Luxagraf: Topographical Writings

Low

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 17:37:23 -0500

Oak leaves shimmer and dance in the wind. Morning sunlight filters in through the trees, the rays fighting their way through wisps of Spanish moss.

You can find this scene anywhere in South Carolina below the fall line, a vague geographic boundary that runs along the southeastern part of state, where the hard rock of the mountains gives way to the softer sand of the coastal plain. This is what they call the lowcountry. Marshes and ribbons of water. A place where everything is a little bit different. Dolphins in rivers, moss in trees.

We've been coming here off and on for decades. Always in the off season. Usually to Edisto, a small island at the edge of the world. A small island that is slowly, inexorably being pulled into the new world that has previously ignored it.

Nearby Charleston swells. Eddies of retirees swirl in from New England, the mid Atlantic, all weary of winter. The old southern culture is sinking like the land, pulled under the rising tides of something new.

People like to say they want to go somewhere different, but it's been my experience that most people, the minute they get there, set about making it just like the place they left behind.

One day all that will remain of the old lowcountry culture will be like the dead, weather-worn trees on the beach at Botany Bay, making a lonely stand against the inevitability of the waves.

For now there are still pockets to be found. Hidden places. If you know where to look.

Don't ask me. I'm not from here. I have no secrets to give. I am just passing through.

Winter Storm

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:06:55 -0500

The afternoon of the day we decided to leave the Jeep behind a ranger stopped by to tell us they were closing the campground the next day due to a large storm front that was headed our way. Winds were expected to be in the 50 MPH range, with gusts even higher. We've sat out a storm with winds like that in New Mexico. It wasn't fun, but we're still here. But that wasn't an option this time. Fortunately we were planning to leave the next day anyway.

We crammed all the backpacking gear and misc stuff from the Jeep in the back of the bus and hit the road the next morning. We cut inland and headed south for somewhere to sit out the storm. Driving the bus in the rain sucks and I wasn't about to do it with everyone on board.

I also wasn't crazy about camping anywhere with pine trees when the forecast was for days of soaking rain followed up by high winds. Unfortunately nearly every campground on the Carolina coast is full of pines and oaks. I've seen too many trees come down in too many campgrounds to risk it when I don't have to. We found a hotel south of Wilmington and booked two nights.

The storm came on slowly. The first morning not much happened. I decided we probably had time to check out the nearby battleship North Carolina before the brunt of it hit us. The kids and I grabbed an Uber over to the battleship. We had the place to ourselves, which was fun. We wandered around below decks for a couple hours, getting hopelessly lost a couple of times, but having fun nonetheless.

Not the bunks you want on a rough passage.

The kids were relieved to see that while privacy might not be a thing, ice cream was. Priorities.

By the time we came back out the parking lot was starting to flood and I was a little worried about getting a ride back. It took a bit, but eventually we found someone as nutty as us and made it back to the hotel safe and sound.

I alternated between hanging out in the hotel, taking the kids to the indoor pool, and checking on the bus. Just to the south of us North Myrtle Beach took a beating, and up to the north of us Wilmington flooded. The Outer Banks had plenty of overwashed roads and high winds as well, but nothing nearly as bad as had been predicted. Curiously, where we were, other than a good steady rain for 24 hours, nothing much happened.

The next day we hit the road again bound for Edisto, winding our way through Charleston and then the marshland to the south.

Two days later Elliott turned nine and I turned forty-nine.

It was a very revolutionary war themed birthday -- army men, books, costumes, anything at all related to the revolutionary war. His sisters carved him wooden figures as well, two British and two patriots. The only non-revolutionary war gifts he asked for were bacon and chocolate.

Birthday waffle cake

Repair Fail

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 08:49:29 -0500

One of the most underappreciated, least talked about aspects of repair is the hierarchy. There are repair wizards and there are newbies and there are the rest of us, somewhere between those two poles. This hierarchy of skill and experience requires that you earn your way to the top. Experts in repair are experts because they have done it, not because they think they can do it, or they say they can do it. There's no way to fake expertise in car repair. The thing either starts or it doesn't.

It's a long road to expert. The more experience you gain, as you work your way up that hierarchy, the more you see the summit recede in front of you. You start to know how much you don't know. It's one thing to be able to do basic things like replace a head gasket, it's a whole other thing to be able to listen to an engine and know a head gasket needs replacing. The latter is a kind of total understanding of the system that takes years, possibly decades to obtain.

To really understand a system all the way from top to bottom is to hold a total cognitive model of the thing in your mind and be able to access it intuitively. To get that is a hard won process with a steep learning curve. You will fail. You will fail over and over until you learn. I find this dynamic interesting because those are two things I truly dislike -- failure and asking for help. Both are essential if you want to repair things.

I hate asking for help more than I hate failure, so for me, learning to repair anything is a trial and error and error and error and error and error and give-up-and-ask-for-help process.

This process is important. You can't shortcut it. You need those moments of crushing failure and ineptitude. Otherwise your sense of yourself can outstrip what you're capable of, which is usually referred to as "having an ego." Or worse that self-image becomes so fragile you avoid situations that might force you to alter it, and when it is inevitably punctured you go all to pieces, which is worse than ego -- no ego.

Fail early, fail often.

Still, it's one thing to understand this process intellectually. It's another to live it.

About two weeks into our stay in the Outer Banks the Jeep started acting funny. There was no definitive thing I could put my finger on, just an intuition that something was wrong inside the engine. Deep inside the engine according to my hunch. I did what anyone would do. I ignored it. Until one day it became audible on the way home from the grocery store. Thunk thunk thunk when I accelerated.

For a long time there had been a tapping sound that I somehow instinctively knew was a bent rod. Despite two mechanics telling me it wasn't. I took off the valve covers and sure enough, there was a bent rod. But that wasn't all, I ran the engine with the covers off and realized one of the exhaust rods was no longer lifting the tappet. This was on one of the two cylinders that always had slightly sooty spark plugs when I checked them. So far it all made sense. I ordered some rods and some new lifters.

Unfortunately the heads on the AMC 360 engine do not allow you to extract the lifters. I had to pull the intake manifold off. I didn't want to do that at a campsite in the sand dunes so I rented a storage unit to work on it and had it towed up.

It took me two days to unhook everything and get the intake manifold off. I pulled out the lifter in question. The bottom of it, which rides the cam lobe, was worn down a good 3/16th of an inch. It was then that I realized my original hunch was right, the problem was deeper, I was treating symptoms. The nagging suspicion that I was out of my depth and plain wrong began to set in.

Since I was waiting on new lifters I thought I might as well take off the passenger's side head. The Jeep had always leaked oil toward the rear of the engine on that side. It was almost impossible to see where the leak was coming from, but I thought maybe the head gasket was bad. It turned out I was wrong. Fail number one, but that one was minor, a wasted morning and $40 for a new head gasket. I put the head back on and torqued it down.

At that point I'd spent the better part of three days hanging out alone in a storage unit, talking to my GoPro as I recorded everything I did. Still, I was optimistic, I was having fun. We weren't due to leave for another five days. I had time.

Then the parts got delayed. Thoughts about opportunity costs started to creep in. I spent a day thinking about all the other things I could be doing. Everything has opportunity costs. I could be playing with the kids in the dunes, visiting with friends, writing things I wanted to write. Instead I went back and forth between the storage unit, the mailbox to check on parts, and various parts stores. Still, I was optimistic.

It's the little things I miss when I am busy. Playing Stratego. Lingering over a cup of coffee.

Long before I ever did any vehicle repairs I rationalized not doing them by saying that I could earn more money working the hours I'd be working on the vehicle, so it "made more sense" to pay someone else to do it. This kind of "sense" only really makes sense on a spreadsheet though. The truth is I was scared to try repairing anything because I didn't have a clue how to do it and knew I'd probably screw it up.

I started to think about that rationalization from the opposite direction though -- does it make sense to spend this much time working on a vehicle when what I really want to do is enjoy a warm day with my family or taking pictures of the dunes at sunrise?

One day I was sitting in the storage unit drinking coffee and I realized, I am done with this. This isn't the way I want to spend my time, my family's time. The Jeep is an incredible vehicle and I love it. If we lived in a house and I could work on it when I felt like it, it'd be perfect. But that's not how it works on the road. There's the added pressure of time, the need to move on. The Outer Banks was getting colder every day. We were waking up to frost on the windows and clouds of breath in the air. We needed to be in Edisto for Christmas. We're supposed to spend January on the Georgia coast. All of these things felt like they might be slipping away, and for what? So we could drive the Jeep? Is that what we're doing here?

And yet, the Jeep is by far the best car I've ever driven. It is an absolute joy when it's running well. The kids love it. We all love it. I hated to give up on it.

The lifters finally arrived and I put everything back together. I left the valve covers off so I could make sure the new lifter was working. The kids came with me that day, and I let my daughter start it so I could watch the engine. It turned over and caught. But the thunking noise was still there. And that was when I realized oil was only coming out of the rod that I'd replaced. Not out of any other rods. That's when I knew something else was wrong. I was out of my depth. I had failed. It hadn't even occurred to me that oil should have been shooting out of all the rods all the times I'd started it with the valve covers off. That should have been extremely messy and it never was, something else was wrong. My uncle suggested the oil pump was probably dead. Either way, I was out of time, we had to get moving if we were going to make Christmas down south.

I punted. I called the mechanic I'd almost called to begin with. He said he didn't have room for it on his lot and couldn't get to it until after the holidays. Damn. I called some other mechanics, none of whom really grabbed me but I had to do something. I settled on one, called a tow truck, and sat down to wait for it. The original mechanic called me back. He said he'd make room, bring it on by. I took that as a sign, redirected the tow truck and dropped it off.

I took everything out of it, somehow found room for it in the bus and we hit the road with everyone in the bus, something we haven't done in years. It's fun to travel that way, but not terribly practical for us right now.

A few days later the mechanic called with bad news. The engine was a mess, the cam was blown and half a dozen other things had gone wrong. It needed to be completely rebuilt. Corrinne and I talked. Then we talked some more. We love the Jeep, but in the end, it was just too much to keep going with our life on the road. One engine to repair is enough. We decided to move on and put it up for sale. I'd like to see someone else rebuild it. It's a great car. But it's not for us right now. I'll miss the Jeep, but it's time to get back to what we love about this life.

In The Dunes

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 07:47:54 -0500

Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 22, 1842

Mornings grow colder with every passing day. The sunrise edges a little further south every time I crest the dunes to watch. The wind howls most mornings, a biting cold that cuts through the layers of wool I pile on in a futile attempt to keep warm. But the sunrises. Never the same, always spectacular.

In the popular imagination, living in an RV -- or #vanlife as my editors at Wired insist on calling it -- is one of leisure and relaxation. We all spend hours drinking coffee in the sunshine, reading in hammocks, doing yoga on the beach, or in my case, hanging out with my wife and kids.

I have been known to spend a while drinking my coffee in the sunshine, and our family is together almost all the time, but by and large, this is not how I've been spending my days lately. It should be how I spend my days. It should be how we all spend our days, lingering over the things we love, but life has a way of finding other things to eat up our time.

I get to the point where I feel antsy whenever I am not doing something. Maybe antsy isn't the right word. I feel like I should be doing something whenever I am not doing something. That creates a low grade stress that permeates life. When you're feeling like you should be doing something else it pulls you out of whatever you're trying to do and you end up doing nothing.

I did not use to be this way. I remember, and I have even written about, finding peace in doing nothing but listening to the rain.

What happened? I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Somewhere in the last five years I lost touch with that ability to relax into any situation, an ability I think is the key to traveling well. How did I lose touch with something so essential?

I don't know exactly, but I know that these days I feel like there is always something that needs to be done: a meal that needs to be made, an engine that needs to repaired, a child that needs attention, a thing to write, a thing to edit, a thing to call in. Something always needs to be done that keeps you from doing what you want to do.

That probably sounds a lot like your life as well. That's why I am writing this, to let you know that the solution to feeling overwhelmed is not buying an RV and hitting the open road. Modernity will find you, and try to hurry your life along, even out here.

This is where Thoreau comes in. "Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried." I'm sure if he were writing today, Thoreau would say "person" rather than "man", but the point is that it takes a determination not to be hurried. Thoreau wrote that in March of 1842, in case you were thinking hectic lives were a recent phenomena.

I dug through a 1906 copy of Thoreau's complete journals to see if there was any additional context to that thought, but there isn't. It's a single line set off by itself, no connection to any of the ideas around it. It stands on its own though I think.

Something about Thoreau's phrasing, "a determination", made me realize that not only was I hurried by things that should not be hurrying me, but that this state, this feeling of always needing to do something, was a state of existence I had allowed myself to fall into. I lost the awareness of it that you must have to resist it -- because if you aren't determined not to be hurried, you will be. You are in charge of how your mind works. It's your responsibility to stop the hurrying.

That's why I like Thoreau's particular phrasing here. It takes work, determination, not to be hurried. If you aren't working at it, life is going to rush you along with no time to appreciate the sound of the rain or enjoy that coffee in the sunshine. I find it both heartening to know that Thoreau had this problem, and somewhat depressing that Thoreau had this problem -- despite being nearly 200 years on, life seems to be no less noisy. Same as it ever was.

It was around this time that I started running out over the dunes to watch the sunrise every morning. It was driven mostly by a desire to see what was over the hill from the bus. From the bus all I could see was the sky and I would wonder, what does the sea look like? So I ran over the dunes nearly every morning. Sometimes with a camera, sometimes not. I had to see what was on the other side.

After I did my morning rituals out there I would sit down and watch the sunrise. It was rarely the relaxing sort of reverie you might be thinking, this is the Outer Banks after all, and it's nearly December. Usually the wind was blowing at least 10 knots and the temperature was rarely above 40. Mostly I sat with my teeth chattering, desperately wishing I was back in the warm bus, unable to feel my toes, but there to watch the sun rise and do nothing else. To force on myself the unhurriedness of sitting still, observing the world.

It took a while to work. At first I was trying to hard to get something out of it. That doesn't work. It wasn't until it became routine that I started to find my way back to the relaxed kind of energy I was seeking.

The key turned out to be bringing my notebook with me, not to write down some profound insight, I had none of those, but to write down all the things that were on my mind instead of the sunrise in front of me. It's not until you clear all the hurriedness out of your mind that you can begin to relax. You can never relax when you feel there are other things you need to be doing. The secret to being relaxed is to be okay not doing the things that need to be done.

There is no true relaxation until you are mentally free of all the hurriedness, that feeling that there's something you should be doing. The way to get to that state, for me anyway, is to write down everything that needs to be done, know that it's all in a notebook I can look at from time to time, and then get on with life. It is of course one thing to know this intellectually and another to stay on top of it.

There's an interesting dichotomy at work here: in order to relax, you need to be disciplined. This is where I failed. I was not being disciplined in my determination to remain unhurried. I was not doing the work of keeping my life organized so that I could in turn relax and be unhurried.

As an aside, I find the larger lesson here fascinating and instructive: the path to wisdom seems to begin in the mundane ability to keep track of your commitments so you can get them off your mind, which then frees your mind up to thing about other, if not higher, than certainly more interesting things.

In the end it wasn't going into the dunes to watch the sunrise that brought me back around to a more relaxed state, it was bringing my notebook with me and clearing my mind into it. Once that was done, I could watch the sunrise without worrying that I should be doing something else. It's not a solution exactly, more of an ongoing practice. Not only in the dunes, but everywhere, carving out time to empty your mind of commitments so that you can be free to live a more relaxed, unhurried life. Not a grand revelation, just a short run through the dunes and a little while sitting still. If only it had been a bit warmer.

Halloween in the Outer Banks

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 05:27:56 -0500

From Virginia Beach we drifted south, making the short drive down to Oregon Inlet in the Outer Banks. Our plan was to spend a couple of weeks there, visit friends, get some time at the beach, and then head to Ocracoke for Thanksgiving. It was pretty good plan, but it didn't work out that way. So it goes.

We arrived on a nearly perfect day at the end of October -- sunshine, clear skies, hardly any wind.

The first week we were there the days were in the 70s, the nights cooling off to the low 50s, which is perfect temps for living on grid in the bus. Although there are some electric sites at Oregon Inlet, we've never felt the need for them. There's plenty of sunshine for our solar (no trees) and we prefer to the non-electric sites backed up against the dunes, a short walk from the bus to the shore.

We got plenty of time in at the beach that first week. We went seining again with our friend Val (the main reason we came back here was to see friends we made on our last trip), and went bird watching around Pea Island.

It wasn't long after we arrived in the Outer Banks before Halloween rolled around. In our family Halloween has always been a big holiday. This year Elliott spent hours designing and then building out his own green demon costume. I would take no outside assistance.

But something has changed about Halloween. The Halloween vibe has shifted from the kind of playful, mock-scary decorations of the past, to an overabundance of plastic horror movie stage props. I read somewhere that ticket sales of horror movies correlate closely with several economic indexes -- as the economy gets worse, horror movies get more popular.

I'm no economist, but this makes sense to me. As the world gets genuinely scary, our fantasy worlds have to up the "scary" tropes to continue to offer an escape. I think this plays out in Halloween decorations too. The change in the Halloween vibe has really accelerated over the last two years as the economy has cratered. Neighborhoods decorated with dismembered body parts says a lot about the quality of life in them I fear.

Whatever the case, our kids are not fans of the horror movie vibe, so we decided to head the Elizabethan Gardens, which had a Halloween festival and trick or treating setup the weekend before the holiday.

I have no idea why this picture ended up like this, but it's kind of fun.

It was one of many local events we've ended up at over the years where after about half an hour we realize we're the only ones there that don't know everyone. I rather like it when we parachute into someone else's world for a few hours, and everyone was very kind and welcoming. Although I did have to explain to the kids there was no way they were going to win the costume contest, which was decided by popular vote. Outsiders don't win popular votes. They had fun though, and loaded up on candy, which, let's face it, is the important part of Halloween.

Corrinne was complaining to another friend about the whole horror movie Halloween thing, and she told us to come to her neighborhood, which was suitably old school and not into the horror movie thing. This turned out to be true, so the kids got to go trick or treating in peace after all. It really was an old school neighborhood, pretty much just like being back in 1984 . Val joined us and we all wandered around for a few hours, gathering candy from strangers, as you do on Halloween.

History

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 16:31:39 -0400

We crossed the Mason Dixon line on our way to Assateague, but it didn't really feel like we were in the south yet. No offense Maryland, but it wasn't until I stopped at a gas station in Virginia that I heard the friendly twang of a southern accent. A few miles later I passed a cotton field and I felt like we were back. Smiles were less strained. Drivers were slower. Duke's mayonnaise was on nearby shelves.

One of these days I'll get around to the essay about why it is that I love the south more than the rest of the country. Not today though.

Unfortunately Virginia Beach isn't the most southern of places. We had planned to stay closer to Jamestown and Williamsburg, but the day we left Assateague Corrinne came down with what I'd had (not the ragweed apparently) and didn't feel up to a longer drive. We cut it short and stopped at First Landing State Park, just on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay.

That meant a longer drive to the stuff we were here to see, but it also meant we were closer to groceries. We stocked up, and then following day the kids an I drove about an hour inland to see Jamestown.

Jamestown has two parts, a National Park site that appears to be in a perpetual state of digging and disarray, and a re-enactment section that features a replica of the old settlement, a native village, and a few other odds and ends. We started at the actual site, which has a few buildings, mainly the church, but is on the same land as the original Jamestown settlement.

I will confess that I generally dislike archaeology. To me it's a fancy word for grave robbers that we've collectively agreed to not call grave robbers. Do we learn things from archaeology? Well, maybe? I definitely think we can learn a lot about ourselves, how we see the world, and how we view our relationship to the past. That is to say, that archaeology is something we invented says more about us than anything else.

It's not that I think archaeology is all wrong. There may be some truth to the stories archaeologists tell us. The problem for me is that we will never really know. There is very little that's testable about the hypotheses archaeology offers. The stories we tell ourselves based on archaeology are educated guesses presented as truth, whereas the stories from other sources, which may be educated in a different way, don't get that blessing, which rankles me.

At Jamestown current archaeology is attempting to say whose body is in which grave, which is just... I don't want to sound too cynical, but who cares? I try to keep my prejudices out of the kids' experience so I didn't say a word, but after listening to about five minutes of a tour guide's talk, the kids wandered off to look at other things. My daughter even asked me, why does it matter who is buried where? I try to see the upside of these things, so I told her perhaps it mattered to the descendants of the people buried. She said if it were her ancestor she'd want their bones left in the ground even if she didn't know exactly where.

We wandered away from the grave robber area to see the rest of the Jamestown site, which was beautiful. If you were picking settlement locations based solely on picturesque qualities, Jamestown was a brilliant find. It was undoubtedly different 400 years ago, when it was covered by old growth, but it was probably even better. It's still beautiful today.

We drove around the island and stopped near a marsh to have a picnic lunch. It was quiet back in the woods and we had fun imagining perhaps Pocahontas once stopped for a snack in this very same place. The kids loved the fact that Pocahontas would probably have been eating something similar -- dried meat, nuts, hard bread (crackers), cool water to drink. Probably not plantain chips, but otherwise we were reasonably historically accurate.

After lunch we drove over to the re-enactment area. There was a museum, but I knew the kids didn't care that much, they were in a rush to get to the real stuff, the replicas and actors. There turned out to not be many actors around, but those that were there were great. One man, who was captain of the guard, put Elliott and another boy each in charge of an imaginary squad and walked them through their duties.

The highlight though, were the replica ships. Only one was open, but the kids got to run all around it, go below decks, see the hold, and even the captain's quarters -- pretty much everything but climbing the rigging. This was extra entertaining for them because I wrote them a book a few years ago about a family that lives on a boat in the year 1710. These ships were a different design, but close enough that I could say, yes that's how Lulu and Birdie (the main characters in the book) would have cooked, where they would have slept, etc, which gave them a kind of connection to the book that goes beyond anything I could ever write.

It was fun for me to watch them all infected by this fascination with the past, this thing we call history. It has always struck me that we do ourselves a great disservice by cutting off the past, putting it outside our "reality," the world around us. The past can be in the present. It can be all around you all the time. Many cultures have this view. Our view of the past as something "back there" is a choice, and from what I have seen, it is not a natural one. At least not to kids. Kids are ready to step into the past as a real and living thing. It is a real and living thing for them when we get out of the way, which is what I try to do as much as possible.

Unfortunately, after Jamestown we decided to see Colonial Williamsburg. This was a mistake for a variety of reasons, and to tell the full story would be a post of its own and to be totally honest, I don't want to ruin Williamsburg for anyone else. But because I know you're going to ask, I will go with my grandmother's advice and say nothing. Yes, we went to Williamsburg. And then we went home for the day.

Undeterred by Williamsburg, we went back the following day to check out the Yorktown battlefield, which was also divided into a museum, re-enactment area, and actual battlefield. This time the kids were into the museum and we spent several hours walking around talking about the revolutionary war (the war of colonial aggression to my British friends). The kids were especially taken with the signs that said "please touch sword" rather than the usual, don't touch anything signs you see in most museums. After wandering around the working farm out back, we drove out to the battlefield, but that one failed. To a kid, a field is just a field.

We drove into the little town that was nearby and found a fun little maritime museum, that consisted mainly of one man's amazing model ship building prowess. From early colonial ships to modern warships it was a historical tour of American shipbuilding in miniature. But more than anything it was the sort of small museum where everyone is incredibly enthusiastic and kind and friendly. All volunteers, doing it for the love of it. It helped restore the kids' faith in grownups I think, which was a little shaken after Williamsburg.

Shoreline

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:20:46 -0400

If there is a theme to the places we go, it's water. Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, creeks. We find them. Even out west, far from any large body of water, "the desire of water is scribed across the desert like graffiti."¹

While I like almost all places with water—the bigger the better, which is why we spend so much time by the sea. The sea is life. It is the blood in our veins. It always feels like coming home to me. It's only been six months since we last saw it, but that feels like too long now that we're back.

I tried to read a book once about why it is that many, if not most, people feel most at home near the shore. I like the premise, but it turned out to be a book full of studies, with lots of evidence of the sea doing this and that for people, and I couldn't help thinking of Conrad, who spent a good deal more time at sea than most: "For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness."

I tossed the book of studies in a free book bin months ago. I realized I didn't care. I know why I feel at home by the shore and that's enough. I also know that part of why I love the sea is that like Conrad writes, it doesn't seem to much care about humanity, certainly not for our individual lives. My impression is not that it dislikes us, rather that it is far too old, too immense, too complex to even notice that we exist. I find this heartening, this reminder that there are forces far above and beyond me, that I can't begin to fathom. The world is large, we are small. We forget that at our peril.

I don't think, for instance, that the sea really cared that I came down with a head cold the day after we arrived. It might have been the pace we've been keeping for the last couple months. You get a rush of energy from moving quickly through things, but it feeds on itself, you burn through it eventually, and when you finally stop there's a tendency to crash. Or it could have been allergies. The campground at the National Seashore in Assateague is covered in ragweed. It was virtually the only plant around.

Still, if you have to pick a place to crash (or succumb to ragweed), the sea is the place to do it. I usually cure myself of illness by swimming. I know few will believe me, but it works for me.

Assateague (and Chinoteague to the south) is a barrier island somewhat like the Outer Banks, but less windy. That might make it sound more appealing, but it doesn't work out that way in practice. The magic of barrier island is, I think, in that windswept character that is inescapable in the Outer Banks. In the Outer Banks, life becomes about wind. You notice when it changes directions, you notice when it picks up, dies down, and most of all you notice when it stops because it so rarely does. There was none of that in our time at Assateague.

Instead there are semi-wild horses, which people really seem to love. Including my kids. They certainly make themselves at home in the national park.

We spent a few days in the National Seashore portion of the island, and then migrated over to the Maryland State Park portion, which is much nicer. No ragweed and right on the beach. My head cold cleared up. Storms rolled in. The sea didn't seem to care. It was good to be back by the shore.

From Craig Childs' The Secret Knowledge of Water, one of the few books I keep with me in the bus. ↩

Farm Life

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 16:03:42 -0400

One day this past summer a man stopped by our site to talk about the bus. I wasn't around, but when I got back he was telling Corrinne about something called Harvest Hosts. It's a clever idea, wineries, farms, other people with land provide free camping in exchange for you spending some money at their store or whatever they have. We looked into it a few years ago when first launched, but it was mostly wineries at the time and neither of us drink, so it didn't make sense for us.

That day last summer though he assured us that the service had grown considerably and there was a wide range of options, not just wineries. We didn't do anything about it just then (we take what I like to call an Amish approach to things—we like to think about them for a long time before we actually do anything), but as we plotted a route the rest of the way down the Erie Canal, past New York City, along the New Jersey coast and beyond, there were quite a few places with nowhere to camp. Normally we'd get a hotel, but that's expensive and we don't enjoy it, so we decided hey, lets try out Harvest Hosts.

We signed up and booked a night at an apple farm about halfway between St. Johnsville and where we were headed in New Jersey. It turned out to be a great experience. The kids got to see what a real working farm is like (well, orchard in this case), we stayed for free, and we loaded up on apple cider, fresh cheese, and other treats. In the end we spent about as much as a hotel, but it was a much more enjoyable experience.

Apparently every place is very different, but this farm we were more or less alone in a big open field. Having just been to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the kids wanted to play, and what better place than an empty farm field?

Are we playing baseball or taking pictures?

One catch about Harvest Hosts is that you can only stay 24 hours. So the next morning, after we went back for more fruit, veggies, and cheese, we hit the road again, bound for New Jersey.

You might be wondering why we didn't stop off in New York City. We talked about it, but in the end decided that right now isn't a great time to be in New York. Crime is pretty high, particularly in the outer boroughs from what I hear. And yes, I have traveled through sketchy parts of India and Thailand where people were blowing up buses and trains and never worried about that. I still wouldn't. But American cities right now, especially New York, are too chaotic and unpredictable to be safe¹. Besides, we're just not city people anymore. I'd make exceptions for Paris, Bangkok, and a handful of others, but by and large I don't enjoy cities these days.

We drove right on by New York City, catching a view of the Manhattan skyline from the turnpike before pointing ourselves south to a place called Cheesequake, New Jersey. We spent the night there. Between the five of us we didn't take a single photo of the place, which tells you more than I can with words.

The next morning we hit the road again, headed south down the New Jersey shoreline for the Cape May area. Cape May is a major birding area and I would like to have stopped for a while, but I had picked up a cold and wasn't feeling that great, and then it started to rain.

We stayed at another farm, this one a sheep dairy farm. This time we exercised a little more restraint and bought plenty of cheese, but not enough to fund a night in a hotel. We also discovered a downside of Harvest Hosts -- when the weather pins you down, there's not much to do but sit in your rig and read and play games. It was only for an afternoon, so it wasn't too bad.

Before the rain started.

The next morning we were up bright and early to catch the Henlopen Ferry to Delaware.

I'll never stop enjoying putting the bus on ferries. There's something about sitting at the table in the bus and looking out to see the ocean that makes me happy. For a moment it's a boat. And then we were ashore again, still headed south, bound for Chincoteague, wild horses, and some warm beach days.

This is not me watching the news (I haven't done that in 25 years). Our decision was based on reports from friends currently living in New York City. ↩

Baseball Diamonds

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:32:36 -0400

We would never have come this way if weren't for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Not that I wanted to go there that badly, but when we took the kids to a baseball game back in Florida the Baseball Hall of Fame somehow came up and I remember Elliott saying "can we go?"

My first thought was probably not. I lived in western Massachusetts for a few years and had driven the mountains in the area -- they're more than I would want would to put the bus through. It's not that the bus can't climb mountains. It can, it's just slow and I never know which mountain is going to be its last. I like to save mountain driving for out west, where it's unavoidable.

Still, I pulled up Cooperstown on the map to see where it was and what it looked like. That's when I noticed the Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys, which cut through upstate New York. Valleys aren't so bad. That's probably why they put a turnpike along them. Hmm. I plugged the route into a website I use to get the elevation change of a road and was surprised to find that most of the big inclines were actually downhill. I started formulating a plan to make it through the Appalachians without going south. And here we are, upstate New York.

I had to work some early mornings while we were in St Johnsville, which turned out to be a lovely, if somewhat curious town at 5 AM (and otherwise).

One day the kids and I headed up into the hills to find Cooperstown. I don't really know what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I got. To me the Baseball Hall of Fame is a big thing. But Cooperstown is a tiny little town. I mean tiny. The population is 1,867. Yet somehow, this is where the Baseball Hall of Fame is located. It wasn't even crowded.

I was dreading how much it was going to cost, but when I got the kiosk to pay the man looked at the kids and said, they're free right? I said, um, well. He said, yeah, they're free. Who am I to argue?

There are several floors to wander, much of it is a tour through the history of Major League Baseball. That latter part is key, if the MLB as an organization isn't involved, there probably isn't much about it (despite the MLB not owning or otherwise having anything to do with the hall of fame). I understand that you have to set some limits or it would be an overwhelming thing to document, but I was a little disappointed there was almost nothing on stuff like the Cuba league or the Negro League (Satchel Paige has a plaque, but that's about it).

There was plenty of cool stuff though. We got to sit in Hank Aaron's locker and see countless artifacts. Different parts of the room had different historical games being broadcast, which was fun. I like being at a game, but radio is still my second favorite way to "watch" baseball.

If this means anything to you, we could have a long conversation about baseball. If it doesn't, we could have a long conversation about something else.

I was a little disappointed to find almost nothing about the 1980s LA Dodgers, which to my mind were baseball for so many years. I knew every player and every stat about them. I still remember most of it. But of course that was just my world. The LA Dodgers did not figure quite so prominently in the larger world of 1980s baseball.

The only thing I found that represented the 1980s LA Dodgers that I grew up with.

Part of the fun of going to Cooperstown turned out to be the drive. Upstate New York is on the more beautiful places we've been. The fall colors mixed with the seemingly endless historic farmhouses was fantastic. I could have driven around exploring for days.

As it was though I had to work much of the time we were in St. Johnsville. Corrinne took the kids up to dig for Herkimer diamonds one day. Not real diamonds, Herkimer diamonds are "double-terminated quartz crystals", whatever that is. But they're primarily found here, in and around Herkimer County and the Mohawk River Valley. They aren't just lying around either, you have to split rocks to find them.

I was looking at these pictures later and the only think that came to my mind was Cool Hand Luke. Next time I'll boil up some eggs for them to take along.

Fort Klock

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:48:10 -0400

We left the shores of Lake Ontario on a blustery, cold day. Fortunately the wind was with us. The bus blew down the road into the Mohawk Valley, to a small town on the shores of the Erie Canal where there was a marina that also had a few campsites.

The campground was wedged between the canal and a train track, with about 100 feet in either direction. Trains came by every two or three hours, which provided endless entertainment. On the other side was the Erie Canal, one of the more impressive feats of engineering in American history.

The Panama Canal gets all the glory (it was an epic feat), but many people don't realize there are networks of canals running all over the eastern and southern United States. They aren't used much commercially at the moment -- although with diesel prices rising, the canals may be economically viable again soon -- but the Great Loop¹ is popular with sailors.

It was a short drive. We made it to our campsite by lunch time and started looking around for something to do. Part of the reason we're here in upstate New York and headed through the mid-Atlantic region was to show the kids some American history sites, so when Corrinne found something called Fort Klock, A Fortified Stone Homestead, we figured it'd fit right in. What kid doesn't love the sound of a "fortified homestead"?

To be honest we weren't expecting much from Fort Klock, but it turned out to be the best historical site we've visited. We enjoyed it more than Jamestown or Williamsburg (more on those soon). What made it the best place we've been was the people, or rather the person, Les.

We were the only visitors there and when we walked in the only other person was Les, who had been in the kitchen, tending the fire. He asked if we wanted "the full tour" and we said sure. We paid $20 for the five of us and Les proceeded to lead us on a three-hour historical tour of the property, and by extension life in the Mohawk Valley over the last three hundred years.

It would be impossible for me to try to capture it here because part of it was that when he was talking about cooking, there was a fire in the hearth, when he talked about making farm tools out of wood, he was showing us how to drag a draw knife, how to save the shavings to start the fire, how to work a loom.

There were no glass walls cutting you off from Fort Klock. There were some railings here and there, but for the most part you could touch and interact with artifacts in a way that you never can at most historical sites. For the kids that's the whole point. They don't care about the abstraction we call history -- those people back then. The kids want to know how they would have lived, what kids did, how things worked, what the food smelled like, how you load a muzzleloading rifle, how you fire a cannon, how you make a canoe, how you sail a wooden square rigger. I'm the same way. I don't really care about who won the battle, I want to hear the stories of the people who fought, or farmed, or traded, or hunted, or whatever. That's what Fort Klock was, a working example of what life was like. History that's still alive.

Klock's fortified homestead is a stone farmhouse built in 1750 by Johannes Klock. The walls are over 2 feet thick. It sits on Kings Highway, the main thoroughfare of the valley at that time, and on the edge of the Mohawk River. It was a major trading post in the area and one of the primary defensive structures around.

It was built from the ground up with defense in mind. There are little portals on all sides with angled access to provide the widest range of fire to those inside. The windows could be covered by sturdy wood shutters and -- the real key to its defensive capability -- it was built over a spring, which still bubbles up in the cellar. All the Klocks had to do was lay in some food and ammunition and they were ready to withstand a siege. Which they did, several times.

Fort Klock was used during both the French and Indian War and the American War for Independence, as both a refuge and trading post (there were other such fortified homes in the valley, but this is the only one that's been restored and has public access).

Rather amazingly the home remained in the Klock family through the 1950s, though it was largely abandoned when the family moved back to town in the '30s. In the early 1950s the Tryon County muzzleloaders (re-enactors interested in collecting and shooting antique guns) were looking for a place to shoot and came across the property. The last descendant of Klock had been looking for someone to restore the property and so they struck a deal. The muzzleloadiing group raised money and rebuilt the property and eventually opened it to the public.

Today it is owned and operated by the Fort Klock Historic Restoration group. The non-profit was spun off of the muzzleloaders group because the National Park Service refused to give the National Historic Landmark distinction to a muzzleloading club. Fortunately the muzzleloaders had the humility the government lacked and they set up a separate foundation and eventually got the historic designation. Don't let the name fool you though. The truth is a bunch of people who love shooting muzzleloading rifles saved and restored this place and continue to maintain it.

There is something sad about a house that is no longer a home. We've been in many over the years, and I always get the feeling that the walls feel lonely after generations of families running through them, the silence is greater for the sounds that are no longer there. It's as if an entire way of life falls silent when the families leave. Fort Klock was the opposite. It still smelled of woodsmoke and life and that, combined with Les's stories, which always seemed to wander from the past, to the present, the grandparents of someone down the road, the ancestors of the man who still has a working blacksmith shop just over the ridge in... history was not something abstract, but real. That barn, in that person's family, that did this, and so on for three hours. It was the best $20 I've ever spent.

The Great Loop is a route that brings together various waterways, making it possible to travel along the Atlantic seaboard, Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, Great Lakes, Canadian Heritage Canals, and the inland rivers of America -- like the Erie Canal -- to make a big loop. There are a few routes, but the Erie portion seems to be one of the more popular ones. ↩