But I live there…

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions.  Having the axis of the earth tilted at the exact same angle relative to the sun as it was 365 days (and one second!) ago, is a poor reason for me to get off my figurative ass and change something about myself.  But even if it was sufficient reason, why not just pick the anniversary of some other angle?  Any one is as good as the next.  Or better yet, drop the correlation of self-improvement with our home planet’s location in space.  But anyway, there is one thing I want to try to change.  I want to migrate from here….  (I am pointing at my head) to … here.  (now I am sort of patting my belly).

Here is why:  I always have thought that to understand something, I have to be able to describe it.  Such as with words.  Lots and lots of words, if needed, or at least with obsessively thorough and detailed mental pictures, each of which is apparently worth a thousand of those sons of bitches, ceteris paribus.  What this leads to, if you’re me, is a tendency to not just be able to grok some shit on the quantum, accept it and then move on with mental grace and emotional serenity; but instead to succomb to the paralysis of analysis.  This can lead to getting so bogged down in thinking about something or someone or some event or some memory, that the object of such thought can move on and do whatever the fuck it wants while I am still mentally chewing over some fossilized remembered remnant of the thing or person or event.

I have a feeling that this doesn’t make sense yet, so now I am going to describe it some more.  (Haha, that is called irony).  One way to do that is to remember how one of my religion professors in college described religion as an act of metaphor.  There are two parts to a metaphor, the vehicle and the tenor.  The vehicle is the mechanism by which meaning is expressed, and the tenor is the meaning itself, or I guess you could say the thing that is being meant.  Most religions are rooted in references to things or beings well beyond the grasp of human comprehension, making their God by definition something that cannot be defined, but only believed in.  That leaves religion, when considered by me anyway, bogged down in symbolism, chock full of stuff that stands for what is holy, but is not holy in itself.  I am not really educated in this kind of thing, but I do see people regard objects–man-made ones, at that! And food and drink, in some cases–and hold them in reverence and awe, as if “stuff” in a room, right in front of you, were actually something divine.  Let me veer off the rails here to say that this is a very simplistic recap of a series of conversations I had with a deacon (and a couple of shorter conversations with a priest, who by the way is as deeply spiritual and honest a person as I have ever had the privilege of talking to) during the course of RCIA instruction a few years ago.  Yes, I joined the Catholic church, right before I got remarried, and also a little bit before I learned about that church’s arcane thoughts on annulments and whatnot (“Wait…on your say-so, 10 years of my life and 16 years of someone else’s, along with our respective former spouses’ lives, did not actually happen??  Except mine is different because I came to this party really late, but those years just kind of got squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed or some shit?  OK, so then what the fuck are all these kids doing here, and where did I get that scar??”)  I actually did give it an honest try, and have many times since then, but I can’t fully grok the notion that a wafer and a cup of wine are anything more than symbolic representations.  Once my literal mind gets beyond the shuddering thoughts of cannibalism (and the inner smart-aleck stops thinking shit like “Yum! Krist Krispies, again!”) I still can’t help thinking (see?) that actual human flesh should be chewy and that real blood would not taste so…grapy.

I didn’t mean for this to be about religion.  As you can see I am quite retarded on the subject.  Agnostic in the precise sense as defined by Thomas Huxley, but once or twice in my life an actual believer (not at this moment), would about sum it up.

Try again: many of my life experiences turn into what I would call chewing gum for the mind.  No nutritional value whatsoever, but man does that fucker ever keep busy with memories and conjecture and attempts to define and understand what I have experienced:  replaying, speculating, scripting possible do-overs and alternative responses or behaviors or actions for events that took place way off in the distant past; analyzing the shit out of what I should or shouldn’t have said or did, agonizing over what-ifs and how it could/should have gone differently or better.  Unchecked, this kind of shit could lead to a life that is a tooth-grinding, paralytic waking nightmare.  Good thing for me that this is only a tendency, and not a full time hobby.  Although sometimes at night I wake up with my jaws clenched.

One good thing that has come out of this sort of obsessive tendency is a lifelong love and respect for language; English in particular but also for all the cool shit English has inherited and mostly stolen from other languages.  My prevailing need is to describe shit in order to understand it, to make some order out of it, and what better means to describe shit than via language, hmm?.  I know, there are other ways.  Anyone who is an artist or musician or writer or dancer or athlete, or for that matter anyone who has ever found themselves deeply moved by what artists and musicians and writers and dancers and athletes have produced; knows this on some level.

Anyway, the thing I want to do is not have that analytic tendency so much, the one that gets my mind so bogged down in the artifice of life that it overlooks the beauty in just experiencing it. Analysis paralysis…it interferes with the present, and that is really all we have. It is like this:  if you have one foot in yesterday, and one foot in tomorrow, you are in a perfect position to take a giant dump on today.

If I were not such a retard I could have just summed this all up with some pithy little ditty, like the bumper sticker that says “Be here now”.  I usually fail at that simple instruction, instead concocting some thousand word mental essay going deep in to what that could really possibly mean.  In fairness to me, most of the time that bumper sticker is surrounded by several dozen other ones of equal or greater (by which I mean lesser) pith and depth.  And bumper sticker-plastered cars like that usually just end up pissing me off.  Pithing me off, too.  Take your god damn ontological salience and get the fuck out of my way, I think at them, really loud, in my head.

I do not usually make New Year’s resolutions, but this time I am going to think about it.

Glen Lake

It has been a couple of weeks, but the awesomeness of that place and that time has not worn off yet.

We got there at dusk:

Our house was about 200 yards from a small park on the lake. 

View from Old Settler

 

Glen Lake

The second day, I took a 15 mile bike ride around Big Glen and Little Glen lake–nice rolling terrain with a couple of good hills.  To me, as a former (slow, Category 5, no USCF credentials) racer, it’s still not really a bike ride unless you get to the point where your heart is beating outside your chest and you’re gasping for breath for prolonged periods.   Another day I rode up Pierce Stocking Drive, which is the scenic route to the Lake Michigan overlook at the Sleeping Bear Dune. 

My kids

Jillian and Ian

Late Monday night a few of us took sleeping bags to a rugged little beach on Lake Michigan and watched the Perseids meteor shower.  If you live in Columbus and it is night right now, go outside and look up.  You will see about 10 stars.  Multiply that by a million, and that is what we had as the backdrop for the meteor shower.  Breathtaking and unbelievably clear.

Tuesday we had another lake day.  We rented a boat and jet ski again.  The really fun part about tubing was having the boat go full throttle and seeing how high me and the tube could go after hitting a small wave.  The the not so fun part was–have I mentioned that I am 6′4″, and 215 (at least so says my scale upstairs, which I like much better than the scale at the doctors office which seems to think that my shoes weigh 7 pounds)?–was the bruised rib from hitting the water at 50 or so mph.  And then there was the wave runner, again.  That was about 10 minutes of gas squandering bliss, followed by a half hour of sitting stalled in the lake waiting for a tow boat, after it started billowing plumes of black smoke from the motor. 

Change of pace the next day… we rented kayaks and paddled on Crystal River, a creek that winds from Glen Lake, through some beautiful and peaceful wetlands, and empties out into Lake Michigan.  We covered about 3 miles of it, at a restful pace.  Nice.

This part of Sleeping Bear Dune is a 450 foot vertical drop to Lake Michigan.  It only takes a few minutes to get to the bottom; less than that if you’re Jillian

We ignored the warnings...

The problem is that what goes down must come up.  It took my wife and I about a 35 minutes to make the ascent.  It took Jillian about 1/2 hour.  Climbing a steep sand hill is the kind of workout you can get from a stair stepper machine at the gym, if you are waist deep in molasses.  Ian, who runs on the track and cross country teams, made it in 8 1/2 minutes.  Li’l bastard.

It is bigger than it looks in the picture

This doesn’t do justice to the view you can get.  To the north, you can see the Manitou Islands, and on the distant horizon, you can just make out Wisconsin on the other side of Lake Michigan.  

Up and down the shore are several miles of rugged and undeveloped lake shore.  There is a “ghost forest” just to the north, which was several acres of dead dried trees, where over the centuries, sand buried a forest and then blew or eroded away, to reveal the dried and bleached remains of the trees.

I want to go back…

Driving day

Friday August 8
My wife and her girls left Thursday night to spend the night with her cousin, who has a farm outside of Toledo. So that meant my kids and I were on the road again…we planned to leave by 8:30 for what Mapquest said was a 7 hour 25 minute drive.  When we plan to leave by 8:30, that usually means we are going to leave at some point during that same calendar day. It was closer to 10:30 by the time we hit the city limits outbound. But we did manage to cram a 7 1/2 hour drive into a 10 1/2 hour ordeal.  We ended up with a bastardized hybrid of Mapquest, AAA (A.A., eh?) and directions some retired truck driver gave my wife when she was at her cousin’s.

The first highlight was that we met up with my wife and her girls at a bead store near Toledo.  I don’t know why.  It was just off the freeway, and one of them had a burning need to lay in some supplies for bead-related crafts.  Jillian set off to look at the goods, and when Ian and I walked in, a nice birdlike lady approached us and chirped “Are you beaders?”  First of all, I didn’t even know that was a verb, and second of all, my default setting is sarcasm.  But fortunately, before I responded “Holy shit, do you really think that when people see me walking down the street, one of the first things that they think of is ‘I’ll bet that guy beads’?  Because if so, I am going down the street to my wife’s cousin’s barn and hang myself from the effin’ rafters…”, my internal editor kicked in and I gestured over to where the girls were poring over the goods, and said “I’m with them” instead.  Whew, close call. 

I think that Ian sensed the testosterone depletion inherent in those types of stores; he came up to me and said in all deadpan seriousness, “Can we please go?  I’m getting an urge to go to Pottery Barn next for decorating ideas”.  I told him that if we needed to, we could go to a Tractor Supply and buy some chainsaw oil, or a trailer hitch, if that would help.

Eventually headed north, through the western part of lower Michigan.  Passed through some beautiful and rugged terrain in the Manistee National Forest, and the Pere Marquette River watershed.

Back! From a vacation rental with no internet connectivity…

Got back late yesterday…8 day trip to Glen Lake, MI. with my wife and four of our kids, my brother and one of his sons, my sister and her husband and the cutest pair of twin 3 year olds anyone has ever seen in the history of the entire world, and my parents.  That’s right, 14 people (15 the night my brother’s gf stayed over) in a house designed for about half that many.  It looked bigger in the pictures. 

We had a great time, the highlights of which I plan to completely bore the shit out of you with, for a couple of posts.

I worked at a foundry…

 Siebolt’s face was in either a grin or a grimace–you couldn’t ever tell which, due to the ill-fitting choppers that clacked in his mouth–as he raked red-hot pieces of iron and dirt from the bed of the sweatbox.  The oilburner in the ceiling of the furnace was turned down but the maw of the box glowed bright yellow-orange and cast Siebolt’s shadow demonically against the block wall behind him.  The well of D-furnace, Siebolt’s sweatbox, filled up much quicker than those of the other three furnaces, sometimes once per shift, and the molten aluminum was swilling and splashing up into the bed. The bed of the sweatbox was just below chest-high, and was angled to allow molten aluminum to drain into a large cylindrical well  that rested on the ground.  Raw materials were thrown onto the bed and heated to melting, and after the aluminum drained down into the well, the remaining dirt and iron and steel and slag were raked out of the bed into small hoppers.
     Clarence, who disliked his name and would answer only to “Jim”, was shift manager.  He was running a sample from A-furnace, after which he would tap and drain the sweatbox.  Running a sample entailed reaching a long iron dipper into the well, filling it with aluminum, and pouring it into a small mold.  When solid, the molded aluminum disk would be shot with a metallurgical spectrograph, which would reveal the percentages of other metals present and tell us how close we were to the desired alloy.
     Siebolt’s ingots were always a cloudy gray bastard alloy, too high in iron and dirt and too low in manganese, magnesium and silicon to be of any commercial use.  Their only purpose was to stock the “heels” of the other furnaces after they were tapped out.  Several 1,500-pound stacks of sweatbox ingots were always on hand for just this purpose.  Clarence–no one ever called him anything but Clarence after his “be scary to new guys” schtick stopped working–pressed the green button on the hanging switchbox, and the gears that drove the ingot-mold conveyor belt groaned and whirred into slow movement.  The belt was about 100 feet long and contained some 300 concrete ingot molds, each of which Clarence checked for signs of cracking at the mount bolts. 
     The furnaces each backed up to the long pit containing the ingot-mold conveyor At the furnace end.  At the back of each furnace was a tap hole that was plugged by a cone-shaped sandcore, which could withstand the heat but could easily be chiseled out when it was time to tap the furnace.  Clarence used a hammer and chisel to pound and dig a hole through the sandcore.  Molten aluminum, opaque as milk but bright silverish orange and well above the 1800-degree Farenheit freezing point, trickled out of the tap hole.  It ran down concrete-lined open iron channels through a geared starwheel that would distribute it evenly and directly to the molds, not allowing any to escape between the molds into the pit below.  Clarence picked at the hole until the volume and flow of metal was to his liking.  Froggy, a local boy with just enough brainstem activity left over from breathing and dressing himself to get by in the world, had drawn the assignment of skimming the final bits of dirt and slag from ingots before they froze solid at the other end of the conveyor.  Nobody could explain to Froggy that sweatbox ingots went right back into the furnace, were full of dirt anyway, and didn’t need skimming, but there he was in his Skinner-box world doing what he was trained to do.  He also controlled the speed of the conveyor, making sure the molds didn’t overflow or underfill.  A steady trickle of water from overhead pipes cooled the ingots somewhat (sometimes cracking the concrete molds when the hotter alloys were tapped) as they moved toward the stacking end.
    Harbaugh was the other young guy on the 3 – 11, and he and I stacked first, as Siebold was getting old and was excused from stacking.  Harbaugh pried the now-solid ingots from the molds with a chisel tip, using a hammer on the chisel for sticky ingots.  The ingots, solid but still hot enough to cause bad burns and  melt rubber bootsoles, landed on a rack, where I picked them up with a short straightbladed shovel and flipped them onto the stack.  The stacking frame was two small parallel 3-ft i-beams on the floor and two sheet iron walls, about 3 feet high.  One wall was welded along the length of one beam, and the other wall formed a corner with the first, perpendicular to the beams.   The 20-pound ingots were shaped in a trapezoidal cross section such that they could be stacked in rows of 8, every other one upside down.  The first row would lay north-south, the second east-west, and so on up to 10 or 12 rows. I finished my stack and Harbaugh hollered “Towmotor!” - his south  central Pennsylvania take on what to call a forklift came out more like “towmoor”.  The normal pavlovian response was for Davey, the co-owner’s lazy slug of an offspring, to amble on out from the break room, fire up the forklift and haul the stack away.  If Davey was on break or making the scene with a magazine somewhere, it would be up to us.  Timing was critical, since the conveyor relentlessly kept serving up ingots on the rack.  Harbaugh said “fucker ain’t coming” and hopped up in the seat and put the forklift in gear.  Davey rounded the corner and  said “the fuck offa there” – always trying to join in the standard blue collar repartee, thinking he was “one of the guys” and always falling just a couple light years short.  Harbaugh laid a big hocker on the seat as he hopped down and Davey, oblivious,  hunkered down into the seat.  I said, “think it’s OK to get these things out of our way, for crying the fuck out loud?” and Davey flipped me off.  Then it was my turn to pry and Harbaugh’s to stack. 6 stacks later (about 4 tons) we finished out our 3 man stacking rotation and D-furnace was tapped out.  The bigger furnaces held up to 48,000 pounds of metal, taking 2 – 3 shifts to fill and almost an entire shift to tap.  Froggy slowed the conveyor and Clarence plugged the taphole with a sandcore to stop the last trickle of aluminum.    
     Back up in the break room Roy, Sammy, and Pap Crites sat smoking or chewing. Siebolt, a walking zombie, had left for an 8-hour shift driving a truck at a “grit mill”, which I think was a quarry.  Harbaugh was off somewhere making Davey’s life even more miserable than his maker had conspired for him.  Pap Crites was more of an honorary employee than anything else, his useful years well behind him.  He generally held forth as the keeper of foundryman’s lore in the breakroom, and liked to propound on the state of the planet and pretty much let everyone know exactly where they were full of shit, regardless of the topic at hand.  He had years before somehow gotten his legs pinned and crushed under the starwheel on the ingot mold conveyor.  A year later he returned to the breakroom but rarely to work.  The owner and manager no doubt figured paying for his presence was cheaper than a workers comp settlement; and he much would rather have been with his people than laying around at home.
     Roy and Sammy were the ones who had conspired to give me my nickname. Roy was an aging country feller with a gigantic pot gut, stringy short little legs which could only muster a shuffling gait on good days, and a huge appetite for beer.  He had big bassett hound eyes and always wore a grimy ball cap tilted way back on his head.  He always had trouble remembering names, and started calling me “Slim”.  Sam was a 6′5″ Jamaican with a constant and brilliant smile – made even more so on bonus week when he got his large gold front tooth out of hock – who had been a migrant worker and ended up here as he worked on his GED, or as he called it in that syncopated reggae lilt, “my graddiat deploomer from high school”.  My nickname was something that I can’t quite phonetically spell, but imagine a giant smiley Jamaican imitating a boozy hilljack saying the word “Slim” and you’re close: slee-um.
     Roy blew up A-furnace one evening.  It was a recycling foundry, and the furnaces were stocked with all kinds of raw materials: building siding, military plate armor, lathe turnings, 2000-pound bales of crushed beer cans or used license plates, industrial cast aluminum engine blocks or cylinders… anything that was aluminum would go in the well of the furnace.  Oilburners would heat it to melting back in the enclosed heel.  The furnacetender would throw shovelfulls of flux (like sand) or mag flux (like flour) and work it back and forth with long iron hoes.  Compressed air blown through iron tubes would roil and stir the mixture and the flux would float the dirt and slag in a glowing mess to the top.  We used longhandled iron skimmers to scoop the lava-like slag into small hoppers, using the edge of the furnace well as a fulcrum.  Once the surface of the silver-orange pond of molten slop was clean we would lean over it with long iron rakes and dredge the bottom, pulling up baling wire, piston rings, and assorted other iron or steel or stainless steel flotsam that was unacceptable over certain tolerances, depending on the alloy.  This debris would later be weighed, dumped into wood-slatted crates usually labelled “staynels stell” or “irne”, and shipped off to other foundries that dealt with those kinds of metal.  Anyway, about Roy and his big explosion: His job was to drive a forklift carrying big hoppers of raw materials up to the well of the furnace and dump them in, making sure he did it slowly enough so as not to splash hot liquid metal out of the well and not to freeze up the furnace.  One winter evening the hefty little jackpine savage took his forklift and picked up a hopper that had been sitting outside.  The drainholes in the bottom had clogged and unknown to Roy or anybody else, there was a 1 by 3 by 3 foot chunk of solid ice in the bottom, under the ton of lathe turnings. Lathe turnings didn’t freeze up the furnace or splash, so usually Roy just dumped them right in.   This time though, the iceberg hit the molten metal and pretty much vaporized in that single instant, creating the loudest percussive sound I have ever heard.   Ka-WHUMPH!!! accompanied a burst of steam, followed immediately by an immense explosion.  The ice made a splash like the one real husky kid at the swimming pool that can always soak the lifeguard with his cannonball, only the mist that hung in the air from this splash was a hellish concoction of molten metal, slag, steam and smoke.  Years of accumulated dust and grit were jarred loose from every surface in the room, and hung in the air like a dark viscous cloud.  The redhot glow of the furnaces through this miasma made me think of Mt. St. Helens or Pompeii, or Hell.  At first I couldn’t hear anything exept my ears ringing and could only take in the scene in a spooky silence.  The hood and ductwork over the furnace that led to the filter room were torn apart; a gaping jagged hole was blown in the corrugated ceiling 25 feet above; dust, cardboard and anything else flammable in a 30 foot radius around the furnace was  burning; and a 2100-degree aluminum slick spread out from the well.  Then noticed Sam, outside the back bay door, helplessly leaning against the wall, clutching his gut. 
     I ran over to Sam first, and saw that he was shaking.  He wasn’t hurt though, he was just laughing his ass off.  “Dot fucker, he ron like Jesse Owen”, pronouncing it “Ho-wen”, he giggled, pointing to Roy, who with his stumpy little legs and hyperdeveloped beer muscles, had indeed cleared the large bay door and staging yard, crossed the parking lot and was quickly attaining the fence.  By the time the rest of the shift made the run from the breakroom to  the furnaceroom, every one of those old boys on the furnaces was standing with his back to the holocaust and was facing Roy, who backed up against the fence and stared wide-eyed at the mess he had narrowly avoided, muttering “ohhh shee-it…gawdawful dammit!”  Clarence glowered from under the wide brim of his crusher, and then shifted the soggy cheroot, Clint Eastwood-style, to the other side of his mouf without touching it.  “You boys clean this shit up. Roy, you been trainin for the ‘lympics? Haw, haw…”  “No, just havin a god damn heart attack is all.”
     Froggy, in the background, was  recapping the situation for the latecomers, gesturing wildly. “Well the luminum went up like that there, and we knowed she was gonna blow, and sure nough the furnace hood buckled like that there, an Roy lit out like that there, an’…”  Harbaugh interrupted, his arm around Froggy’s shoulder, “Froggy, why don’t you just try shettin the fuck up a while?”
     The sirens got louder.  The volunteer fire station 3/4 of a mile down the road had not been called but they had heard the blast.  After they checked out the damage they left, and on their way out I heard one of them mutter, “these fuckers screwed up a hell of a pinochle meld”.

…

If you are ever in Gettysburg, PA, head south out of town on Rt. 15.  You will drive through a couple of miles of a scenic and haunting stretch of road, right smack through the middle of where Pickett’s charge took place during the Civil War.  Just south of the battlefield there is (or was) a conference center on the left; and just south of that there are two gravel drives that are chained and padlocked.  These lead to the former site of Gettysburg Foundry Specialties, which was in operation until the mid 1980’s or so.  It is now an EPA Superfund cleanup site.

Electric heat

When we lit out with our dog Penny tonight down First Avenue after sunset, there was just a faint hint of light in the western sky.  Sultry and warm, the air was still. A dark purple-gray wedge of cloud stretched from the horizon.  It jutted out oblong toward us, with a clean, almost parabolic arc on its northern and leading eastern edges; frayed and tattered on its southern edges.  In a clear pocket of sky to the left, a thin but vivid sliver of new moon was visible just above the horizon.  To the east we could make out stars very dimly above the yellowish glow of the Columbus skyline.  We began to see streaks and flashes of lightning in and behind the cloudbank, and far off to the north and south.  The only sounds though, were the hiss and chirp and buzz and drone of late summer cicadas, locusts and crickets; and the incidental distant traffic sounds from the interstate.  The lighting steadily increased in frequency and duration as the tattered southern fringes of the cloudbank moved to obscure the thin moon, but still there was no hint of thunder.  As we rounded the corner of Cambridge Avenue and headed toward the Tarpy woods, we thought we heard storm sirens very faintly in the distance.  It was difficult at times to distinguish the steady keening wail of the sirens above the high-pitched tire whine from the semis on the interstate, but at other times it was unmistakeable.  Occasionally there was a light puff of breeze that would bring with it the smell of rain in a barely noticeable trace, but it was just a tease.  We thought (and partly hoped) it would really let go and start in earnest, but the sky just kept gathering in a patient and slow crescendo, with all the action too high or too far away to be a real threat.  Or promise.

The Tarpy woods at night were infused with a barely discernible amber glow, from the reflection of the Columbus skyline off the low thick clouds.  The last few nights I have been there, it has been later at night after the moon has set, and clearer overhead, and therefore much darker.  Under the thicker parts of the canopy we can make out the path partly through the muscle memory of having made the walk hundreds of times previously, and partly because of the bluish strobe-like flashes from lightning far overhead.  Penny usually stays a little closer at night, but she will still dash off through the woods at a sprint when a critter dares her to.  Jagged and arhythmic, at times the flashes of light persisted long enough to cast the trees in pale jittery stark relief against blue-black shadows.  Still, no sound except the night insects and the distant freeway and the faint steady welling wail of the sirens.  The path winds through a section where something viny and thick like kudzu has overgrown everything and obscured almost all the light.  There is an arch-shaped opening like a doorway into an open meadow.  Once or twice a year, the clearing is mowed down to stubble, but now the path winds through thick, high thistle and weeds.  There is a stretch of what looks like Queen Anne’s lace, and in the blue-white flashes of light you could make out the pale white flowering tops of the plants but not the stems, making it look like they were suspended in mid-air, hovering three to five feet off the ground.  We were still early enough to see the last of the evening’s lightning bugs against the woods surrounding the clearing.  The path loops briefly through a very dense thicket which we navigate almost purely by memory, helped by the faint amount of light that gets through.  Penny has her own path through here, maybe part of a the network of game trails too low for people to navigate.  She has a trick of disappearing into the woods at full speed and then showing up a few seconds later from a completely different direction.  We love it when she does that.  We crossed the clearing to retrace the path back through the woods.  From this angle the arched opening is black against the solid wall of the thick viny kudzu. 

As we got back to the edge of the woods we finally heard the first faint rumble of thunder, far off and barely noticeable over the other night sounds. The lightning still came frequently, straight overhead now and far off to both the north and the south.  We went down Lincoln Avenue and then Goodale, and then up the steep short section of Elmwood at a pace to give our legs a little bit of work.  At one point Penny made a reckless sprint across the street toward a raccoon that was poking out of a rain sewer, so she had to go back on her leash.  As we rounded the last corner, back onto First Avenue, we could very briefly make out the pouring edge of the Big Dipper through a clearing in the clouds.  And still, the lightning streaks and flashes continued.  It would have been a poetic ending had the rain started splatting in big fat drops on the street just as we ended the home stretch, but no such luck.  I went out to the front porch with my guitar for about a half hour to wait for the rain, but it did not come, and hasn’t come yet.  From the porch swing a couple of times I saw flashes of lightning far off to the north at the same time I saw streaks of lightning from the south reflected in the windows and lighting up the wall of the apartment building across the street. 

While on the porch I did watch a big fat spider start a huge project involving the chain of the porch swing and the tapered column of the porch.  I know I will have to relocate the spider before my wife or stepdaughter see it, but I want to see its finished work in the sunlight tomorrow morning.  If it’s still not raining.

Point/Counterpoint

So finally, here is my Operation Feed point-counterpoint:
Point:  Operation Feed sucks!

(excerpted from a rant I wrote a couple years ago, regarding the setup of a bunch of carnival-like team-building crap to usher in the op feed campaign):
This morning the “Good Morning Associates” guy blasted something on the p.a.  about the aroma of popcorn signifying the onslaught of Operation Feed activities.  Sure enough, a peek out the front windows confirms that the embarrassment (at least for anyone with a moderate sense of irony) has begun.  The tricycle street sprint summer nationals course is set up, as is a large inflatable Jupiter Jump-like apparatus that has been “tagged” on the side with a pictograph of a cloying cartoon elephant, as are all the other various accoutrements of such an extravagantly moronic endeavor.  Let’s think about Operation Feed for a moment, shall we?  Getting past the most egregious symbol of ironic stupidity, the pie toss—our ex-mayor, acting on behalf of the corporate legal staff, throwing comestibles *prepared just for the occasion* into the faces of other gainfully employed (and presumably not homeless nor hungry) coworkers—and moving right on to the subtler examples of cluelessness I witnessed this morning: a heavyset woman, with whom I shared an elevator, huffing with the exertion of trundling her corpulent self from clear over at the cafeteria, was toting two cafeteria to-go plates (one laden with belgian waffles, the other with a goddamn rasher of bacon and two small tubs overflowing with butter and syrup) and a 20 ounce bottle of soda.   The “congestive heart failure platter” was on special this morning, I see.   Tomorrow’s blue plate is the “Bury the needle on the god damn sphygmomanometer, why dontcha, Special”.   And then there were the two immense phocine people slaunched over a bench in the atrium, sitting splay-legged and helplessly recumbent amid a bunch of popcorn that had spilled out onto their clothes and the floor as they plunged their flaccid flippers into the bags and slammed handfuls of the deep-fried, chemical-saturated grain into their gaping maws.  As I glanced over they were each sucking the last trace of rancid salty gelatinous grease from a chubby finger, emitting squishy popping sounds not unlike those you hear when stirring a bowl of macaroni and cheese.  Yum.  You missed a kernel.  Make sure you get your daily quota of FDA Yellow #5 there.  Operation Feed apparently means you Feed your own gut-slung body with enough food for a third-world family of 12 to subsist on, then maybe you get one of those fat-sucking Operations when even the big-boy pants feel a little snug.   Some skinny kid from Franklinton with hunger pangs and dull eyes thanks you from the bottom of his heart.

Take a deep breath…

Counterpoint:  Operation Feed rocks.
I have volunteered at the Food Bank several times and have seen first hand what an impressive and remarkable operation it is. Even those volunteers whose primary motive is just to duck out of work for a couple of hours, end up doing a lot of heavy lifting.  Our company provides 34% of the meals and one out of every 4 volunteers for the Mid Ohio Food Bank, and is responsible for about 620,000 meals per year to hungry people in 6 counties.  So even though we do this partly by stuffing our own faces, taking the slim profit margins from food sales, and donating it to the Food Bank, that is pretty damned impressive.  So there.

Also–the department I work in has an Operation Feed pantry that is, to make up a statistic and a category on the spot, in the top .0000001% of all Operation Feed pantries in the western hemisphere.  I have seen the others.  A conference room table holding a pathetic array of granola bars next to a Dixie cup half full of loose change is not an op feed pantry, Marketing Department!  And you, over in HR?  What the hell is up with warm diet Fresca?  Get out of my sight!  In contrast, we have an entire kitchenette-like enclave that is literally brimming, chock full, of snackety and drinkety goodness.  We are in a new building two city blocks from the either one of the cafeterias where I work, so people flock from other floors in our building to marvel at the sheer magnitude of choices available.  We are even considering a full time pantry monitor to keep the gawkers and looky-loos from impeding the traffic flow and fucking with the feng shui.  The previous sentence is not in the least bit true.  But we do provide this veritable cornucopia of gastronomically delectable comestibles by making periodic trips–during work hours!–to haul the stuff back from Sam’s Club, by the pallet-load.  And that means mid-day road trips with Patti, Jason, Jamie and/or Conrad (depending on who’s available and whatnot), who are among the finest and most fun coworkers you could want to spend the time with …  So put that in your pipe and smoke it, hunger!

L.B.I.

It occurs to me that it is going to take longer to document my recent trip with my kids than it took to actually be on it.  I can’t figure out if that is a bad thing or not.  After all, M*A*S*H was a great TV show back in the day (except for some of the more ponderously moralistic and heavy-handed Alan Alda-directed episodes where he channeled his inner SNAG (that stands for Sensitive New Age Guy, by the way)), and it lasted way longer than the Korean War ever did. The shooting part, anyway.  I think they are still over there, staring daggers at one another and whatnot, even though I’ll bet you could count on two hands the number of actual dagger-starers who actually know what the fuck the staring is even about anymore. Not to suggest, either, that I think M*A*S*H was a documentary of actual events like this travelogue is.  Just that the telling outlasted the events, by a long shot.

Sunday morning we set out from Weehawken, got on the GSP and headed south.  Less than 40 minutes later I was off the Parkway and on the phone to my friend Ray.  Ray lives in Jersey but had spent the better part of two years as a technical consultant on a major project where I work, in Columbus.  He sat right in my cube most days, and we ended up getting along great.  He has since formed his own company, still in the same line of work, and we keep in touch occasionally.  I had gotten his address and mapquested it, and written down directions and done all that navigational due diligence.  But here I in Perth Amboy, trying to make out the new Mapquest directions back to Woodbridge on my Blackberry screen, when I finally called Ray back and asked him to talk me down from the ledge.  He pulled up beside my car in a gas station parking lot just as we heard the screech of another car locking up its brakes to narrowly avoid assholing the car in front of it out on the street.  Ray leaned out his window laughing and yelled, “Hey, huh? How’s about the ringside seats to the demolition derby!”  That was my kids’ introduction to him, and they liked him right away.

Since the last time I saw Ray at work, he and his wife have had a son, also named Ray.  We had stopped in Weehawken at Toys Backwards ‘R’ Us (or as it is properly known in some quarters, “We ‘B’ Toys ‘N’ Shit”) and bought a stuffed animal for little Ray, who had just turned 15.  (Months.  I have often wondered what the protocol is for switching from Months to Years as the appropriate measurement of age, as parents of youngsters will sometimes say “18 months” or “23 months” instead of “one and a half” or “holy shit they weren’t lying about the Terrible Twos.  Kee-Rist!”  After I turned 40 I tried it for a while:  “I am 483 months old.  It took a long time to recover my self esteem after I totally fucked up on that APGAR test score, but developmentally I am almost where I am supposed to be”.  That was like 130 months ago now, and since then I have way outgrown madcap antics of that ilk).  Anyway, we finally made our way to the home of Ray, Rena, Ray-ray, and Chester, who is a 3-legged dog with a bullet fragment still in his chest near the stump, that they traveled through a blizzard to pick up from the animal rescue.  I always pictured Ray as kind of a pistol, or maybe a little bit of a loose cannon.  Quintessential New Jersey guy, assertive with occasional hints of a temper, but real nice and down to earth.  I thought, when he got married, that his wife would certainly have her hands full.  But then I met his wife in person, last Sunday.  She is just a trip–quick and funny and no-b.s.–and it was clear right away that Ray is the one who has to toe the line.  And their kid is cute and sweet and easygoing.  Their dog is basically a 65 pound lapdog, well adapted to his new gait. We had burgers from the grill, pasta salad and potato salad, iced tea, and a very nice visit for a couple of hours.

At this point Jillian and Ian and I still had our actual destination up in the air.  Would it be Seaside and Tom’s River, or farther south to Long Beach Island?  We settled on the latter, and with good directions we lit out for the New Jersey Turnpike. And about 45 minutes later, there we were!  I had made many trips to various points up and down the shore in my high school and college days, and this area has long been my favorite.  Long Beach Island is about 18 miles long, and consists of several municipalities all up and down the island, each with its own character and flavor.  Beach, Ship Bottom, Surf City, Harvey Cedars, Barnegat Light, to name some of them.  Some of the towns have touristy business sections with coffee shops, arcades, beach stores and restaurants.  Some have the kind of old-fashioned general stores that remind me of the ones in quieter sections of the South Carolina Grand Strand.  Some had a higher density of what appeared to be year-round residences (this inferred from the property upkeep, landscaping and how lived-in the houses were), and some with more rental properties and seasonal condos.  We found a cool little old-fashioned motel called the North Shore Inn in the town of Barnegat Light, about 3 blocks from the northern end of the island.  From the motel room it was about a 3 block walk to the beach access path.  The path itself is about a quarter of a mile long, through grassy dunes and scrubby shore flora and sandy dunes, before getting to the actual beach.  It is actually more rustic and quiet than I emembered, but the places I used to stay were farther south on the island, surrounded by far more commercial activity.  There was some kind of weather or Gulf Stream phenomenon that I’m not quite clear on, that caused the water temperature to be at about 55 degrees the whole time.  Our first view of the ocean was breathtaking and weird.  The air above the sand was warm and clear, but above the water there hovered a blowing mist, thick like a fogbank, that was clearly delineated where the sand met the tide.  It looked like some kind of hackneyed visual cliche out of Stephen King, such was the starkness of contrast between the mist and the beach air.  The wind was from the south, and the fog was moving right along, but still thick enough that visibility was extremely limited. 

 

Jillian got some pictures, too, but I don’t have them yet.

About 1/3 mile from the oceanAt night...

 We went in the water and right back out, and we kept doing that.  The surf was choppy and strong but excellent for body surfing and boogie boarding.  But after 5 minutes at a time we couldn’t feel our toes.  Monday morning started the same way, with the added bonus we hadn’t noticed before of a foghorn, very close to the north of us.   I was out on the beach for about 3 hours before the air cleared enough to see a long jetty, about 1/2 mile away, with the foghorn on the end.  In the other direction, on the other hand, the lighthouse was clearly visible all morning and all day.  As I said, weird.

From the end of our beach access

Tuesday morning we got moving around 8:30.  The route to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and home took us through the Pine Barrens, which is more or less a desert that takes up much of the middle part of southern New Jersey.  Sandy soil and pine trees, for miles and miles.   For such a densely populated state, the southern part looks sparse and rugged and wild; and being in it, you can easily imagine the context from which the legends of the Jersey Devil emerged. 

My car did this in Ohio.

     

We got home in the early evening, after about 9 1/2 hours on the road.  It was good to be home.

All in all, WHAT AN AWESOME TRIP WE HAD!!!!

Jetty at sunset

Driving

We got checked into our hotel, unloaded the car, and then headed into NYC, hitting the Lincoln Tunnel at about 6:30 p.m. on Saturday.  It has been years since I drove in the city, but I felt right at home, as if it is been in my muscle memory all along and I have been driving for years under unnatural conditions.  I have lived in Ohio for 24 years, but I am still not quite used to some of the midwestern driving styles.  Not that they’re wrong, mind you, just…different.  For example: when a traffic light in New Jersey or New York turns green, generally the entire line of motorists will at least take their feet off the brakes and the entire line of vehicles will start to roll, albeit slowly at first, at the same time.  The subsequent spacing between vehicles sort of takes care of itself as they pick up speed.  In the midwest, the tendency is for the first car to move, then the second driver will remove his or her foot from the brake and start to roll, and only then will the subsequent driver even consider doing the same, and so on.  For 24 years, if I am the 4th or 5th (or higher) driver in line at a fresh green light, I start getting antsy and drumming my fingers on the wheel in anticipation when it will finally be my turn to go.  I have more or less resigned myself to the plodding and deliberate pace of the staggered start–what else are you gonna do?–and to the fact that only a fraction of cars that COULD make it through an average green light, actually will.  And I really only start screaming in my head (or out loud) when someone is doing the vehicular equivalent of the Thorazine shuffle, or driving like a complete retard at the sight of the first snowflake or raindrop.

As it turned out, I hit a red light right at the exit vortex from the Lincoln Tunnel, and I was about 10th or 12th in line.  My big chance to demonstrate my pet peeve!  I turn around to the kids and say “ok, here’s what I mean”.  Then I think, I don’t know, maybe I’ve been bitching about minutiae for years.  I mean, go outside on a starry night, contemplate the vastness of infinity and check out how big the fucking universe is, and then come back in and tell me how important it is that I make it through this light instead of the next one.  Seriously.  But on the other hand…sure enough, the light turned and everyone–everyone!–started moving in unison.  There were no fender benders, no panicky skid stops, no weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, no subsequent exchanging of insurance information, or fleeing the scene.  There was simply a row of cars doing what it should, but in a well-coordinated, choreographed fashion, pristine in its symmetry.  Ah, home…

Then one of the kids asked me to tell the story about the wreck and fight on the parkway.  Back in the day, I had a warehouse job that was about 4 miles away from my apartment.  The job moved to central Jersey, about 60 miles away.  I didn’t have it in me to put on enough of a game-day face and go make a favorable impression on some new job and boss, so I did the 120 mile per day commute for a while.  Exit 163 of the Garden State Parkway, south to where the New Jersey Turnpike intersects in Woodbridge, and then a few exits down the Turnpike before getting off at the one near Dayton and New Brunswick.  One morning there had been a heavy early rain.  The sun was out but the roads were still very wet and slick.  There was a construction zone on the Parkway, and traffic was moving at a medium pace.  Around one curve it came to a standstill, and cars were packed bumper to bumper (“bumpetabumpeta” as my friend Joe used to say). I noticed a set of skid marks on the shoulder which led to deep tire gouges in the muddy cut where the road went through a former hill.  This was right next to another pair of skid marks and tire gouges, which the keen-eyed passing motorist could follow up the hill to where one car rested on its side, front facing down the hill.  There was another car resting at an oblique angle, the debris field around which suggested that one of the cars had t-boned the other before they slid to a stop in the mud.  A few yards farther up the hill there were two gentlemen who were discussing the nuances of their recent vehicular altercation.  By “discussing” I mean “beating the shit out of each other over”.  One of the guys had loosened his tie and removed his sportcoat, and the other was dressed for a more blue collar workday.  Both of them appeared to be avid negotiators, as neither was giving the other a single god damn inch.  From the mud stains it was apparent that they had both lost their footing at some point, but in the short time I saw them they were up and punching.  I looked around briefly at the other rubberneckers, and at least half of them were just laughing their asses off.  I’m sure it was a nervous laughter, but for some reason I found that funny, so I did too. 

While it was very I-don’t-know-if-”relaxing”-is-quite-the-word-I’m-looking-for-here to drive without feeling like a complete impatient nutjob, I didn’t want to spend all evening in the car. So I pulled into a garage at 47th and 3rd and we got out to walk.  I have been to Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and many other large and medium cities–Columbus!–and they each have their own defining character.  But there is a raw, frenetic energy that seems unique to New York. It is almost energizing at first, and in small doses.  I love the pace and cadence.  We walked to Times Square, with its crush of people and visual overstimulation and sensory bombardment.  We ducked into a little eatery where we got sushi and pizza, and sat on a bench to eat.  Shopped in the Virgin Megastore and looked in a few other shops.  We then descended into a subway stop, where I had to do that squinty-eyed slack-jawed tourist thing where I figure out how to read the subway map and the Metro Pass ticket dispensing machine. 

Side note:  Back in that previous life, I would occasionally drive in to the City after the 2:00 a.m. closing time for New Jersey bars.  The only rule in New York was that a bar could not stay open 24 hours a day, so they would close at 5:00 am and reopen at 6:00, giving the proprietors a chance to splash witchhazel on the floors and straighten up the chairs.  Some of those times I stayed well past my intended departure because I could not remember where I parked my car.  With typical drunken resourcefulness, the solution to that was to park, then write the nearest intersection on my palm.  That way all I had to do was read it, or hold my hand out to a passerby and say “where’s that?”   Have I mentioned that I am extremely lucky and grateful to be alive?  And that for several years in my twenties, I was an absolute fate-tempting dumbass?

We got a subway to Houston street and walked around SoHo and Greenwich Village for a while.  Listened to an a capella group sing “My Girl” in sweet 5 part harmony.  Walked through Washington Square, where an entertainer had rolled a spinet piano on a movers’ dolly to a spot near the fountain, and was playing some lively sounding classical music.  The crowd there was very quiet and attentive, and it almost felt like we were crashing a private party.  Found a bookstore that Jillian just absolutely loved–geared toward alternative and countercultural subject matter.  I leafed through some Bukowski while she browsed.  We walked several blocks down to the site of the World Trade Center, which is now a huge construction area.  I did not really expect a particular reaction to the traumatic history and the scar in the skyline, and I did not really get one.  A flash of sadness for the families of the victims, and a little bit of an under-the-ribs chill.  I went to college in Gettysburg, and spent many many late nights walking around the battlefield, and have felt that there, too.  It was late and kind of quiet, but there were still a lot of people walking around.  We walked down to the riverfront where we could see Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty to the southwest.  We caught a subway back to Times Square, which was still as hopping as ever, and got to the car at about 1:00 a.m.   It took me several laps to negotiate the vortex that is the feeder lane to the outbound Lincoln Tunnel.  I have no idea how I ever managed that back in “those” years.  We ended up back at the motel at about 2:00.  The consensus was that we had had a blast, and were tired.

Saturday at Doug’s, out of the blue…

I had not seen my friend Doug since 1990.  Before that I hadn’t seen him since 1984, when he dropped me off at the Newark Airport for my big geographical cure.  Doug was one of my best friends in high school.  At age 15, he and I and one other guy took a weeklong bicycle trip on which we rode our bikes from Allendale (waaaaay up north, near Suffern, NY) to Cape May (southern tip), and back to Tom’s River (middle part), where one of the moms met us and drove us home. 

After freshman year of college, Doug and I took jobs driving Pied Piper ice cream trucks (“sales and delivery of frozen dairy products”, I called it on job applications for years after that).  We had different routes, but always compared notes, and got into exactly the kind of shenanigans you would expect from that kind of job.  For example, we found out that ice cream trucks can pop wheelies (very top-heavy, spongy leaf springs, no shocks, fantastic torque and acceleration.  Get that baby rocking front to back with rhythmic taps on the gas, then PUNCH IT and bingo, the front end is airborne.  Might have only been 6 inches off the ground, but it felt like Evel Knievel flying across the Snake River Canyon.  Hey, I didn’t invent the ice cream truck wheelie, but after that one burned-out hoodlum Dave showed it to us in the parking lot, I couldn’t wait to show it off to all my customers.  Not all of them, just the ones who would be impressed, mostly teenagers and other burned out stoners, and a few of the cooler little kids).  I also found out that when you snap the a-frame on the front suspension of your ice cream truck and the front wheel toes in, disconnects from the axle and falls off on the street–presumably from one too many wheelies–you can make Ernie from the Pied Piper depot turn all kinds of shades of purple as he and another guy drive up from Paterson, NJ to Haverstraw, NY with a replacement ice cream truck and a towtruck.   That other guy was a mechanical genius to keep those things running the way he did, let me tell you what…

Another summer, after sophomore year of college, Doug and I had a job sort of lined up, to work on a salmon trawler out of Seattle.  We spent 5 days hitchhiking to Seattle, during which we met an amazing and incredible variety of people.  (I have written about bits and pieces of that trip, and would like to put it all together some day).  We missed the boat (in many ways), and ended up working for Manpower and doing odd jobs in Seattle all summer.  Doug plays bagpipes–there was a Scottish motif in our high school–and he had brought them.  Day One of hitching, I was thinking to myself “what a knucklehead.  The fuck’s he gonna drag those things across the country for?  Jeez!”   By the end of Day 3, when those bagpipes had scored us all kinds of rides between New Jersey and South Dakota, and free drinks courtesy of local people in little bars in Illinois and Keystone, S.D., I was fully on board with Doug having his bagpipes along.  Doug got a busker’s license in Seattle and played his pipes at the Pike Street Market.  By the end of the day his case would be literally overflowing with bills and loose change, with the added bonus (where he was concerned) of baleful glares from the guys playing guitar and other, quieter instruments, who had far more pitiful piles of money to show for their musical efforts.  Bagpipes in real life are EXTREMELY LOUD up close, by the way.  I like the sound of them all the same.

A couple years later, after I had some, ahem, legal difficulties as a result of my dabbling in the, ahem,  subterranean economy in Pennsylvania, and was trying to make a fresh start by returning to New Jersey, I moved into an apartment with Doug in Midland Park, NJ in 1982. 

All this is by way of illustrating that Doug and I had some history together.  But my trajectory took me to Columbus, and I sort of let it slide, and we did not keep in touch over the years. 

So this past Saturday afternoon, I stood in the parking lot of our old apartment building and dialed information, asking for his number.  Turns out it was the same number we used to have, and he lived with his family about 3 blocks away.  He and his wife have three teenagers, and they live in a very cool house with a swimming pool and a nice yard.  He is CTO for a chain of Karate schools in NJ, NY, CT and FL.  He says it is a made-up title, and that there are only 8 employees in the technology division, but I am suitably impressed all the same. 

He also teaches bagpipes to–well, here:

http://www.northjersey.com/betterliving/news/A_pack_of_rockin_pipers.html

I said something like “nothing like short notice” and he said “I wouldn’t expect it any other way” and we caught up for a couple of hours.  My kids really liked his family, and we had a great visit.  I should really not wait so many years between visits. 

Later that afternoon, Jillian and Ian and I checked into a hotel in Weehawken, on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel….