A Sunset Journey into History

Eve and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary on October 9, 2010 with a sundown wine-and-cheese trip aboard the parlor car "Marian" on the Strasburg Rail Road, through some lovely, pastoral Lancaster County, Pennsylvania countryside. Having spent the first years of my boyhood in the age of steam locomotives and elegant passenger trains, this was more of a sentimental journey than I'd expected. I can still remember living close to both the Pennsylvania and Reading railroad lines in the Schuylkill Valley across the river from Conshohocken and falling asleep to the sounds of trains passing in the night -- the chuffing of the engines and the haunting wail of steam whistles. The air horns on today's Diesel locomotives don't even come close to that melancholy quality. The Strasburg Rail Road is a wonderful window into a day we'll never see again in this country, except where historically-minded folks take the time and effort to preserve and re-create these extraordinary pieces of machinery...

The Iron HorseAnd the Sinews of the Iron Horse.

We came to this adventure expecting a good time, and we certainly got what we bargained for. However, we didn't expect to be riding in such distinguished company... Someone told President Roosevelt he had a lot of nerve to be traveling in luxury with a woman not his wife. Ah, well. Luxury it was, and a fitting capstone to seventeen years of wedded bliss -- ours, that is; not necessarily Teddy's...

At the Foot of Broad Street

IT'S PROBABLY NOT generally known, but at the foot of Broad Street in Philadelphia, at the U.S. Naval Base, is what's left of the Henry C. Mustin Naval Air Facility -- a military airfield now abandoned and slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. Grass and even small trees sprout between cracks in the concrete of what once were runways where vintage warplanes took off and landed in the 1930s through the 1940s and perhaps even into the '50s. My little springtime wandering brought me to this place, which I'd last seen in 1976 when I was stationed at the Navy yard as a liaison officer to visiting ships during the Bicentennial celebration. Here's a big hangar which now serves as a commissary for Navy Yard personnel, of whom there are fewer and fewer with every passing year (note the jetliner making its approach to Philadelphia International Airport several miles to the north of Mustin Field)... I wasn't sure whether I was venturing into forbidden territory as I drove north along the Delaware into the semi-wilderness of the old airfield. I didn't see any "Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs, but I remember the Navy Yard being a seriously security-conscious place back in my Cub Scout field-trip days, when they didn't even allow cameras to be brought through the gate.

Adjoining the airfield complex were a goodly number of abandoned row homes, which undoubtedly housed base families back when Mustin Field was a going concern. It was an eerie feeling to be wandering in the midst of a ghost town within the geographic limits of one of the nation's largest cities. It occurred to me that, homelessness being the urban problem it is, these structures might have been fixed up and put to good use in some fashion...

The Naval Base is also the last stop before the razor-blade factory for a number of ships comprising the nation's mothball fleet. Back in the day, the carrier Enterprise and the battleship Iowa were moored there, along with a host of cruisers, destroyers and other ships of the line. On this particular day, however, I saw mostly retired amphibious vessels and minesweepers. Here's an image of a dock landing ship of the type that steamed with our squadron deployed in the Caribbean in 1968 and 1969... And the strange-looking ship you see in this image is a Newport class tank landing ship that wasn't even in commission back when I was an LST engineering officer in '69... Back in MY day, the stars of the LST fleet were the Suffolk County class -- bigger than but essentially no different from the ships that landed tanks and vehicles over the beach at Normandy in 1944... Although I can say with a straight face that I served in the country's naval forces in the Vietnam years, I got real lucky with respect to WHERE I served. If I had extended my service contract for an additional year, I was looking at shore duty with a beachmaster unit in the Mediterranean. But I'll never know what an adventure that might have been because I opted to return to civilian life at the first opportunity.

I guess we can drive ourselves nuts pondering what might have been.

It was a rather melancholy thing to see what's become of Philadelphia's Naval Base, but I was glad to have dropped in for a look-see. The next -- and last -- stop on my sentimental journey was 1714 Sylvan Lane, Gladwyne, PA, where my family lived from 1957 to 1997. There were a number of trees in the front yard which survived the grading and landscaping during construction, and it appeared one of them had finally given up the ghost. The new owners had done something I've never seen before, and I must say it's one of the most creative and imaginative uses of a dead tree I've ever seen... My Dad was a talented whittler. I think he would have approved this piece of work.

And so, surfeited with nostalgia, I charted a course for Reading (which is not an easy place to get to from Philadelphia when the traffic is heavy), and the next day I was back in harness, slogging away through the swampland known as The Practice of Law. If I keep practicing, and if I live long enough, I just may get it right.

Springtime in the City

One pretty day last April, I got my usual case of springtime wanderlust. Since nothing dramatic was going on at the office, I proudly and unabashedly decided to go off on a little frolic to my old home town, Philadelphia. Since I was in no particular hurry, I drove down Kelly Drive, along the east shore of the Schuylkill. In the East Falls section of the city, I visited Castle Ringstetten, the upriver clubhouse and social quarters of the Undine Barge Club, one of the venerable rowing clubs whose boats are housed along Boathouse Row several miles downriver....

Many years ago, I put in a lot of miles pulling an oar (or, in some cases, a pair of sculls) up and down the Schuylkill, wearing the colors either of the Undine Barge Club or The Haverford School. Won my share of medals and trophies and plaques and other hardware, which still collects dust around the house. Castle Ringstetten was locked up tight that day, but I remember what a wonderful museum of late nineteenth-century Philadelphiana the place contains. Back then (and still today, I'm sure), Undinians gathered there for several dinner meetings every year, each time beginning the meal with the traditional "Handle Oars!" (pick up silverware); "Toss!" (bang silverware on table); "Let Fall!" (drop silverware back on table, with as much noise as possible).

Well, I didn't get inside, but I wandered around back, where it appeared some horticulturally-inclined folks had been at work on an azalea garden... By this time, I was good and hungry, so I wandered down to Fourth and Bainbridge Streets for a visit to the Famous Fourth Street Deli...

The Famous, as it's known among those who love it, was a favorite haunt during my Naval Reserve days at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the '70s and the '80s. The fella who ran the place in those days -- David something-or-other -- would spot a bunch of us in uniform coming through the door and holler to the waitress who usually served us, "Stand by, Maggie! The fleet's in!"

My salivary glands still experience a Pavlovian torrent at the memory of huge piles of warm beef brisket on an onion roll, with cole slaw and Russian dressing, and a great big Kosher dill pickle. So, I guess you know what I had for lunch that day. It took some determination to finish the thing, it was so big, but I certainly wasn't going to allow any of that to escape.

Burping happily, I toddled off to my next destination, which I'll tell you about next time.

Something new? What?

All righty, then. Summer 2010 vanished in the space of a few rather silly blog entries about vacation trips.

"Get some new material, man!" I hear a still, small voice urging somewhere in the distance.

"What new material?" says I. "There's nothing new under the sun. It's just the same old merry-go-round, day after day."

"Ah. You're not paying attention, then," replies the SSV.

So, your humble correspondent will now try to get back into the habit of taking more notice of what's going on around him.

Count on it. But don't bet the ranch -- yet.

End-of-Summer Wrap-Up, 2010

Anyone glancing from time to time at this electronic feuilleton could be forgiven for thinking I lead a hopelessly humdrum life, having reported on nothing in the entire summer of 2010 other than a three-day trip to various points north of here. Lazy? Maybe. Humdrum? No! For example, one stifling night in July we heard a loud snap and a crash in our front yard. The harsh light of day revealed this...

It may not look like much in the picture, but it was a HUGE limb from the aging sweet-gum tree in our front yard, and it missed my car by a couple of feet. It served as a neighborhood conversation piece for several days, before a tree specialist removed it.

Then, at the end of August, there was the Family Vacation From...uh...I mean, the Family Vacation to the Nether Regions -- namely Virginia. This epic adventure was the brainchild of my wife Eve and her daughter Taryn; I was informed in no uncertain terms that this trip was to orbit exclusively around Taryn's daughter Kyla, age 7, and I had no authority or responsibility whatsoever, but only the privilege of paying for gas and meals. I had certain reservations about this, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut and bring a good book to read.

First on the agenda was Virginia Beach. I have fond memories of Virginia Beach, having lived there in the winter of 1969, when it looked like this one cold night...

In late August 2010, it bore a much closer resemblance to a popular Atlantic beach resort town...

We shoe-horned five persons and all their gear into an average-sized motel room in one of the beach-front high-rise hotels. The grandparents spent three luxurious nights slumbering fitfully on a fold-out sofa-bed while the huge-screen TV flickered violently and soundlessly because one of our number (who shall remain nameless here) proved nocturnal, insomniac, and utterly oblivious to more traditional notions of allowing others a decent night's sleep.

On Friday of that weekend, after a frantic and fruitless search for my GPS device which had gone missing in the chaos of our living quarters, we set out in caravan, to proceed up the James River peninsula. Colonial Williamsburg was our focal point; but, lurking in the background like a black widow spider in a bad mood, was (ominous music) BUSCH GARDENS!! I would rather crawl on my belly through broken glass and plunge into a pool of isopropyl alcohol than go to Busch Gardens in the middle of summer with a seven-year-old child. Call me an old grouch if you want; I come by it honestly and I named this blog accordingly.

I remember Williamsburg from November 1960, when my parents and two brothers and I spent the Thanksgiving holiday there in one of the historic inns on Duke of Gloucester Street. It was good to get back and wander around for a couple of days. Here are a couple of images of the Governor's Palace...

I have great respect for the folks who put so much effort into maintaining Williamsburg as a faithful representation of the way things looked in that part of Virginia when it was still a British colony. I also have great respect for my son-in-law's father, who arranged for us to stay in one of the apartments at the Historic Powhatan Village, part of an international time-share resort empire whose name I've forgotten. Where the quarters in Virginia Beach were a bit too cozy for comfort, this place was a sheer delight.

It broke my heart when Eve told me we would not be able to join the kids at Busch Gardens on Sunday, because we had to drive home and be ready to rejoin the ratrace the following day. When I learned of this change of plans, I felt as if the governor had issued a pardon moments before the death-row warden could throw the switch.

And so, we hit the open road and made our leisurely way north, past Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, York and Lancaster, back to our home and our sweet-gum tree which mercifully had not dropped any more limbs. With only a modicum of shrill back-seat driving from somewhere on my right flank, I brought Eve's beloved PT Cruiser back to port unscathed. And then...

...peace reigned over the realm. And I found my GPS unit in my suicase, right where I'd left it several days before.

The Road Trip: Finale

I simply MUST complete the June 2010 road-trip saga before the summer ends.

So, without further ado:

I arrived at Harvard Yard around 4:30 Friday afternoon, after an uneventful straight shot across the Mass Pike from the Berkshires. As it turned out, I was just in time to walk with Lindsay from Grays Middle to Nora's day-care center down on the Cambridge bank of the Charles River. I'd hoped to have a current picture of Nora for you, but I've already mentioned the camera casualty that rendered that impossible. Here's one from a year earlier... The face and hair are more filled-out, but the personality is just the same -- albeit quite a bit more verbal. That evening, Brad and Lindsay (and Nora) treated me to a birthday dinner at John Harvard's Brew House, a popular Cambridge watering hole with a pleasant rathskeller ambiance and a menu of some old favorites as well as some unusual items, such as pulled-pork sliders and pizzas built on crusts baked from dough incorporating spent grain from the brewing process. It was good to see the kids -- all three of them -- and settle the dust from the road with a bite of food and a glass or two of the local ale.

Back at the apartment, Lindsay whipped an ice-cream cake out of the freezer and we polished off a decent chunk of it at a table in the Yard as evening descended and the campus began showing early signs of the impending rush of summer students expected the next day.

One of the objectives of this trip was a visit to my Dartmouth classmate and best man John Kornet and his wife Diana (best known as Pokey). Brad and Lindsay had a function to attend on Saturday afternoon, so I headed down the South Shore to Cohasset, where the Kornets live in waterfront splendor. After almost being completely stymied by weekend traffic bound for Cape Cod (which makes Philadelphia-to-South-Jersey weekend traffic look like a walk in the park by comparison), I arrived to find the annual Arts Festival in full swing on the grounds of the First Parish Church... This was a gala function indeed. John was manning a display featuring a group (whose name I have sadly forgotten) whose function is to produce and distribute complete portable disaster relief shelter and equipment packages for rapid deployment to worldwide disaster sites such as post-earthquake Haiti. It was fascinating to see how much equipment, including cooking equipment, utensils and a tent to shelter up to ten people, could be packed into a rectangular box not much larger than a full-size household refrigerator-freezer. Here's a shot of John and Pokey...

As always seems to happen when I get together with these folks (altogether too seldom), the years fell away and we were reminiscing (and swapping lies) about the good old days and wondering where the time had gone. It was a great visit. Too short, but a great visit. I drove back to Boston in a thoroughly mellow mood, enjoyed a home cooked dinner with the kids -- all three of them -- and watched a movie (whose title I have conveniently forgotten) about the mistreatment of women in certain Muslim societies which, although nauseating, couldn't dampen my good spirits.

Next morning, it was time to bring my Road Trip to a merciful end and head for the barn. I took my leave after breakfast (that Lindsay knows how to make pancakes) and was home well before sundown.

I don't know what all this proves -- if anything -- other than the realization (which I've hinted at before) that we can revisit old haunts and old friends and cherished relatives, but we cannot turn back the clock or the calendar. That isn't news, I know: perhaps Rabbie Burns said it best in the ballad of Tam O' Shanter:

"Nae mon can tether time nor tide..." v>

The Road Trip - Chapter II: On to the Berkshires

It was good to shake the dust of Poughkeepsie from my feet. The place baked in the relentless sunlight and just looked tired, dusty, and best seen in the rear-view mirror. The road (U.S. Route 44) then took me north and east, through Millbrook and Amenia in Dutchess County and across the line into Connecticut. In Canaan, U.S. 7 meets Route 44 and heads north into Massachusetts. I had programmed my GPS device to take me to Southfield, Mass., the home town of my dear departed law school friend and classmate Jim Stevens, seen here in June 1978 with my daughter Lindsay, then just a year and a half old, at the top of the World Trade Center (remember?) in New York City... And with your humble correspondent at the Scottish games in Round Hill, Connecticut, in July 1991... A tiny village in the southern Berkshire Hills, Southfield has come a long way since I visited Jim there first in late 1974. We were both first-year law students then and had bonded in our mutual bewilderment at the utterly baffling stuff we had been studying for the past several months. Jim was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and his academic abilities sustained me through many a bout of despair over the mysteries of Marbury v. Madison and other landmark Supreme Court decisions he'd already studied in his undergraduate history courses. In those days, Jim worked holidays at the Southfield village store, which then did double duty as a general store and the municipal post office. Today, new owners have turned it into a Yuppie-chic gourmet cafe and restaurant catering to the burgeoning throngs of urbanites who have established vacation homes in the area... Ultimately, Jim Stevens's story is a tragic one (in keeping with the tone of my road trip? I hoped not). After a long and hard-fought battle with a recurring brain tumor, he died just about 13 years ago to the day, the father of a wonderful son, veteran of many years of criminal prosecution work in the Manhattan District Attorney's office and then a well-respected country practitioner in Great Barrington. It was fond memories of that friendship, so many of them centered on Jim's beloved Southfield, which had brought me there on my 65th birthday, to lay a wreath (figuratively) at his resting place in this idyllic little town seemingly in the middle of nowhere...

My daughters called him "Uncle Jimmy." He was godfather to Lindsay, and honorary godfather to Janet. I was godfather to his son, Armen. While were were at Villanova, he was an almost regular weekend guest in our home, where we tried to feed him up a bit from the diet of cold cereal and freeze-dried mashed potatoes which sustained him during the week in the rooming-house where he lived. His boyhood hero was John Wayne; I remember giving him for his birthday in 1975 a big book of photo stills from movies in which the Duke had starred -- and snippets of whose dialogue Jim could rattle off by heart.

This was another rather melancholy stop on my sentimental journey into New England, but in the end an uplifting one, so I thought. Sometimes it's good to remember places and people who have held vast tracts of one's interior landscape.

Now, it was time to drive up through Stockbridge, Lenox and Lee, get on the Mass Pike, aim the car east, and make a beeline the 112 miles to Boston, then Cambridge, then Harvard Yard, and to turn away from the land of the melancholy to a place of joy, youth, energy -- and Nora Jeanne Molyneaux and her parents!

The Road Trip - Chapter I: Darkness at Midday

All right. It's time to stop crying over unexposed film and get on with the story.

The first destination on my road trip was 139 Academy Street, Poughkeepsie, New York, an historic Hudson Valley farmhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was the home where my first wife was raised with her four siblings in such a Bedlam of chaos and dysfunctional relationships that sanity was in critically short supply (if the family folklore is to be believed). Of course, many things become clear only in hindsight. Things seemed normal enough in the Poughkeepsie homestead during most of the two decades of that marriage (1970-1990) -- if one disregarded my ex-mother-in-law's penchant for collecting strange derelict characters and lodging them on the third floor, a kitchen which might have been condemned by the public health authorities (the refrigerator especially), and enough misery and weirdness to have filled a fat novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

So what drew me back to the place? Curiosity, plain and simple. Morbid curiosity? Perhaps. The house has been out of my late ex-wife's family for a good many years now. From outward appearances, it's in the process of falling down, like the House of Usher. It's hard to tell if the place is even inhabited (by living human beings, I mean); certainly no one challenged my walking onto the property to take pictures. It exhaled darkness and decay, even in the middle of a bright day in June 2010.

On this side porch, guests gathered to go through the receiving line after our wedding in August 1970. After looking at the pictures, you may decide for yourself whether or not you'd be willing to set foot on that porch for any purpose. The front of the house, facing Academy Street, was once an imposing specimen of Hudson Valley Victorian architecture; now it's just a specimen of faded glory.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. So far, my epic sentimental journey was looking a bit shabby and melancholy around the edges. You can't go home again, wrote Thomas Wolfe. It has something to do with time and the river.

DAMMIT!!

One of my worst fears spread its big black bat wings, flew out of its cave and hovered over my head, blotting out the sunshine and plunging me into the midnight of despair. When I returned from the Road Trip (see previous), the roll of color film I had been shooting during said Road Trip was still in the camera. Subsequent events revealed that the film roll had not seated itself properly on the take-up sprocket; or, to put it plainly, I had been shooting pictures of NOTHING. But I'm a seasoned enough photographer to have been carrying a back-up camera loaded with black-and-white film. So, unless I screw up the processing of that film, I should have something to show you in a few days. In the meantime, my shimmering prose will have to suffice....

The Road Trip -- Prologue

LIKE ALL complex logistic operations, my Official 2010 First-Days-of-the-Rest-of-My-Life-65th-Birthday-Father's-Day-Summer-Solstice Road Trip had its genesis in meticulous planning. I spent at least fifteen minutes squinting at maps and trying to remember why certain places shown on those maps had some nostalgic or sentimental significance that would justify the time, expense and wear and tear of a solo pilgrimage in my long-in-the-tooth (123,000 miles) 2003 Dodge Neon. I didn't have the time or (so I thought, anyway) the stamina to visit every place in New England that had been formative in my life over the last almost fifty years.

So, we may write of other road trips. For now, we'll concentrate on this one.

Since I was traveling solo, I had the luxury of selecting the musical theme for the voyage. Don't ask me why, but I chose Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony -- the "Symphony of a Thousand" -- as suitably majestic and lengthy (not to say tedious) enough to gobble up road miles by the dozen. I listened to it three times on the outward journey and three times on the trip home, in each case with multiple re-plays of the portions which REALLY gave me goosebumps.

The camera gear was important, too. I loaded both Pentaxes, made sure my gadget bag was full of spare ammunition and lenses, flash, tripod, etc. This was going to be a PICTORIAL pilgimage, worthy of such stalwarts as The National Geographic, even if I wasn't packing a nuclear-powered, turbocharged Model K9-P Nikoltacanonflex Digital Demon DSLR Deluxe with hazelnut flavoring and cinnamon sprinkles. Nope, I was going to use film, you see -- with tragic results as you may read presently.

***

AND NOW THE DAY OF DEPARTURE HAD DAWNED!! With a full tank of gas, a big cup of coffee and a couple of contraband doughnuts (another positive aspect of traveling solo), and with Veni, veni, Creator Spiritus ringing forth in full choral splendor from the rear speakers (yet another good thing about flying solo: I get to set the volume where I want), I set out heading east and north, bound for the Hudson River Valley, Dutchess County, and the Town of Poughkeepsie. This was the situs of my first marriage, if you please, and an oft-visited place during the two decades of that (ill-fated in some ways but not others) liaison.

But now, dear readers, I shall leave you while I spend a few days trying to dream up the next episode in this ridiculous saga....

The First Days of the Rest of My Life: My 65th Birthday, Father's Day, Summer Solstice Road Trip

Watch this blog for stories and pictures from my epic (?) First Days of the Rest of My Life Sixty-Fifth Birthday Summer Solstice A. D. 2010 Road Trip. It covered about 800 miles and 40 years, with stops in Poughkeepsie, New York; Southfield, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cohasset, Massachusetts. The characters ranged in age from two and a half years to ... well ... deceased. Stay tuned!

OBX? OK! SIC? OK! ROG? WTF???

IF YOU drive a car in traffic, you've seen these little emblems people put on their cars, to say something about themselves. Most often, these are the initials of places the car owner has visited, and found recreationally meaningful or significant, or initials of a college attended or some other talisman. This is one of those little find-the-image-that-doesn't-make-a-bloody-bit-of-sense tests. Please look over the following (this is dead easy, trust me) images, and find the one that doesn't make a bloody bit of sense. Have fun!

Now, we all know this is the ubiquitous "Outer Banx" (huh?) status symbol. This means the driver of the car in question and his/her family (if any) has/have spent time in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and that he/she/it/they can't spell. This one tells us the driver's status involves time spent at a lovely community on the South Jersey seashore. At least this driver knows how to spell the name of his/her/its/their particular vacation Shangri-La.

NOW, for the one that doesn't make a bloody bit of sense...

WHAT??? This is one crazy-ass message. What is/are this person(s) saying?? I spend my vacation at the ORTHODONTIST?? I spend so much money on my orthodontist I can't afford a vacation at OBX or SIC? I have a whole lot of status and you should kiss my ass because I spend money at the orthodontist? I'm providing free advertising for my orthodontist because he/she's charging me out the ying-yang for teeth-straightening?

I'd be most obliged if some reader could explain this puzzle to me....

Up in the San Juans, 1966

Having just turned 21, I spent the summer of 1966 with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Bellevue, Washington, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. Over the Independence Day weekend, we took the family's cabin cruiser, Molly Brown, on a voyage in the San Juan Islands just below the Canadian border in Puget Sound. Since it was the Pacific Northwest, it rained just about all the time, and memory tells me we didn't see blue sky or sun the entire four-day weekend. But, so what? Once you're wet, you can't get any wetter, right? One of our ports of call was a place called Boat Harbor, a place I haven't been able to locate anywhere in cyberspace today -- so maybe, like Brigadoon, it only appears once every so many years. As I recall, Boat Harbor was pretty much the exclusive domain of the Kendall family in those days, and the Kendalls, like Boat Harbor, seemed pretty elusive and ... well, ominous in absentia. The Kendalls did, however, make their attitude toward visitors pretty plain... In case there's any doubt in your mind about what a "haywire private dock" looks like, this image should give you an idea... Across the harbor, seemingly careened on the beach for caulking, but on closer examination permanently affixed to the real estate, was a vessel which may or may not ever have gone to sea, but which now apparently swashbuckled from a fixed position... All of this happened so long ago, I wouldn't even try to chronicle it were it not for the photographic evidence. Even though I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest that summer, I've only been back once -- for a short visit in May 2008 with my cousin and his wife in Gig Harbor, near Tacoma. There's still nothing that stirs my love for the sea quite as much as the clear, cold, wildly tidal waters of the North (anywhere in the world, but particularly here), teeming with creatures and peopled by quirky characters like the Kendalls (if they ever existed).

A Visit to the Graveyard of the Atlantic II -- An Ocracoke Interlude

One of the great free rides in this country is the ferry that plies the waters of Hatteras Inlet between Hatteras Island and Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. From May 12 to September 28 every year, they run every half hour from 6:00 A.M. to midnight. The ride takes about 40 minutes, which gives you just enough time to get out of your car, wander around the decks and – on the way over – prepare yourself for a visit to a wild and wonderful seashore, jealously preserved and defended against the kind of gaudy, cheesy high-rise junk that’s ruined so much of our nation’s seacoast. Gordie and I boarded the ferry at about mid-afternoon on the Saturday of our high-adventure camping weekend (see previous post); by the time we debarked on Ocracoke, the sun was shining. Things were looking up. So we thought. We drove down Highway 12 to the National Park Service campground, about three miles north of Ocracoke Village, and booked a site to pitch our still-soggy Navy-issue tent. The park guard told us they were expecting a tropical storm to blow through during the next 24 hours. We said thank you and proceeded to set up the tent and hang some of our wet stuff out to dry.... Then we drove down to Ocracoke Village, a seriously tiny little town that looked like little more than a collection of fishing shacks. As I recall, there was one restaurant, whose name has long since faded from my memory. We stopped there to eat, and came face-to-face with the 1975 Ocracoke version of clam chowder – a thin brownish soup containing some clams (since, by Federal regulation, a restaurateur is prohibited from calling anything “clam chowder” that doesn’t have clams in it) and a large quantity of sand. A forerunner of the high-fiber diet craze, I suppose. At supper, we overheard some more chatter about “Tropical Storm Amy,” which was said to be brewing out there someplace we couldn’t see it. From the Cedar Island Ferry landing in Ocracoke Village, we viewed a sunset much too romantic for two Navy guys away from their significant others, and drowned our sorrows in some of our onboard liquor supplies. After dark had fallen, we returned to our campsite and made preparations to bunk down for the night. Just before lights-out, a park ranger came around in his Jeep and told us the ferry service was being suspended after 9:00 P.M. because of storm warnings. If we weren’t aboard that ferry, we wouldn’t be getting off the island until service resumed sometime the next day. In other words, we had about 20 minutes to catch the last ferry, or else... We did notice that the wind was picking up. After a brief, half-sober council of war, we decided that no little tropical storm could keep us from our adventure, and turned in. After a short while, we noticed the wind was picking up a bit more, and it seemed to have started raining again. And so to sleep, lulled by the whisper of the wind and the gentle drumming of the rain on our not-so-waterproof tent.... It was about 3:00 A.M. when we awoke in at least six inches of water, with our tent collapsed all around us. The wind howled and the rain drove down in torrents. For mid-July, it was cold. We got the tent standing again, after a fashion, and bailed out as much standing water as we could. Then, with what was starting to feel like grim determination, we curled up in soaking misery and occupied our individual versions of hell until morning. Which looked something like this.... I don’t know exactly why it is, not being much of a meteorologist, but once a big storm blows through, the weather usually turns beautiful. The sun was shining again; the wind had dropped to a dead calm. We took bleary-eyed stock of our situation, set up drying clotheslines, splashed some water on our faces (as if that would help anything), had another beer and went back to the Village for breakfast. We noticed that portions of Highway 12 were flooded to a depth that made Gordie quite cautious about navigating. Spirits restored by a day in the sunshine, we boarded the Cedar Island ferry for the two-hour trip back to the mainland, from which we returned to Norfolk by way of Morehead City, with only one automotive breakdown when something hiccupped in the Mazda's Wankel engine (which we all know run by magic and at the time were not too well understood by auto mechanics in rural North Carolina gas stations). After some duct-tape and baling-wire repairs, we got the old Mazda running well enough to get us home not too ridiculously late, ready for another week of Anti-Submarine Warfare School, which should probably have been called "Anti-Climactic Submarine Warfare School That's how I remember it, anyway -- with the help of some old photos I found in the back of a closet. See the following link to a wonderful Ocracoke blog: http://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2010/05/reentry-stickers.html

A Visit to the Graveyard of the Atlantic, Chapter 1

It was July 1975. My friend Gordie Keen and I had been sent to the Anti-Submarine Warfare School at the Destroyer-Submarine Base in Norfolk, Virginia, for a two week tour of Naval Reserve duty. On the intervening weekend, we decided it would be fun to take a camping trip down the Outer Banks of North Carolina. So, we checked out a tent and other camping supplies from Navy Special Services and set out Friday evening in Gordie's Mazda sedan. By the time we reached Hatteras Island, it was raining pretty heavily, and we discovered our Navy-issue tent wasn't exactly waterproof. We had one or two bottles of Seagram's 7 and a cooler full of beer (Schmidt's of Philadelphia! Remember?), so we had no trouble getting to sleep, rain notwithstanding. We arose Saturday morning with clothing dampened but spirits undaunted and proceeded to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Park, where we climbed the 268 steps to the light platform of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a/k/a "The Big Barber Pole"... There, 208 feet above sea level, the wind was a mighty elemental force, as you can see...

The visibility was so poor you couldn't see much on the seaward side; but, looking straight down, you could see an amusing bit of seaweed graffiti on the beach... I don't know exactly what the viewer was being exhorted to do (jump off, perhaps?), but what we did was the only sensible thing to do on a day like that: Drive to Hatteras Village and eat breakfast.

Next we checked out the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station in Rodanthe. Fascinating place, those Outer Banks. Many ships came to grief on the treacherous Diamond Shoals off Hatteras and elsewhere along the Outer Banks, nicknamed "The Graveyard of the Atlantic." You can still see the skeletons of wooden and iron ships along the beaches -- which, by the way, in good weather are some of the loveliest beaches in the world.

As the day wore on, we took the ferry from Hatteras Island to Ocracoke, but I'll tell you about that next time.

A DASHING YOUNG CAVALRYMAN

Here's my paternal grandfather, Joseph French Page, in the dress uniform of the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry. The photo was taken about 1910, but the uniform is of mid-nineteenth-century style. The Philadelphia Light Horse are considered the oldest military unit in continuous existence in the United States (and the British colonies before that). Organized in 1774, the Troop saw service with Washington's army in battles at Trenton (1776), Princeton (1777), the Brandywine, and Germantown and with the Continental Army encamped at Valley Forge (1777). A unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard, the Troop served under General Black Jack Pershing in the Mexican Punitive Expedition in 1916 and were featured in an entertaining novel by Glendon Swarthout titled The Tin Lizzie Troop. During World War I, they formed part of the 28th "Keystone" Division of the American Expeditionary Force in France. A visit today to the Troop's armory at 23rd and Ranstead Streets in Philadelphia wouldn't yield much evidence of mounted cavalry, but the place bristles with tanks, humvees, armored personnel carriers and mobile artillery. The horses come out only for parades and other ceremonial functions. Like all such military units, the officers' mess is a veritable museum of artifacts, insignia and battle honors. Good old Grandpappy Page -- cuts a dashing figure, doesn't he?

A Spring Frolic

It was a lovely day in late March; the sun shone and the crocuses bloomed. A young nanny goat frolicked in the sunshine. The scene charmed me so, I didn't notice at first that the little goat was missing a hind leg. The occasion was a visit to a veterinary clinic near where I live. The vet tech supervising the goat told me her name is Peggy. She lost her left rear leg because of severe infection from a dog bite Peggy's former owners had left untreated for too long. I knelt down and Peggy danced right up to me, pooped on my shoe and butted my chin gently. Those little nanny goat horns gave a certain amount of emphatic authority to that butt, however gentle. Goat poop isn't a serious problem. "Broom and dustpan is all you need," the tech told me. Lost leg notwithstanding, Peggy pranced about as happily as any four-legged goat on that smiling spring morning. So, whatever YOUR troubles may be (and may they be from few to none), happy first day of spring!