:

Bigfoot sighting here

And even though I don’t believe

I look, half-hoping.

 

A local man had established a “museum of cryptozoology” in his home to document the bigfoot sightings that had occurred in the region in recent years. He was, in fact, the guy who found the footprint in the park. The “museum” was just a collection of odds and ends of unremarkable artifacts and framed newsprint. The cast of the footprint found in Medoc was unrecognizable as a foot, sasquatch or otherwise; he might as well have, and indeed may have, poured plaster of paris in a Kroger bag. (Kroger is a supermarket chain found in the south and the Midwest. A guy I knew from West Virginia said a paper shopping bag from Kroger was “West Virginia Samsonite.”) Interestingly the curator of the museum was a seemingly-sane and engaging guy who only moved to North Carolina a few years earlier, after retiring as a writer for the New York Daily News. I don’t recall anything he said as revealing that he actually believes in Bigfoot; Brenda thinks he is taking advantage of peoples’ interest in paranormal things to make a few bucks. The museum in Littleton NC is free, altho you feel obligated to make a donation. Call the guy up and he will invite you over to see it.

We made the perilous descent from Mount Medoc and took up residence in Jamestown Virginia at a county park called Chickahominy River. Since coming back into the states almost a month ago the heat has been extreme and debilitating, and the further south we went the more humid. We wondered if it had been this hot when we were kids and just didn’t notice. I did some cursory research that wouldn’t stand up under peer review and found the following: in every year of the 1960s the average temperature in Washington DC was in the low to mid 80s for the month of August. The maximum temperature in August for eight years of the decade was at or below 90. In 1965 and 1968 the maximum temperature was 95. In August of 2015 and 2016 the average temperature was 92 and the maximum 101.

We visited the state-run Jamestown site. The National Park Service has a park at the original site of the settlement but it is almost all outdoors and it was too hot to go there. The state-run site is extensive, with a 20 minute movie, a fairly-interesting museum that took an hour to go through, and life-size recreations of the ships, the fort, and an Indian village, peopled by costumed interpreters with accents and accoutrements of varying degrees of accuracy. (“Hey Powhatan, where do you buy your eyeglasses?”) I was curious how the displays would handle the recently-discovered (2013) evidence of cannibalism among the first settlers and the movie did cop to it with a brief reference.

After a few days along the fetid Chickahominy we went to VA on the Chesapeake at the mouth of the Potomac. I had long been curious about this area, home to Omega Protein, the perpetrator of genocide against the Bay’s menhaden population. The campground, Chesapeake Bay RV Camp Resort (another campground almost entirely to ourselves) was in a piney wood by an inlet of the Bay about ten miles from Reedville. The camp is on a downhill slide—the founders are aged and the kids are incapable or uninterested. It was okay by our standards but unless somebody gets motivated this place is going to be overrun by weeds and spiders come spring. There are some vicious screeds on Yelp about this place that make for good reading, along with an equal number of less-interesting entries that are positive.

Historical markers of the area are uninteresting for the most part. George Washington’s mother came from here, Northumberland County. Jessie Ball is a favorite daughter with a roadside marker noting her birthplace, a small national historical site of a schoolhouse where she was a teacher and principal, and a roadway named in her honor. She was famous for marrying Alfred Dupont and spending some of his umpty-ump millions on charitable works. You might not be able to buy your way into heaven but you can spend your way into the consciousness of Virginians.

 

Reedville has a watermen’s museum that was closed during our stay, a couple of restaurants, a handful of 19^th century homes worth the restoration they have received. The whole Northern Neck of Virginia, between the Rappahanock and Potomac Rivers, is a pleasant landscape of hills, farms, river- and bay-side views. It is sparsely-populated, possessing a handful of small towns, notable manses, and historic sites. Most of it is played-out farm fields, reduced to sand through centuries of tobacco farming. The area seems something other than southern even tho the region’s glory days were allowed by plantation economy. I suspect that the Northern Neck is still peopled by descendants of early settlers.

The pleasure of traveling as we have is spending time in places and regions that, in previous travels, we had just blown through en-route to someplace else. To have the time to soak up the atmosphere of Kentucky, the various ecozones of North Carolina, Tidewater Virginia, rural Ohio, has been enjoyable and enlightening. Some ideas I have long held about certain places and peoples were little more than caricatures or stereotypes based on scanty information; with the addition of each additional detail gleaned from actually being in a place I feel a little more connected and sympathetic to that place. So don’t you go bad-mouthing Lenoir City, Tennessee around me, you hear.

August 5 to August 13, 2016—A Layover in Tennessee;  Western and Piedmont North Carolina

 

It is a neat sight, coming southbound downhill on Interstate 75 and seeing the hills of Tennessee framed in the distance through a cut in the Kentucky stone lining he highway. We are making a quick run through Tennessee on this leg. We might return in the fall but on this pass we only had time for two nights.

 

En route to our camp we took a detour at the urging of a mandolin player we had met in Berea to see Cumberland Falls. It was only twenty-some miles out of the way, but a long twenty miles. I could barely go fifteen miles an hour the whole way the road was so tortured. The front wheels of my truck were entering a right turn hairpin curve before the trailer tires had come out of a left turn hairpin. Our informant got my attention by calling Cumberland Falls “the Niagara of the South.” Indeed, the falls are widely known by that moniker. Who could resist.

The Niagara of the South is to Niagara Falls as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania is to the Grand Canyon. The falls are  seventy five feet across and seventy five feet down. The remarkable thing about the falls, which we could not witness, is that under the right conditions the full moon will produce a rainbow in its mists. It is said to be the only waterfall in the western hemisphere that produces such a “moonbow.” Now that is some bragging rights and might be worth a detour when the astronomical details align. Actually we were glad to have visited there, making a lunch and leaving the cats in the trailer while we took a walk around.

 

Arrived at our camp in Milton Hills Dam outside of Knoxville, TN. Another on-the-cheap campsite, on land owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority (and bordering the Oak Ridge National Research Center where they play fast and hopefully not loose with every form of matter and energy). The camp is built around one of the TVA hydroelectric dams on the Clinch River, a relatively small dam built in 1960. Talk about a social engineering project, the TVA takes the prize. It was a concerted effort to not only bring electricity to an impoverished region but an overhaul of agriculture and manufacturing practices. A massive federal project started in the 1930s and still going on. I want to hear candidates for national office in an hours-long debate in which the TVA is the only topic of discussion. The damming of the rivers for hydroelectric power displaced some 15,000 people and presumably disrupted natural biological flows. Was it worth it? “Who can say?” if I may quote the estimable Mr. Hines.

We spent a day in Knoxville. I had passed through here in January of this year, arriving late at night on a weekday and found it deserted and dead (although I did have a genteel conversation in a bar with a high school latin teacher waiting for his wife. I managed on that occasion to dredge up a Latin joke he hadn’t heard before. It would take too long to tell and really isn’t funny at all, but ask me about it next time I see you if you care. It really isn’t funny.) On this occasion, a Saturday morning, Knoxville was popping. There was a huge farmers’ market in the town square—scores of vendors offering beautiful produce, baked goods, etc, (free samples of peach slices I relished until I imagined Brenda saying “They didn’t advertise lunch.”) and an entertaining sampling of buskers, including a nose flute player. Crowds were flowing in and out of little shops and restaurants. Brenda bought a backpack. We took in that scene for a while, walked to other parts of town, and down to the site of the 1982 Knoxville World’s Fair. The Sunsphere was the symbol of that event which had Energy as its theme. Knoxville is nicknamed Scruffy City. I thought this was an old appellation used by truckers but it only started in the 1980s when a national newspaper reporting on the idea of a world’s fair in Knoxville called the town “scruffy.” The town adopted it as a badge of honor. Scruffy City Hall is a nice bar where you might have the chance to talk to a latin teacher, or a place to avoid for the same reason.

 

It has been grotesquely hot and humid since Ohio; makes everything a drag and even in the mountains of Tennessee we were affected. Stayed in the shade of the camper and watched the comings and goings of locals in the campground. A girl recognized a guy from high school. An old woman berated her 40ish mentally feeble son. Not what I signed up for but the day passed and we headed east.

Stayed at a fairly luxe RV park outside of Ashville after the harrowing trip through the Smoky Mountains. Actually we were driving the dividing line between the Smokies and the Alleghany mountains—all Appalachian to me. The Smokies are smoky looking, owing to the mists and fogs that are always shifting around between valley and summit. Magical to look at if you can take your eyes off the road for a second which you can’t towing a trailer.

Took advantage of the park’s pool the first night and explored Asheville the next two days. Spent a  day at the North Carolina Arboretum and took a long, grueling hike after looking at the extensive displays. Came back to the camper and checked on the cats, showered, then went back into town. An outside jam at a small funky bar in West Asheville (WesAsh? WAsh?) which I would have liked if one of the half dozen players had invited Brenda to join in. She had her fiddle case sitting in plain sight on our table not twelve feet from the circle of players but after an hour not one of the musicians had reached out. Brenda would have fit in fine and maybe even have taught them a thing or two. In consolation we had a nice conversation with a couple at the next table who lived in NYC in a neighborhood I know well near St. John’s cathedral. After a while they said they were going to a contra dance and we followed them there. It was in an on old industrial part of the city, a big space with a tacqueria and a bar. Danced a few dances with the other hundred-or-so dancers in the cavernous hot space, had some delish tacos and couple locally-brewed pints, watched some Olympic action, had a nice chat with the bartender. All-in-all a first rate day excepting the lack of courtesy of the local old-time jammers.

Next day we walked all over Asheville’s downtown and spent the evening at an Irish bar featuring a local cajun/zydeco band. (On the steet I spotted the faded remains of a painted NuGrape soda ad on the exterior of a building; a special treat for me. Do yourself a favor and google the NuGrape Twins singing a weird jingle for the product circa 1930.) The evening was made special  by some old guys and gals who knew how to two-step to the music. One guy had alligator boots that must have stuck  out a good six inches from his toes, coming to a spectacular point, the kind that can kill cockroaches in corners. I still don’t get the dance step but they looked cool doing it.

There seems to be trouble brewing in Asheville. It has grown faster than St Mary’s county in recent years and the newcomers are driving up the cost of living space and the bohemian-types are having to relocate to smaller surrounding towns.

 

From Asheville we descended into the piedmont region of North Carolina. We took advantage of a cheap campsite at the NC State Fairgrounds in Raleigh. An unremarkable camp with no shade, but the cool thing is we had the run of the fairgrounds which were empty of people. (I recognize this is the second time I have mentioned being enamoured of a place because it lacked humans.) The cop who oversees the place gave me a tour of the whole complex, driving me around the grounds in his police cruiser. We (Brenda and I, that is, not the cop and I, tho we had become close) used the showers in the equestrian section of the fairgrounds.  I don’t think Maryland’s state fair can compare to this –stables to house over 300 horses individually, a huge open arena for jumping and cantering or whatever horses do in contests, and an equally huge covered arena for same. It was a strange and beautiful space to wander around it in silence.

Three or four hours then to Nags Head, NC. We were to meet up with our children and their spouses and their children AND our friends and neighbors Donald and Lucy and their children and their respective mates and proto-children, at an oceanfront house. We are giddy at the prospect.

August 1 to August 5, 2016—”Berea, I Just Met a Town called Berea”

From Cincinnati our destination was Berea, Kentucky, just because it was the right driving distance, I had heard of the town, and the campground was $10/night cheaper than elsewhere. In hindsight we should have stayed in Lexington, KY as we wound up driving there two nights, 40 minutes away.

The first night we went to Lexington so Brenda could play with an old time mountain music jam. It was worth the trip—a small gathering of nice people who gather every week in a bicycle repair shop/café in the North Limestone neighborhood of Lexington.( I saw the neighborhood  referred to more than once as NoLi and, honestly, this practice needs to stop. SoHo in NYC and London is SOuth of HOuston Street, and Tribeca in NYC is the TRIangle BElow CAnal Street—these are ancient and longstanding shorthand references and should be honored, but every berg on the planet is turning neighborhoods into these types of abbreviations and it has gotten old. We have time to say “South Limestone” or “North of Massachusetts Avenue,” don’t we?) I was quite impressed how Brenda handled herself with the jam group– jumping in, starting a song, even teaching them a number (Year of Jubilo which they did not know presumably because it is a northern yankee song. Seriously.) It was a fun trip even if the downpour flooded the streets of North Limestone.

 

 

We drove back to Lexington the next night to meet up with some friends who now live in Lexington. Jenny Neat is a friend from Chaptico, stationed there when her husband Jess was rector of the Episcopal parish. They have traveled all their married lives, relocating every few years,  the 21 years he was an Army officer and the years after he was ordained. Now they are back where they met–Jenny is a native of Lexington KY and met her husband when they were at Eastern Kentucky University. He now has a parish in Frankfort, KY. Jenny arranged for us to meet at a food co-op that served a great hot buffet, really one of the top meals of the trip.

Joining us was an old comrade of mine, Richard Farkas and his wife Julie. Richard was director of manufacturing at a DC publishing house and a customer of mine when I was in the typesetting business. He and I and a handful of others started an association for DC publishing professionals called Bookbuilders of Washington which had a successful run of ten years or so, hosting monthly meetings with guest speakers and publishing  a monthly newsletter which I wrote. Richard retired from the University of Kentucky Press a couple years ago, founded a Buddhist temple in Lexington and wrote a primer on Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama wrote the introduction to his book!

Having been traveling amongst strangers, kind and well-intentioned as they may be, it was good to hang with old mates and find them doing well.

 

Berea, KY is home to Berea College and the center of Kentucky arts and crafts. The college is noted for its early and unwavering support for civil rights. The weather was brutally muggy but we enjoyed touring the town and the arts neighborhood. The Kentucky state arts center is only a few miles away and worth an hour of your time—textiles, woodwork, printmaking, basketry, and a wide array of foodstuffs flavored with bourbon. There is no comestible on the planet, sweet or savory, that some Kentuckian has not thought could be improved by the addition of bourbon. They are awfully proud of this substance, and rightfully so; strange, then,  that in some places you have to drive through two counties before you can buy any.

 

Brenda struck up a conversation with a docent at the state arts center and told her we were looking for a good hike. She produced a photocopied sheet that gave written instructions and a hand drawn map to Anglin Falls. We sought it out the next day; it was located about 20 minutes from our campsite. Only a few miles in the road became very twisty and almost one lane; we encountered a barrier and huge sign reading “Road Closed.” It was curious to me that the barrier did not actually bar entry to the road entirely so we drove around it. Sure enough a half-mile later a  good half of the road had slid down into the creek below, but there was enough room to sneak by on the intact part and we weren’t towing the trailer so we kept on gettin’. The directions and map were mistaken in some particulars and we had to double back a couple times. The final direction told us to turn onto the dirt road “with the mailbox.” And sure enough a good ways later there was a trailhead. The Anglin Falls hike has become my favorite of the trip. It was only a little over a mile round trip but climbed steep. It was old forest; massive limestone bluffs above;  boulders everywhere that had broken off and fallen from above ages ago and were now completely covered in moss and vegetation. And of course at the top was the Anglin Falls, not a spectacular torrent but a steady flow of water falling 75 feet. What made it special was that we had the entire place to ourselves. “To walk in quiet reverie these ancient hills” was an honor. There were many sights and places recommended to us that were, I’m sure, more spectacular, but we had this place all to ourselves the entire time we were there. You wonder why some people live out their lives in hardship in places of little opportunity with danger of floods and other natural disasters and you see a place like this and you know, it’s the land they love and don’t want to leave. Okay, I’m laying it on a little thick; let’s just say we had a nice walk in the woods.

 

This area around Berea is Daniel Boone’s stomping ground. I had just started a book by Hampton Sides on Kit Carson and was surprised by the coincidence that Carson was born only a few miles from our campsite. In the early 1800s this area was the frontier. People were pouring through the Cumberland gap and pushing west. It is astonishing how much change came in such a short time. A European guy “discovers” the opening through the mountains in 1750. Daniel Boone and his pals widen it in the 1770s and start leading settlers through. Something like 300,000 settlers come through the Cumberland Gap over the next 40 years, felling trees and natives as they go. Seems like recent history, the older I get.

 

It’s easy to imagine how this rough terrain and a Boone-fed self-image would foster a sense of self- and kin-reliance and a lack of interest in central government, and a political and cultural conservatism. In a region where the topography prevents easy transport of grain for sale it makes sense to turn the grain into liquor for sale, leading to more conflict with government. And of course the original settlers themselves were temperamental Scots and Irish who had already been badly-used by and alienated from their previous overlords. So how did trade unionism among the coal miners take hold and become such a vital part of their story? How did these rough-hewn individualists come to buy into that sort of solidarity across holler and hill? Every mile you go further up into the hills you feel like you are entering a very different world that is older, more primal, and holding some secret. Okay, I’m waxing again; let’s just say I find this area fascinating. And if it weren’t so damn hot and humid we might not head to Tennessee in the morning.

July 27 to August 1, 2016   Hey! Oh, hi. O!

 

From Ann Arbor we drove south to a state campground at Indian Lake. The Cowsills song was, supposedly, inspired by this big lake ringed by resort towns. Well, it used to be ringed by vibrant resort towns; now it is ringed by shells of once-lively resort towns. What is it with lakeside and riverside holiday towns that they are all seem to have fallen on such hard times—grass a foot tall growing up through the holes in old mini-golf greens; rusted remnants of kiddie rides glimpsed in junk shops and peoples’ back yards; little wooden structures that once sold burgers or ice cream falling down, some with the menuboards still hanging over the counter. Have consumers’ tastes changed so much that these little amusements can’t satisfy them, or have the rivers and lakes grown so polluted that people avoid them?

 

The beaches of Indian Lake that we saw were littered everywhere with goose crap, the water warm, cloudy, shallow. The camp was huge and fairly empty in midweek. We found a good hike in a nearby forest and toured the little towns on the periphery of the lake, staying two nights. We left there for Cincinnati, a few hours south, taking back roads. Ohio countryside is  beautiful in this region. It rained as we drove. During our entire trip it has rained only at night or when we were on the road. I don’t think there has been a single day when we were stuck in the camper because of weather.

 

I have a modest attachment to Cincinnati. I lived here part of a year as an infant when my father was lured there by his older brother with reports of a good job at a printing plant. It didn’t work out for reasons unknown to me. (In St Mary’s County we knew a woman whose family owned the printing plant in question.) My first memory images contain details that my mother said must have come from our time in Cincinnati. When I was twenty or so my friend Tim H. called from Cincinnati where he was finishing a year of music school and said that his 1964 blue Dodge Dart that I admired could belong to me if I came to get it; otherwise he was going to leave it in Cincinnati. Brenda dropped me off early the next morning in front of what is now Bert’s Diner in Mechanicsville and I hitchhiked to Cincinnati in ten hours, as long as it takes to drive there; had dinner with Tim and drove the Dart home. It was a push-button automatic. I turned on the lights as the sun went down and all the little lights on the dashboard lit up (P,R,N,D,L) and I felt like a man that fortune had favored.

 

We stayed at a county campground on the edge of the city, Wilton Woods. It was the weekend and the place was packed with local families. They all had campfires despite the fact that the temperatures were sweltering and the humidity was near 100 percent. On Sunday just about the whole camp emptied out and it became a nice place to stay—we could hear the birds, for one thing.

Took a trip into the city. The downtown area was pretty much deserted, like a lot of downtowns on a Sunday. And it was so hot and humid that only the panhandlers were out with us. There are a lot of panhandlers in Cincinnati and they all seem to follow the same protocol—standing still in the median at an intersection holding a small hand-lettered sign. No spoken entreaties, no going from car to car. Maybe the city enforces some code of conduct.

 

We spent several hours in Spring Grove cemetery, one of the beautifully-landscaped, park-like cemeteries of the mid 1800s that the major cities treated as important public spaces. Cincinnati was something like the 6^th largest city then and a manufacturing powerhouse, and the markers of the cemetery are gigantic works of stone, many over twenty feet high—obelisks, angels, trees carved out of stone, a sphinx here, a life-size statue of the decedent there. Cincinnati is considered the first truly American city—the first one to arise after the Revolutionary War and the first inland city in the country. The cemetery is Cincinnati at the height of its wealth and status. It is still an appealing city, a little barren in the downtown area but rich with architectural ornament. It is like a smaller-scale Pittsburgh, with two rivers instead of three, and the remains of an industrial past.

 

 

Jul 24 to July 27, 2016—Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ann Arbor is a nice little city. I had always heard as much and the rumors are true. We got there just at the end of the annual art show that completely takes over the downtown area—something like 4,000 exhibitors and a couple of miles of city roadway closed to vehicle traffic. We saw none of the displays, only the weary artists taking down their display booths.

 

We came so that Brenda could hook up with some friends from Augusta music camp and join in their wekly Cajun jam. The evening of our arrival her friends Terri and Patrick took us on a walking tour of the city which is reminiscent of low-rise San Francisco, a mix of Victorian-trimmed residences and small businesses, restaurants. We had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant and dropped in on an Irish music jam at a local bar. The next day we rejoined them for rafting on the Huron River. This is not whitewater rafting but leisurely tube rafting down a series of cascades built on a 19^th century mill race. It was very pleasant, shooting through narrow openings and drifting downriver. The trip lasts about 20 minutes then you pick up your tube, hike back, and do it again. We went three times. Later, in the evening, we were joined by a dozen Cajun music aficionados for a jam at a picnic area along the Huron River. The band was strong and passers-by stopped to applaud or dance. The University of Michigan sculling team was holding tryouts on the river, youngsters were  jumping off the railroad bridge in spite of posted warnings, lots of runners and dog walkers along the river path — it was a picture-perfect scene in the Kerrytown neighborhood of Ann Arbor.

 

The next day we went to the Henry Ford Museum which was near our campsite in Ypsilanti. Early in our travels, in Chambersburg PA, we had gotten together with my old mate Glenn and his family. Glenn joined us for the museum tour as he was in Detroit where he has business interests. Henry Ford went around the country buying examples of American life from all periods, styles and regions with the intention of starting a comprehensive museum of such things—furniture, machine tools, locomotives, farm equipment, musical instruments. The museum notably contains the rocking chair that Abe Lincoln was sitting in when he was killed at Ford’s (no relation) theater; covered in blood it was and an unsettling object to behold. I was similarly disturbed by the presence of  JFK’s limo from Dallas. I’m not the most squeamish of people, but something seems not right about exhibiting these things. Also in the museum is the bus in which Rosa Parks took her stand.

Henry Ford also collected buildings to represent the American experience and had them relocated to this site and reassembled as a small town called Dearfield. Noah Webster’s house, a residence of Robert Frost’s, a Cotswald cottage for some reason, most of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, and dozens of other structures including a 19^th c plantation house from St Mary’s county (it used to be on the grounds of the naval air station in Lexington Park). I would have liked to have seen this village and the museum as it was when Henry Ford, a renowned racist who died in 1947, was supervising it. While the museum and the village tell an inclusive story now I’ll wager that Ford was trying to shape the historical narrative in a different way when he was curating the collection.

For two dollars you can make a plastic, injection-molded figurine of the Ford man himself. I could not pass up the opportunity. Here he is on the hood of my Toyota.

That evening all our friends from the area, Terri, Patrick and Glenn, came to our campsite. The Cajun musicians played music and Glenn and I discussed and disputed and drank wine until late. We had hosted our first party during our travels and it seemed to be a success!